The genealogist’s stock-in-trade is the idea that the facts of the past can be (partially) recovered through research.

We stumble when those facts turn out to be slipperier than we thought they would be. As our research takes us further back in time, there is more chance of stumbling. Unless we have specialized knowledge about period and place we can make mistakes easily. There is a risk that our basic assumptions are wrong.

One of the most interesting assumptions, I think, is that the truth consists of facts. Genealogists who try to work with medieval genealogies often crash and burn on this one.

“The concept of ‘the fact’ first appears in Renaissance Latin, but the word only entered common usage in the 1660s. The Royal Society, founded in November 1660, was dedicated to experimental knowledge and declared that it would concern itself with ‘facts not explanations.’ ‘Facts’ became part of a modern vocabulary for discussing knowledge — also including theories, hypotheses, evidence and experiments — which emerged in the 17th century. All these words existed before, but with different meanings: ‘experiment,’ for example, simply meant ‘experience.’“

There’s a whole thing going on here that has disappeared from the modern world. Our ancestors understood the idea of facts. They just didn’t rank them as highly as we do. Ancient authority ranked higher.

For example, the ancients thought lions were afraid of roosters. See, for example, Lucretius, The Nature of Things 4.710 (1st century BCE). Because an ancient authority said it, it was truer than any fact. No experiment could prove it wrong, because the weight of authority was greater than the weight of facts.

In the same way, ancient genealogies often also rely on authority. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) says Scef, the ancestor of the English kings, was a son of Noah, born in the Ark. The AS Chronicle is an authority, so it is true whether or not it is factual.

This is an astounding idea to us moderns. We wouldn’t even think to think of it for ourselves. I can remember learning this in Historiography 501, or whatever it was called. I sat there thinking, “Bastards have buried the lead.” They should have taught us this in Western Civ.

Years later, I came across a quote that epitomizes this approach to knowledge. It’s from Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino. (Some of you remember and loved Name of the Rose.)

The bishop is talking to an imaginative monk. He says:

“I have heard you invent many stories that the emperor has believed. So then, if you have no other news of that realm [Prester John], invent some. Mind you, I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true–which is a virtuous act because it compensates for the lack of proof of something that certainly exists or happened.“

This was the world of our ancestors. Not secret, underground transmission of exotic facts.

• David Wootton, “The Concept of Facts Is Newer Than You Think“, History Today, Time (Feb. 15, 2017).

More Information

• Emily Winkler, “Was There History in the Middle Ages?”, St Edmund Hall, YouTube (Apr. 6, 2017).

We genealogists often struggle with memory and its problems. So often, I run into fellow researchers who think the long ago memory of someone who was “there” is fully trustworthy. We saw an extreme example of that a few years on a collaborative website. A certain user made the most outlandish claims, each time attributing his information to a a conversation he had with his father. His father was able apparently to remember detailed names, dates, and relationships going back hundreds of years, and this user was able to apparently to remember the whole thing after hearing it only once. 

This was an extreme example, but it was an especially strong reminder that there are limits to memory. Even when you think you remember, you don’t. Not always. I myself am often surprised when I read my old journals, that so many incidental details were very different from the way I remember them.

I often regret I haven’t done a better job of documenting and citing the science on the the fallibility and malleability of memory. In that spirit, I’m taking note of the following piece.

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“In a well-known study conducted to measure memory retention, a group of college students were told a very short thirty-second story. The researchers said, We’re going to tell you this story, and all we want you to do is remember it as accurately as you possibly can. Then we’re going to have you tell it back to us at various intervals.” And so the students would listen to the story, knowing that their only task was to remember it as accurately as possible, and then, one minute later, they would be asked to repeat the story. Five minutes later, they’d be asked to repeat it again; and then a half an hour later, and then an hour later, and then twelve hours later, and then a day later, and then two days later, and then a week later, and then finally, two weeks later.

“What the researchers found was that, in the very first retelling of the story, after only one minute, the students were actually already beginning to distort it, that their memories weren’t as accurate as they imagined. Even though the researchers were telling the story to very intelligent college students, with the relatively easy task of simply remembering the story, what they found was that when the students started to retell the story, within the third or fourth retelling, it became so different that it began to appear almost unrecognizable in relation to the original tale. And that was just within the third or fourth retelling, within an hour or two of having heard it. By a week later and certainly by two weeks later, the story was so distorted that you almost couldn’t imagine that the retelling ever came from the original story. And yet all of the students truly believed that they were remembering the story quite accurately.“

• Adyashanti, Falling into Grace (2011), 35.

“The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.“

• Read More: Sarah Griffiths, “Can you trust your earliest childhood memories?“, BBC (May 19, 2019).

Updated to add links.

When I was in college one of my professors said, “Objectivity correlates to a consensual subjectivity.” That statement has some very powerful implications for how we understand the nature of historical research. In genealogy we often see people captivated by long, mythical lines of descent, which they invariably believe were transmitted underground, undocumented, for centuries and even millennia.

In that context, I like this insightful passage from Morris Berman:

“Thus we come to the central methodological problem of what I have called hidden history, that the techniques of analysis developed by historiography in the last two centuries are designed to verify (or falsify) only a certain type of assumption; and if we insist that there nevertheless is an invisible or somatic layer beneath the drama we are investigating, there seems to be no way in which this can be consensually validated. Heretical and sectarian phenomena are particularly maddening in this regard, because they open up to an instinctual ‘feel’ that seems to strike home and yet slips through the net of any and every traditional mode of analysis. One historian, George Shriver, thus asserts: ‘Grappling with various facets of the Cathar story, one is well aware that much of life escaped the documents, [and] that there must be a place for intuitive perception at times.’ It was in this spirit that Déodat Roché, the greatest spokesman for Catharism in modern times, constructed a history of the Cathar phenomenon based on the esoteric system of Rudolf Steiner, thereby proposing a comparative method that would enable the historian to uncover a deeper history. Yet his major conclusion—that there is a clear unbroken chain of identical esoteric practice from the Manichaeans, and ultimately from the Essenes, right through to the Cathars, remains, as far as I am concerned, an unwarranted assumption. ‘Hidden history’ is plagued by the problem that it is easy to invent a past while claiming, in the name of intuitive perception, to uncover one [emphasis added].

More Information

• Morris Steyer, Coming to Our Senses: Body and spirit in the hidden history of the West (1990), 195-96.

“Under the leadership of Fernand Braudel and together with Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Philippe Aries, Jacques le Goff worked his whole life to expand the inheritance of Marc Bloch and the Annales School in general. Part of this inheritance consisted of an emphatic resistance against the traditional history of politics as formed by heroes of a bygone time. Social, economical and cultural history were the mainstay of this tradition until the 80s, when the fashion for historical anthropology hit international academia. To say the least, biographies were for a long time considered anathema.”

• http://www.medievalhistories.com/saint-louis-a-biography-by-le-goff/