Month: August 2020

More Oral History

More Oral History

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s another story to illustrate the malleability of oral history. We should not trust our family stories, but always look behind them for ways they might have been elaborated over time.

This story comes from Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian.

“Sometimes, though very rarely, an investigator chances to come upon the actual transformation of an event into myth. Just before the last war, the Romanian folklorist Constantin Brailoiu had occasion to record an admirable ballad in a village in Maramures. Its subject was a tragedy of love: the young suitor had been bewitched by a mountain fairy, and a few days before he was to be married, the fairy, driven by jealousy, had flung him from a cliff. The next day, shepherds found his body and, caught in a tree, his hat. They carried the body back to the village and his fiancée came to meet them; upon seeing her lover dead, she poured out a funeral lament, full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty. Such was the content of the ballad. In the course of recording the variants that he was able to collect, the folklorist tried to learn the period when the tragedy had occurred; he was told that it was a very old story, which had happened “long ago.” Pursuing his inquiries, however, he learned that the event had taken place not quite forty years earlier. He finally even discovered that the heroine was still alive. He went to see her and heard the story from her own lips. It was a quite commonplace tragedy: one evening her lover had slipped and fallen over a cliff; he had not died instantly; his cries had been heard by mountaineers; he had been carried to the village, where he had died soon after. At the funeral, his fiancée, with the other women of the village, had repeated the customary ritual lamentations, without the slightest allusion to the mountain fairy.

“Thus, despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale: the jealous fairy, the murder of the young man, the discovery of the dead body, the lament, rich in mythological themes, chanted by the fiancée. Almost all the people of the village had been contemporaries of the authentic historical fact, but this fact, as such, could not satisfy them: the tragic death of a young man on the eve of his marriage was something different from a simple death by accident; it had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth. The mythicization of the accident had not stopped at the creation of a ballad; people told the story of the jealous fairy even when they were talking freely, “prosaically,” of the young man’s death. When the folklorist drew the villagers’ attention to the authentic version, they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind. It was the myth that told the truth: the real story was already only a falsification. Besides, was not the truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny?”

Naming Conventions

Naming Conventions

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

One of the canards of genealogy is that professional genealogists always prefer the earliest recorded name. The idea is that name is the most authentic.

More or less true, but not quite, not always.

William Shakespeare, for example. You think you know his name? His baptismal record, the earliest in a scant collection, calls him Gulielmus — Latin for William.

Wait! Do I have to change my database so that my tenuous connection to England’s most famous playwright shows him as Gulielmus Shakespeare?

No, what’s happening here is a very basic confusion. Prosopographers already know there is a difference between having a database identifier, which can be a name, and recording all the name variations a person used in their lifetime.

In short, genealogists haven’t kept up with best academic practices. Many are still mired in the amateur practices of the 18th and 19th centuries. Time to catch up.

Almost Métis

Almost Métis

by Justin Durand

I used to think my dad’s ancestors were Métis. They’re not, but I ended up with a seemingly permanent interest.

The Métis are a Canadian group, a mixture of Anglos and Indians from the area between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains. Not all mixed-race people in Canada are Métis, just the ones where the men in the founding group were employees of the Hudson Bay Company.

One of those men was John Hourie (1779-1857). He came to Hudson’s Bay in 1800 from South Ronaldsay, one of the Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland. About 1809 he married Margaret Bird, a Shoshone (“Snake”) woman. She was adopted daughter of James Curtis Bird.

Howery is not a very common surname. When I was maybe 13 or so and just getting started with genealogy, I knew almost nothing about my father or his family. I eventually eked out the information that his grandfather was Elmer Phillip Howery, who everyone agreed was born in England. (Recently it’s occurred to me that probably I was not hearing the difference between English and Anglo that would have been significant for my mother and some of the others I was talking to.)

I wrote confidently to Somerset House, the English vital records place. Nothing. No record, they said. In fact they had no records of any Howerys. That’s just England, though. Since it was obvious Howery is a British name (so naive back then!), I started thinking Howery is probably a Scottish name. Maybe Irish.

In those pre-Internet days each little nugget of information was a treasure. My access to information was essentially just the local library and quarterly issues of The Genealogical Helper.

