From Jacqueline Kehoe:
“When I first visited a year ago, I felt an intense sense of home. These streets I had never walked, these smells my nose shouldn’t recognize, this terra incognita — it all seemed strangely familiar and comforting. But how is that possible? I have Norwegian heritage, sure, but generations back. What makes a foreign place feel like home?”
Read more: Why visiting your ancestral home feels so familiar: It’s literally in your bones, at Matador Network, visited Oct. 16, 2019.
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].
Whatever the definition of “ethnicity”, it does not fit comfortably into any of the present or past political boundaries of modern countries.
Here is some food for thought.
Updated to add link.
When I moved to Salt Lake City in 1977 one of the first things I did on a day off was walk over to the Pioneer Monument on Main Street and South Temple. I wanted to see if there were any Luces on the list of the pioneers. The list is short, just the very first pioneers. No Luces. I was deeply disappointed. I was sure there was a Luce who should be there.
There is a funny thing about this statue, I can’t resist mentioning. A bit of irreverent local doggerel says, “There stands brother Brigham, like a bird on a perch, with his hand to the bank, and his ass to the church.” I was more than a little scandalized the first time I heard it, but later I decided to take it in good humor. As an ironical nod, I opened an account at that particular branch of Zions Bank. And as a reward, I felt like I was part of the web of old Salt Lake every time I went there.
It was many years before I found out I was right. John Grant Luce‘s name should appear on the monument. The fact it doesn’t is due to a (now) well-known mistake. John Grant Luce was confused with Franklin G. Losee.
Where did I get the idea one of the Luces arrived with the first company? I don’t know. All these years and I’ve never found any note to show that I had heard something like that. As far as I can find, the mistake wasn’t actually discovered until 2015. Probably I was just wrong about what was known at that time.
Edited May 27, 2020 to repair link.
Stephen Luce must have been in Nauvoo in April 1840. I’m happy to have that piece nailed down.
The confusion here is from an index card in the Early Church History Information file. It says Stephen Luce was ordained a Seventy on 9 April 1840 by Wilford Woodruff.
That can’t be right. Woodruff was on his English mission. There is no evidence in family tradition or written sources that Stephen Luce served a mission in England.
I wrote to the experts at the BYU Family History Center. They didn’t say it can’t be right, but they did say there’s no evidence. The person who typed that card might have made a mistake on the date. Woodruff’s journal has a fairly lengthy entry for 9 April 1840 but no mention of Stephen Luce or of ordaining anyone.
So, we backtrack.
BYU pointed out that Stephen Luce was ordained a Teacher by Woodruff on 13 April 1838 in Vinalhaven. The event is recorded in Woodruff’s journal. His brother-in-law Nathaniel Thomas was ordained a Priest at the same time.
Stephen and his wife Mary Ann (Nancy) did not join the Mormon exodus from Maine in October 1838. Woodruff named the people who traveled with him in a journal entry dated 4 October 1838. The family of Stephen’s brother Ephraim Luce was part of the company. Stephen and his family were not. (We can guess the reason. Nancy was in the advanced stages of pregnancy. She gave birth to Wilford Woodruff Luce in Vinalhaven on November 9, 1838, just a few weeks after the company departed.
If Stephen and Nancy didn’t travel with Wilford Woodruff to Nauvoo in 1838, it seems likely they arrived there in 1839 or 1840.
I recently discovered Stephen was in Nauvoo in July 1840. On 18 July 1840 Phebe Woodruff wrote to her husband about the death of their small daughter. She died at their home in Montrose, Iowa. They took her body across the Mississippi River to Nauvoo for burial. In the letter, Phebe mentions in passing that Stephen Luce had agreed to make a little fence around the grave. Telling the story, writer Laurel Thatcher Ulrich describes Stephen Luce as “a friend from Maine” (Ulrich, 49).
It seems unlikely Stephen Luce had traveled to England on the mission with Wilford Woodruff, then returned before Woodruff did, particularly when there is no evidence that he went to England at all. I’ve written to BYU again. Perhaps they can locate the record of Stephen Luce’s 1840 ordination.