Online trees

Online trees

by Justin Durand ♥ 1 Comment

Are online trees worth it? I’m not so sure. I was a volunteer curator at Geni.com for many years but ultimately left because of the breathtaking incompetence of some of my fellow curators (as well as a pervasive homophobia). The strongest and most vocal users are often those peddling fantasy. It wouldn’t have to be a problem but they’re abetted by curators with mediocre genealogy skills but with a strong need for social approval. Look at the area around Pocahontas if you doubt me.

I thought maybe WikiTree.com would be better, but it turns out they have no will to correct errors. There is simply no way to remove information that is unsupported if the current manager likes it.

I did get a good story out of WikiTree, though — when I first became active there I received a series of messages from one of the admins advising me to get help before working further on my husband’s account. (What!?) Because they assumed I was a woman getting confused by all that hard DNA stuff. I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of mansplaining before I figured out what was going on. Then the admin huffily explained that he thought I was a woman because men don’t change their names. No apologies (and that seems on-brand for WikiTree).

They say the online trees will eventually coalesce into one massive online tree. From what I’ve seen so far, I imagine it will be a tree filled with massive and insolvable mistakes and pretensions.

The one I have the most hope for is FamilySearch.org. It has more than its share of silly mistakes right now but I see it as less commercial and therefore more likely to make the hard decisions that lead to good genealogy. The others are handicapped by the need to pander to a paying public.

I welcome engagement on this subject.

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Revised Sept. 22, 2021 to add link.

Genealogical Standards

Genealogical Standards

by Justin Durand ♥ 1 Comment

Reflecting on genealogical standards. This is an area that could use a lot of work, maybe get some modernization going. I’m not optimistic. Seems like genealogists as a whole are not a self-reflective bunch. The rules are the rules and we’ll burn you as a heretic if you don’t agree.

I’m not sure entering place names in the form current at the time of the event really makes sense, for example. The standard was created as a time and in a culture where knowing the older names and jurisdictions was the easiest way to find where records might be located now. This was a particular problem for Americans moving west, with new towns, counties, territories, and states being created all sides as families moved through the landscape to find new opportunities. It doesn’t make so much sense when the Internet makes it easy to find the history of any particular location.

Names are also problematic. The standard has been to record the name given at birth. That makes sense in a modern, Euro-centric culture where names are fixed at birth by custom and bureaucracy. It doesn’t make as much sense in cultures where a birth name is not the same as someone’s adult name, where a person might name might change due to adoption, where a person’s name might change routinely through different stages of life, where surnames might take the form of patronymics, or surnames might be fluid or event absent altogether. Prosopographers, being academics, have a much better handle on names. In prosopography, names are not essentialist badges of identity but rather transactional. This is the name that denotes the person in this record, and this other, perhaps similar or even identical name, is attached to the person in this other record. Major and minor variations are to be expected. We can choose one name to represent the person in our database. Call it the “best known as” name. Think of it as the “encylopedic standard”. It makes more sense to enter Bill Clinton as William Jefferson Clinton rather than William Jefferson Blythe, III. His adoption and name change is not headline.

This is a subject that interests me greatly. It’s hard to find anyone who wants to discuss, debate, and explore, so I’m mostly over here on the sidelines noticing little pieces here and there. I hope to write more on this topic in the future.

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Land Back: Settler FAQ

Land Back: Settler FAQ

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A lot of people are saying #LandBack. The idea seems to be settlers should give back the land their ancestors stole. I hear about it more from Canadians than Americans, but the idea is circulating in both countries.

I’m listening, politely I hope, but I’m not really sure about what I’m hearing. How far do they want to go? How much do they want to take? What happens to the people who live on the land now? How can we settlers all go back to Europe? We wouldn’t all fit now. How could we decide which European country has to take us when many of us are mixed? How can they say all White people are settlers when many of us have been here for 12 or 13 generations? How can they judge who is a settler and who is indigenous when some of us are mixed, in varying degrees? And come to that, how do we know #landback wouldn’t be just replacement of one elite with another? (And on, and on.)

