As a Riccardian, Josephine Tey’s novel Daughter of Time is an old favorite.
Re-reading last night. I didn’t expect it to provide an example of how researchers go wrong.
The story goes like this. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is convalescing after an injury. A friend triggers his interest in Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. One of the most famous mysteries in the English-speaking world. Richard supposedly had them killed. It now seems that story was pure Tudor propaganda.
At one point in the novel, a student researcher tells Grant the story of the Boston Massacre. Grant responds by telling the story of the Tonypandy Riots.
Grant says the point of his story is not just “Someone blowing up a simple affair for a political end.” It’s how history has been falsified. “The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story in nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.“
When I was an undergraduate I read a similar story about the dangers of oral history. Star-crossed lovers in wartime Yugoslavia who ended up committing suicide. Except both of them were still alive, and the people telling the story knew them, knew their identity, and knew they weren’t dead.
This is the kind of thing we need to bear in mind when doing historical research. Very often it’s the story that matters. Contemporary accounts aren’t necessarily true accounts.
A few pages later, Grant and his researcher decide they need to look at reactions to the death of Edward IV. Tey gives us a great parting line: “Only historians tell you what they thought. Research workers stick to what they did.”
I’d say that’s sound advice for genealogists.
Josephine Tey (Elizabeth MacKintosh). Daughter of Time. Pocket Books, 1951.
A few days ago I wrote about Online Learning (Apr. 13, 2020). There’s no doubt you can learn on the Internet. Good quality stuff, if you search it out.
Here’s an article that suggests targeted learning might someday replace university degrees. “Could targeted, bite-sized chunks of education help you get a job?”
This particular article focuses on the rising cost of education, and whether online courses and certificate programs could replace a university degree. Or maybe not replace, just supplement.
This isn’t a new idea. I think it must have been around since the early days of the Internet. Hey look, here’s something that might happen. Easy futurism.
Now the landscape has been transformed, just in the two months since this article was written. Here in Colorado we’re all in COVID-19 lockdown. Schools are closed; replaced in various ways by online instruction.
It’s a new world, both for school and for work. It was totally impossible, so they said, to let people work at home. Until it had to be done to keep employers in business. Now it’s magically possible.
I tease my nephew that his education is over. He’ll never get further than 9th grade. It’ll be digging ditches for him. It’s funny only because we know the world has changed. Whether or not he’s ever able to go back to a traditional classroom environment, the certification process will adapt. He’ll graduate high school and go on to college, in whatever way those things end up being defined.
When I retired a few years ago, I thought I would like to good back, finish my Masters’ degree and get a PhD in History. I applied to universities. I got accepted. And I decided I don’t really want to go. Not this school. Not that school. Not right now. I love reading and watching videos; the learning itself.
Even when I was college I pushed against the structure. I wanted to go my own direction. Week 3, I’m thinking that chapter we had to read is fascinating. I want to explore that. I’m not ready to move on with the rest of the class to the next topic.
Today, when I look at online versus classroom education, I agree with the guy in this article. “[H]e came to the conclusion that a major part of formal education was ‘signalling’; that it was used to ‘filter society by which people are smart, conscientious and conformist enough to put up with it'”.
History doesn’t change but our interpretation of it does. It’s all the same events and and the same material culture (as far we can discover it), but when we look back on it we often see different things than our ancestors did.
I’ve been looking for a good example to add to my “toolkit” of elevator speeches, and here it is. Victorian pornography.
We think of the Victorians as being prudish. So prudish, in fact, that we joke about it.
At the same time, it’s pretty clear the Victorians thought it was okay to look at pictures of naked ladies as long as they could be defined as “cultural.” Make it a painting of a naked lady posing as a Greek goddess and you were home free.
Now we have #ArtActivistBarbie and #MuseumActivism. This couldn’t have happened unless our culture changed. Now that it has, our view of the Pre-Raphaelites and Neo-Classicists can also change. We don’t see the same thing when we look back that we used to.
This thing about soft porn disguised as culture makes perfect sense to me. Remember here that I’m an Ethnic Mormon, so I tend to be a bit stricter about some things than the general culture.
When I was a kid we lived in Las Vegas. We were living there when Caesar’s Palace opened. 1966, I think. My parents used to take us out to eat after church on Sundays. Sometimes we ate at casinos. I remember the first time we went to Caesar’s Palace. Pull up, park, and walk up a long path to the front doors. And that path was lined with statues of naked Greco-Roman gods. I couldn’t believe such a thing was allowed in public. (I would have been 10.) My sisters kept their eyes on the ground. My parents didn’t even notice anything was wrong. So worldly, they. That was the day I learned about the hypocrisy of art.
Now, I think I’m go to go follow @BarbieReports and @wmarybeard. There might be something more learn here.
Malatiah Luce, of Martha’s Vineyard married a woman named Eleanor Harley or Harlow. Everything I’ve found about her online comes directly or indirectly from Charles Edward Banks’ 3-volume History of Martha’s Vineyard (1901, 1966):
59. Malatiah(3) Luce, (Thomas(2), Henry(1)), b. 1710; res. T., husbandman; m. Eleanor Harley (or Harlow) 5 July 1738, who was b. 1715 and d. 18 Feb. 1787. He d. 3 May 1801. (Banks 3:255).
