HIST3838: Finding Your Roots: Researching Your Family History

Why has genealogy been a popular pastime in the United States at certain times? What does it mean that PBS has a hit program on genealogy and that tracing family history is a major industry? The desire to trace your family history might seem like a natural impulse to many of us, but it really is not. We know this because we know that genealogy has been a much more powerful force in society at some times than at others, and because it has mattered to some groups of people more than to others. This is a way of saying that family history has its own history. This course helps you to think about that history, and in doing so, to learn a lot about how Americans (and other people, too) have used history for their own purposes. This class is also an introduction to how to do genealogical research. In fact, this course aims to bring the little picture and the big picture together. By little picture, I mean tracing the fascinating history of a particular family?maybe yours. For many of you, this will be your first step in research. For others, it will be just one more step in a long journey of research. By big picture, I mean that for all of you, this class will try to help you think about how genealogical research is a process of historical research that can lead us to think about more than "who begat whom." It can help us think about how people lived in the past and how individuals' and families' lives were part of history's biggest stories. This course will introduce you to the uses and cultural importance of genealogies and family histories in American society and the techniques of genealogy and family history. Course readings will consist of books, chapters, and articles on the historiography of American lineages and families and on the history of genealogy. Readings will cover the period from the eighteenth century forward. Students will study genealogy and its relationship to nostalgia and forms of historical romanticism that have been powerful at different points in American history for different reasons. This relates to an important topic to researchers today: memory studies, which asks (among other things) how our ideas about the past play a role in our lives. Students will learn how family history and genealogy are powerful ideological tools that have been deployed in various ways by different actors at particular times?from elite families in colonial British America, to the new bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century America, to Native American and Native Hawaiian communities, to African Americans and the ?new white ethnics? in the twentieth century, to gay, lesbian, and transgender people in the late twentieth century, and more. Students will also explore the ways that historians have used the history of particular families to trace the construction (and often the instability) of such social categories of race and class.

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