These are all concerns I’ve heard from friends at just the slightest mention of #LandBack. It all sounds very alarmist, doesn’t it? Or in some cases, dismissive. It would be easy to go off halfcocked.

I’m thinking we need to do more listening first. There’s a core element of justice here. The land really was stolen. Let’s not lose sight of that. And you don’t have to be a historian to know that evolving ideas of justice always sound radical against a comfortable status quo. Our Revolutionary War ancestors heard voices condemning slavery and maybe sympathized a bit, but not enough to begin dismantling the institution of slavery.

I haven’t yet found the careful, thorough, and nuanced breakdown I’m looking for. I’m guessing that’s because the idea of #landback is still evolving among Indian communities. If we could really hear, I think we’d hear a variety of voices and opinions.

One of my early encounters with the idea of #LandBack was Nick Estes, “The Battle for the Black Hills,” High Country News, Jan. 1, 2021. (Took me awhile to go back and find the article for this post. I follow him on Twitter, so I was pretty sure I remembered correctly he was the author but it took me longer to figure out it had to have been in High County News.)

I already knew about the legal battle for the Black Hills, but I didn’t know about the NDN Collective and the LandBack Campaign. Seems like the perfect resource. I looked at their website. One of the four demands listed in their Manifesto is “All public lands back into Indigenous hands.”

Specific and predictable, albeit controversial, but then it goes further. Estes quotes Krystal Two Bulls, Head of the LandBack Campaign, as saying “Public land is the first manageable bite, then we’re coming for everything else.” Seriously? I’m back to thinking #LandBack is a moving target.

I’ve continued to listen. Recently I came across an issue of Briarpatch Magazine devoted to #LandBack–September/October 2020. (Yes, it was published before Nick Estes’ article, but I didn’t find it until a few days ago.)

In particular, there’s an interesting summary article: “What is Land Back? A Settler FAQ” (David Gray-Donald, Sept. 10, 2020). It’s easy, short, and provocative. It raises more questions than it answers. I like that. I’m going to start recommending it to my friends as a place to start. (And here’s a hint for you: there’s plenty more in that issue of Briarpatch–if you’re minded to explore a bit.)

Wyoming Oysters

Wyoming Oysters

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When we have turkey for a holiday meal we always have Grandma’s Oyster Dressing. We assume it was her mother’s recipe.

This tradition gets me laughing every Thanksgiving. How in the world, I wonder, did a family of Wyoming ranchers end up making oysters a key ingredient of our holidays? Was great grandpa Luce so rich he could have them shipped from San Francisco specially (as he did his brand)? And how would that even work back then?

Did the Luces from Maine bring the tradition to Utah with them in the 1840s? No way that could work. Spend weeks carting oysters in wagons across the plains? I don’t think so.

So I was pleased when this article ended up in one of my feeds:

Oysters were a thing in the West: “Across the map, nineteenth-century America was mad for oysters.” Who’d have guessed?

“One of the earliest mentions of oysters in the West dates to 1846 when venturers on the Santa Fe Trail were greeted with champagne and oysters upon arriving in Santa Fe.”

The author even satisfies my particular curiosity about oysters in Wyoming: “Cheyenne, Wyoming, established as a node of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867, boomed from a few dozen people to six thousand in a couple of months. The town’s first newspaper, The Cheyenne Leader, was already advertising 75-cent cans of Baltimore oysters by October of that year.”

So, I’m done making fun of family tradition. (This one, anyway.) I’ve been defeated and forced to admit it is totally and absolutely plausible Grandma Essie made oyster dressing for holidays.

Fun with Land Acknowledgments

Fun with Land Acknowledgments

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Land acknowledgments play a serious role in modern American and Canadian society, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with them. While people are chuckling they can also be opening to new and perhaps uncomfortable ideas.

None better than Walking Eagle News. I follow them on Twitter so I don’t miss the good stuff.

Today I’m sharing two of my favorites:

I won’t spoil the fun. Go read them yourself.

Disclaimer: I’m just a White Ex-Mo Settler Boy™ doing a bit to hear indigenous voices.