Critical Family History: Situating Family within Contexts of Power Relationships

Abstract

Family history research has become increasingly popular as online genealogical research tools have become widely available. However, family historians, particularly those from dominant social groups, usually end up interpreting their family story within dominant national narratives. As a form of "memory work" (Kuhn, 1995), family history has the potential to unearth hidden or "forgotten" memories about the past and its implication for the present. Drawing on theoretical tools of the critical theoretical traditions, critical family history interrogates the interaction between family and context, with a particular focus on power relationships among sociocultural groups. In this article, I use my own family history to illustrate the recovery of a silenced or suppressed national narrative. Specifically, through an examination of property records and wills, I show how social relationships that colonization forged, rather than being a relic of the past, live on in the present, and how family history can challenge a national mythology that minimizes the importance and ongoing impact of colonization.

Headnote

Abstract

Family history research has become increasingly popular as online genealogical research tools have become widely available. However, family historians, particularly those from dominant social groups, usually end up interpreting their family story within dominant national narratives. As a form of "memory work" (Kuhn, 1995), family history has the potential to unearth hidden or "forgotten" memories about the past and its implication for the present. Drawing on theoretical tools of the critical theoretical traditions, critical family history interrogates the interaction between family and context, with a particular focus on power relationships among sociocultural groups. In this article, I use my own family history to illustrate the recovery of a silenced or suppressed national narrative. Specifically, through an examination of property records and wills, I show how social relationships that colonization forged, rather than being a relic of the past, live on in the present, and how family history can challenge a national mythology that minimizes the importance and ongoing impact of colonization.

Keywords: historical memory, national mythology, critical race theory, colonization, family wealth

Introduction

Family history has become an increasingly popular activity with the growing availability of online genealogical research tools. Studies of why people research family history find that many seek a sense of belonging to place and community extending back in time, anchoring personal identity (Bennett, 2015; Bottero, 2015; Kramer, 2011). Family memories and personal identity, however, are never entirely private matters. Rather, they reflect public, national narratives, often tacitly incorporating the themes and the silences within those narratives (Kuhn, 1995; Lenz & Bjerg, 2007). This article disrupts the incorporation of unexamined national mythologies, particularly those of dominant social groups, into family history. I will show how "critical family history," which takes account of wider socio-cultural and power relationships, can delve beneath national narratives.

Family History and Context

Evidence suggests that most family historians focus much more on the family itself than on the social context in which the family lived. In a study of how family historians make sense of ancestors' social positions in the past, Bottero (2012) noted that people she studied varied in the extent to which they were interested in non-ancestors. Some found the historical context of their ancestors useful only in tracing individual ancestors. Others found non-ancestral contextual information worth pursuing in its own right. After interviewing family historians about how they seek information, Darby and Clough (2013) found that most of their research participants focused on building out the ancestral family tree. Less than 20% sought contextual information about their ancestors' lives. Even family history television shows like Finding Your Roots are biased toward decontextualized family narratives (Scodari, 2013).

It appears to be family historians of dominant social groups who are least likely to contextualize the family within larger socio-cultural and power relationships. For example, Parham (2008), while observing White and Black genealogists researching their HaitianDominican immigrant family histories in New Orleans, noticed a distinct difference between how each group navigated its family's position in relationship to slavery and racial oppression. The White genealogists, tracing individual ancestors, used the past only as a background context in which to locate their ancestors within a traditional narrative that minimizes racism. In contrast, the Black genealogists linked their family's story with a larger narrative of navigating and challenging racial oppression. Based on analyzing Black genealogical texts, Gardner (2003) argued that, "unlike traditional White genealogies . . . the focus of [two texts by Black genealogists] is clearly on the descendants and their complex positioning in regards to race, slavery's legacy, and American identity" (p. 154).

While family historians from dominant social groups may view social context as irrelevant, I suggest that ignoring context leads to uncritical appropriation of national mythologies. Uncritical appropriation of mythologies related to racism and colonialism enables people to avoid confronting how their ancestors participated or benefited, thereby avoiding accountability for unjust power relations today. For example, while working with predominantly White groups of teachers in Canada, Norquay (1998) noticed systematic gaps and silences in stories they told about their family immigrant histories. The teachers generally interpreted their family histories in a way that "reflected officially sanctioned understandings of immigrants and immigration" (p. 179) - the myth that Canada, despite not welcoming or affording opportunity to everyone, enabled impoverished immigrants to prosper. Similarly, Picower (2009) noticed White teachers she worked with constructing "a hegemonic story about how people of color should be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps," based on their interpretation of their own family stories. For example, a daughter of Italian immigrants described her parents as struggling but eventually succeeding in a meritocratic system she believed worked similarly for everyone.

