That Which Survives

 I was directed to a post on Substack in which this quotation appears:

"One reason I started as far back in the family tree as I did in the 17th and 18th centuries is that no one is left alive who has a personal stake in what I might uncover. That gives me emotional distance, and the freedom to follow the evidence where it leads without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings." -- Arik Hesseldahl, "Turn Every Page," Arik Hesseldahl's Advice on Digging Deep into your Family History, quoted in "The Writethrough," on Substack.

Hesseldahl is a journalist, and recommends digging into family history as a journalist would, to find the facts.  Like journalism or history, he tells us, what we find depends on "what has been saved," the documents and books and diaries and everything else that has managed to survive war, fire, other natural disasters, and retention policies.  It's the same in genealogy.

The quotation does get one thing backwards, though.   In genealogy, we don't start far back, we start with ourselves and work backwards.  For us, a step backwards is progress.  But I do agree that the farther back we go, the more we can reveal, because anyone affected is long dead, and beyond being upset about things.  The emotional distance assists objectivity.  

So, what survives?  I have found that most medical records might survive five to ten years.  The local hospital where my family tends to be treated keeps records only five years.  I can't go back and find, at 78, record of the tonsillectomy I had when I was 18, which had me in the hospital four days right after high school graduation.  Some graduation present.

Government agencies, local, state, and federal, have retention policies that dictate what will be kept, what won't, and where it goes when it goes somewhere else -- such as the state or national archives.  Not everything makes it into the archives.  They're vast, but they're not infinite.  Someone, somewhere, is making decisions on what will be kept and what won't.

Even government archives, stolid as some of their buildings may appear, are not immune to losses.  The fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center that destroyed a large chunk of U.S. military records, is a case in point.  Wherever it's housed, paper has one disadvantage -- it burns.

 These days, a lot of information is being preserved on electronic media.  One problem there is "feature creep," or the advancements in technologies that render older preservation methods and materials obsolete.  And these days, some technologies become obsolete just a few years after being born.  Floppy disks, anyone?  Another problem is that electronic media can be compromised or destroyed by the very thing that gives them life -- electricity.  A random spike or worse can scramble data.  Electronic storage is also subject to attacks by vicious little worms of people who should meet frequently with someone's horsewhip.  I'll volunteer mine.

 So we ferret out that which survives from any period of time.  Having a field of data to do that surviving is another part of the equation.  How good was a particular society at a particular time at record-keeping?  How good was a particular society at indexing, cataloging, or otherwise maintaining records?  I've found, in my study of Spanish colonial Florida between 1513 and 1821 that the Spanish were absolutely anal retentive about creating and keeping records, bless them.  Indiana had marvelously informative marriage license applications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Illinois didn't even record the names of the parents of brides and grooms until 1872.  And, of course, my paternal great-grandparents got married in Illinois in 1871!

 Search on, dear hearts!  Record your searches, document those facts, and write the stories of your family.