I could also order Family Group Sheets from the LDS Genealogical Library in Salt Lake, but I had to be pretty focused. I needed to have name, date, and place. It’s hard to finesse a form when you don’t have much real information. There was no Family Group Sheet for Elmer Phillip Howery, so I was out of luck.

Lucky me. I found Black’s Surnames of Scotland (1946). Yep, there’s an entry for Hourie. I wasn’t finding anything remotely similar anywhere else in Europe, so I was sure this was going to be my family.

One of my strategies back then was to use phone books to find addresses of people who had the surnames I was looking for. The Grand Junction Public Library didn’t have a large collection but they did have some. I would also call directory assistance and do a little fishing for names and addresses. My allowance at that age wasn’t so high I could afford a lot of stamps, so I had to be cagey, looking for the best opportunities. Then too, most people never wrote back, even though I learned to type on my mother’s fancy Olivetti, she taught me to use business format, and I enclosed stamped return envelopes.

With my Howery search I eventually connected with Ian Howrie in Dallas, Texas. He told me, in one paragraph, the story of his ancestors John Hourie and Margaret Bird from Red River, Canada. I was sure that was my connection. The other people I talked to mostly agreed.

I think it was probably several years before I made contact with Pat Sorenson in Yuba City, California. That was through one of her ads in The Genealogical Helper. She couldn’t help with my line, not directly, but she offered the very firm advice that my line probably belonged to the large clan of Midwest Howerys and Howreys descended from Jacob Howry of Howrytown, Virginia, and he in turn from (she thought) the Mennonite Hauris and Howrys from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Pat turned out to be right. I gave up my Métis ancestry, almost without noticing. Too bad. I think my dad would have liked that line to pan out. Many years later when I wanted Ian Howrie to do a DNA test for the Hauri DNA Project, I couldn’t find him again. The whole Métis piece just receded into the distance, although I think there might be distant cousins here and there who still think we’re descended from John Hourie and Margaret, his Shoshone wife.

More Information

  • “John Hourie“, Red River Ancestry <www.redriverancestry.ca>, Dec. 5, 2016, retrieved Aug. 23, 2020.
Anglo-Saxon Genealogies

Anglo-Saxon Genealogies

by Justin Durand

“Germanic pre-Christian ideas of ancestry wouldn’t necessarily be totally intuitive to a modern person looking back.“

This is a favorite topic of mine. I rarely pass up a chance to point out others who agree with me. Here, Simon Roper.

The old, poetic genealogies handed down by our remote ancestors “were probably not completely reflective of genetic relationships in the same way as our modern idea of a family tree would be, so a lot of them seem to go back to a god like Woden, although post-Christianization the royal family trees were retroactively so that the god was somewhere in the middle of the tree rather than at the base. And in fact these genealogies seem to have reflected socio-political associations a bit more than they represented actual, real genetic descent as we would see it.“

“So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that probably people coming from elsewhere and integrating into the local society could possibly be accommodated into that genealogy without actually having been a known blood relation of anybody in the group.“

“It’s clear that not being of genetically Anglo-Saxon ancestry did not preclude a person becoming a very active member of society with a lot of responsibility. So identity was rooted in descent but that descent was not necessarily strictly generation to generation genetic descent; that’s a very modern way of viewing it.“

It’s broader than that, even. As an example well-known to historians, the genealogy of the Wessex kings descended from Cerdic seems to have been grafted on to the older and more prestigious genealogy of the kings of Bernica (Kenneth Sisam, “Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies”, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 39, pp. 287–348 (1953)).

These can be difficult concepts if you’re not used to them. I’m reminded of an old professor of mine who used to say, “Objectivity is nothing more than consensual subjectivity.” Powerful stuff. Think about that for a minute.

When we know there might be something to see, it’s not hard to find ways in our own culture where people see genealogical and cultural identity in different ways.

At a different point in this presentation Roper says, “Think of how many different ways people view their identity today – I know people who consider themselves British but have two natively Japanese parents, and people who consider themselves French despite not having had a French ancestor in more than a hundred years. Neither of these is an invalid way of viewing identity, but it goes to show that we cannot agree on what constitutes cultural heritage and identity nowadays. . . .“

Our ancestors thought genealogy should reflect cultural relationships. We think genealogy is only true if it represents biological facts. We’re not talking across the generations about similar but different things. We can’t use their information for our purposes.