These examples illustrate a merging of understandings of one's own family history with the national mythology. But, national mythologies are patterned reconstructions of the past; they are not the past itself (Halbwachs, 1992; Rovinello, 2013). Speaking to the interplay between family memory and public memory, Kuhn (1995) urges us to ask: Exactly what is being remembered, and, perhaps more importantly, what is being forgotten?

Family and National Mythology

Generally, nation-building projects involve constructing a national narrative based on myths of origin and identity, and building personal psychological identification with that narrative (Bouchard, 2013; Van Alphen & Carretero, 2015). As Anthias and Yu val- Davis (1992) put it, nationalist ideologies use "myths of'common origins' and perceptions of'common destiny' as the main building blocks of ideologies of national solidarity and 'common culture.'" (p. 58). In societies based on the violence of colonization, national mythologies involve massive forgetting and reconstruction of collective memory (Garretón, 2003; Renan, 1990; Waldman, 2012). In a discussion of African identity in relationship to colonialism, for example, Mazrui (2013) argues that collective memory of the past blends nostalgia, or "idealizing the past as our idea home," with amnesia, "a partial suppression of an unwanted past" (p. 14).

In the U.S., historical nostalgia linked with amnesia characterizes the dominant national mythology. That mythology greatly minimizes the violence of European and White American genocide against the indigenous population and enslavement of people of African descent, bracketing that violence off from the present and creating an imaginary distance between it and the White ancestors. The national mythology tells of immigrants arriving in an empty space and receiving the opportunity to pull themselves up through hard work. Homesteading enabled immigrants and other Whites to acquire "free land" that purportedly belonged to no one (Freund, 2013).

Jacobson (2006) argues that "White ethnic sensibilities" were grafted onto "the very question of European expansionism," enabling a shift from the "popular Pilgrim-and-FoundingFathers national legend to the more recent conception of 'nation of immigrants'" (p. 343). As a result, White Americans regard claims of genocide as "an affront to American exceptionalist narratives of being both a chosen and benign nation" (MacDonald, 2015, p. 412). But, as Toni Morrison put it,

We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is lean. The past is absent or it's romanticized. This culture doesn't encourage dwelling on, let alone with coming to terms with, the truth about the past. (Gilroy, 1995, p. 222)

Goldstein (2014) observed that in the U.S., "discussion of U.S. colonialism as a contemporary formation remains relatively infrequent outside of Native American studies and leftist or anarchist critique" (p. 12).

It is possible, however, to unearth silenced histories. For example, working with several descendants of the Greene plantation in Rhode Island, Frank and Ryzewski (2013) constructed a historical narrative that accounted for relationships between the New Englanders and the Native American inhabitants. Their research confirms "that plantations in Rhode Island were not merely household farms, but sites of enterprise and commerce in which English settlers ultimately set the terms and prices at the expense of Native Americans who were excluded from the English system" (p. 39).

I coined the term "critical family history" to challenge family historians to construct their histories in the context of social relationships forged through colonization, racism, and other relations of power (Sleeter, 2011; 2014). The critical theoretical traditions, including critical theory, critical race theory, and critical feminist theories, help probe specific kinds of historical contexts by posing specific kinds of questions.

Critical race theory, which theory emerged in the U.S. during the 1980s, examines systemic and customary ways in which racism works (Delgado, 1995). Critical race theorists assume that racism does not disappear, despite narratives of racial progress. A branch of critical race theory - TribalCrit theory - holds that colonization, related to but not reducible to racism, is "endemic to society" (Brayboy, 2005, p. 430). Colonization continues into the present through "European American thought, knowledge and power structures [that] dominate present-day society in the United States" (p. 430).