I’ve pushed a bit from time to time to see if I could take the line further. It seemed to me she was probably really a Harlow because there was a Harlow connection on the Vineyard. I never found anything but I spun some good theories. And, predictably, many people copied my texts without attribution.
About a year ago I tried again. This time scrapping my old theories and starting from scratch.
I already had an extract of the two records on which Banks based his information. Tisbury Vital Records shows Elenor Harley and Malatiah Luce, married 5 July 1738, and Elanor, w. Meltiah, [died] Feb. 18, 1787, in 73d y.
Tisbury Marriages
So we see the primary source says she was a Harley. Banks must have had the same thought I did, that she might really have been a Harlow.
If we calculate her birth from her death it looks like she should be born 1712/13, even though Banks says 1715. Doesn’t really matter. Some play in the dates wouldn’t be unusual.
I was blown away to find, almost immediately, a simple and direct record of an Eleanor who is probably her: Elenor, christened 17 August 1712 in Boston, daughter of Robert Harley and Elinor. This must be the Robert Harley and Eliner Kerr who were married in Boston on 15 November 1711 by Cotton Mather.
Second Church of Boston
That’s it then. Now we can move to looking for her parents’ ancestries.
Old Theory
Here is the last iteration of my old research on Eleanor’s ancestry. An earlier version presented a theory about how she might have been connected to the Plymouth Harlows. I touch on that theory here, and dismiss it.
Her ancestry is unknown. There are some speculations, but no evidence.
Although her marriage record calls her Elenor Harley (Tisbury Vital Records) it seems certain her name was Harlow rather than Harley. There was a Harlow family on Martha's Vineyard but no other references to a Harley family in this area. Moreover, her daughter Mary's first child was Harlow Crosby (born 15 December 1768).
Theories about her origin include the following:
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of (Deacon) Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole.
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of Benjamin Harlow, and a granddaughter of Sgt. William Harlow.
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of Thomas Harlock and Hannah.
She might have been an indentured servant from England.
It is widely believed Eleanor was one of the Plymouth Harlows and therefore a descendant of Sgt. William Harlow (FamilySearch (2017)) but there is no evidence. A genealogy of this family published in NEHGR does not show an Eleanor (Adams 1860: 227-33), but is undocumented and contains known errors.
The Plymouth Harlows were connected with the Holmes and the Wests, two families who lived on the Vineyard a generation later. Rebecca Harlow of the Plymouth family married 1730 Jabez Holmes. His cousin John Holmes came to the Vineyard about 1757. Rebecca's nephew Robert Harlow married 1749 Jean West, of Tisbury, and Robert's brother James Holmes married 1757 Jerusha Holmes, who was niece of Jabez.
FamilySearch shows Eleanor as a daughter of Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole (2017), and therefore a sister of the Robert Harlow who married Jean West, and of the James Harlow who married Jerusha Holmes. The relationship is problematic, however. The chronology is too tight. Eleanor is thought to have been born about 1714/15, which would make her about 23 at the time of her marriage and would tally with her death record, which says she was in her 73rd year. However, Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole weren't married until October 1717. They had their first child Ebenezer Harlow 16 months later, in April 1719. Their subsequent children follow the usual Puritan pattern of a child about every two years until 1752, with each birth duly recorded at Plymouth, and no child named Eleanor. There is no room for Eleanor in this family.
Justin Swanström, 11/1/2010, rev. 9/30/2017.
Sources
Adams, Theodore P. “The Harlow Family” in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 14(1860), pp. 227-33.
Banks, Dr. Charles E. The History of Martha’s Vineyard (Dukes Co. Hist. Soc., 1911, 1966).
“Family Tree,” database, FamilySearch (http://familysearch.org : modified 23 May 2017), entry for Eleanor Harley (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHJ6-TFB); contributed by various users.
I’m a fan of using networks to break through genealogical brick walls. My shorthand for this is “People tend to marry someone they know.” When you’re studying a community it helps to start mapping everyone. Look at their relatives, look at their neighbors, look at the other people who sign the same documents. It’s time consuming but not hard.
It’s called social network analysis. I remember reading something from Tony Proctor at Parallax View, I can’t put my finger on it right now. I also remember seeing something with the leaders of the American Revolution. Can’t find that either.
Instead I find some old bookmarks about researchers who analyzed the social networks in three epic poems: the Greek Iliad, the English poem Beowulf, and the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge. It turns out these three have the characteristics of real-life social networks.
Then, the researchers analyzed four works of “modern fiction”: Fellowship of the Ring, Harry Potter, Les Misérables, and Richard III. The social relationships in these are flatter. They don’t have the interlinked connections with other characters that people have in real-life networks.
I feel like I could almost have guessed, even before I read about the study. In high school I read Gone With the Wind, with some of my friends. As a group we ended up having many different discussions about idealizing the past and distorting the evils of slavery. In among the politics and ethics, I also thought this novel was a bit unusual in the number of relationships among minor characters. Kathleen Calvert. The Tarleton twins. Mrs. Mead. It’s common in novels. I thought it might be that Margaret Mitchell based the story on real life, just because of the network depth she gave it.
Now I’m going to go figure out where I’ve stashed all my info on social networks. Must be around here somewhere.
NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Retrieved Apr. 15, 2020. “The NNDB Mapper is a visual tool for exploring the connections between people in NNDB, linking them together through family relations, corporate boards, movies and TV, political alliances, and shadowy conspiracy groups. Maps can be saved and shared for others to explore.“