Critical race theory prompts at least two major kinds of questions. First, since families of both dominant and subordinate groups do not exist outside racial power systems, we should identify the location of our families within the racial or colonial structure, ask how that location shaped possibilities open to them, and ask what kind of relationships their own racial/ethnic communities had with others. Second, critical race theory in colonial societies examines how, through the commodification of land and people for profit, colonizers established the basis for their own identity to function like property, thereby cementing material advantages with dominant ethnic or racial identities. In the U.S., for example, according to Harris (1993), both slavery and seizure of Indian land "established and protected an interest in Whiteness itself, which shares the critical characteristics of property" (p. 1724). How did colonization and the commodification of land and people shape one's family's historical trajectory, and how have those relationships been manifest over time?

Situating a Question

I descend from European immigrants to the United States. I was born into a professional class family as a daughter of a father who was a physician and a mother who stayed home to raise four children. Although I grew up with few family stories, those I heard emphasized my ancestors' hard work. My mother, for example, periodically pointed out that her father made good with only a second-grade education by working as a house painter and eventually buying, renovating, and selling property.

When I was six, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother's parents came to our financial rescue: between them and my father's life insurance, we were able to keep our house, and my mother was able to continue to stay home to raise us. My grandparents enabled us not only to have home security, but also continued access to public schools attended by other middle and professional class children. Later my grandparents, whom I had never regarded as wealthy, helped put me and my siblings through college. My maternal grandfather's will divided his assets among his two daughters and four grandchildren; my share helped fund my graduate education. My maternal grandmother established a trust that gave my mother and her only sibling (my aunt) financial security for the rest of their lives. When my mother died, I inherited a share of the trust, which served as a down payment on my house, and when my aunt died, the additional share I inherited helped me pay off the mortgage on my house.

Until I delved into the research reported here, I had not thought much about the source of my grandparents' financial resources. I knew they had worked hard, although the grandmother who passed on the largest inheritance never held a job. Wondering where their financial resources came from, and particularly my grandmother's, led to questions I pursued while researching my family history, which I have been doing for over a decade (Sleeter, 2011; 2014).

As nearly as I have been able to determine, all of my ancestors emigrated to the U.S. from European countries at various times between the 1700s and the mid-1800s. My research process alternated iteratively between seeking family tree data (i.e., data about individual ancestors and family units), and seeking social context data (for example, data regarding other socio-cultural groups whose histories intersected with those of my ancestors). The question I explore below emerged while examining land records and wills of my ancestors. I gathered data regarding land acquisition mainly from deeds in county courthouses (in Jonesboro, Tennessee and Madisonville, Tennessee), property sales reported in digitized newspapers (in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and Decatur, Illinois), and other land records available on Ancestry.com. I gathered data on land values, where I could, from deeds, digitized newspaper articles, and Census data. I located original wills, wills on microfiche, and transcribed wills mainly in county courthouses in Tennessee.

A pattern I began to notice was that several ancestors, in different states and at different times, acquired land from the U.S. government or a state government, rather than from a specific person. I gradually realized these ancestors, knowingly or not, directly profited from U.S. policies that took land from the Indigenous peoples. While the wealth my ancestors built from that land involved work and other investments, it was land theft that made that wealth possible. Table 1 specifies (1) from which governmental entity the land was acquired, (2) the county and state in which it was located, (3) when my ancestor(s) acquired the land, (4) who acquired it (using initials rather than names), (5) how many acres were acquired, and (6) the Indigenous tribe or nation that had lost that land.

In what follows, I trace the violent transfer of land from Native American to White hands, and its eventual impact on me. I do this to explore the larger question of how colonization constructed oppressive power relations historically, how that history still implicates us, and how critical family history can change the national narrative.

Dispossessing Indigenous Nations, Transferring Land to Whites

My maternal grandmother's parents were from the Appalachian Mountains; growing up, I had assumed them to be relatively poor. A perusal of Table 1, however, suggests they were not, since most people on that table were her ancestors. Here, I will trace the legacy of wealth I inherited from the G.C.H./S.McC.3 family, and the W.McC. family, both of which acquired what had been Cherokee land in Tennessee; and their daughter and son respectively (my grandmother's parents) who acquired what had been Ute land in Colorado.

Writing about the process of seizure and sale of Indigenous peoples' land in Tennessee, Phelan (1888) summarized a pattern that repeated across what became the United States, a story that is ignored in the popular national mythology:

The general groundwork was the same in all cases. Indian lands were taken possession of and then improved. The Indians entered into hostilities, and were eventually defeated and compelled to sue for peace. Treaties were made and increased territory given to the whites, and new boundary lines were established, which were again overstepped. Act after act was passed to legalize usurpations, and all the worst features of civilization were brought into play to win a field for the foundation of a government, (p. 51)

While researching my ancestors in relationship to land acquisition, I found this pattern striking. Initially, hunters and trappers came and began to trade with local Indigenous peoples; settlers (usually armed) who claimed land for themselves came next. In the case of the Cherokee Nation, whose land encompassed what is now the Southeastern U.S., this process began in 1732 when General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the British Georgia colony, commissioned a ranger force to defend colonial settlers from the Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples. During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the British razed and burned 15 Cherokee towns, leaving countless Cherokee dead and 5,000 homeless (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). To escape war and increasing White incursion, by the latter part of the 1700s, most Cherokee who had lived in what is now southeastern Tennessee had moved farther south. The town of Echota in Monroe County, Tennessee, near where my ancestors came in the 1800s, was the capital of the Cherokee Nation until 1788, when the Cherokee relocated their capital to Georgia (Schroedle, 1998). The British, then the U.S. government repeatedly pressed the Cherokee to cede land. Treaties established boundaries between tribal land and British colonies, then U.S. states But White settlers, in growing numbers, continued to trespass boundaries, setting up permanent establishments on tribal land, and expecting U.S. military protection from the land's Indigenous inhabitants.

The Utes had lived for hundreds of years throughout what is now Colorado, southern Wyoming, northern New Mexico, and much of Utah. The band closest to Steamboat Springs, where my ancestors went, hunted, and gathered along the Yampa River and considered the hot springs sacred. Beginning in the late 1500s, Utes had contact with the Spanish from whom they obtained horses. French and English trappers arrived during the 1700s. In 1858, gold seekers began to arrive in the Denver area, and three years later, the U.S. government made Colorado a territory, disregarding the Utes as a sovereign nation. The Utes' usual way of dealing with outsiders was peaceful co-existence, as long as the outsiders did not try to take away their land. But in 1868, spurred by Whites moving west following the Civil War, and following from years of conflicts and tensions, the U.S. government forcefully pressured the Utes to cede two-thirds of what became Colorado (Simmons, 2000).

As tribes tried to protect their land from White encroachment, the British, then the U.S. government, sent in the military to protect White families, even when they had trespassed negotiated boundaries. The Cherokee, more than any other Indigenous nation, anticipated White Americans' definitions of what it meant to be "civilized" as a way to protect themselves from conquest. During the 1820s, the Cherokee codified their language into an alphabet that the entire population quickly learned to read with the help of a Cherokee-run printing press. They also established numerous businesses, such as blacksmith shops, cotton machines, schools, and several public roads and ferries (Yates, 1995). In 1819, White people founded Monroe and McMinn counties of Tennessee on land the Cherokee had ceded, with a provision in the treaty that Cherokee families living there would be able to stay. These two counties continued to border the Cherokee Nation for about 10 years. Around 1827, my ancestors arrived in Monroe County. My ancestor G.C.H. boughtl60 acres from the state of Tennessee in that year, and a year later, W.McC. bought 67 acres from a trader who had apparently purchased the land from the Cherokee Nation.

Indigenous peoples' attempts to protect their lands from growing incursions of Whites were always met with conflict, ramped up U.S. military pressure, and re-written treaties in which the U.S. government forced the tribes to cede it more land. Usually a "last straw" incident, such as a massacre or discovery of gold on tribal land, precipitated the U.S. military expelling the remaining tribal members. In 1829, with discovery of gold on Cherokee land in Georgia, the state attempted to expel them. President Andrew Jackson pushed through Congress the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that gave him power to negotiate removal treaties with Indians east of the Mississippi. In 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee as a sovereign nation. However, in 1836, U.S. officials negotiated with a small minority of Cherokee that the whole nation would move west. Although the Cherokee National Council did not approve the treaty, the U.S. Senate did, and in 1838, the U.S. military invaded the Cherokee Nation, expelling about 18,000 Cherokees to Oklahoma on the "Trail of Tears." Some Cherokee were able to flee into hiding in the mountains; their descendants today are the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina.

The Utes experienced much the same process of expulsion; the Homestead Act of 1862 accelerated that process. That act allowed a settler to exchange five years of living on public land for 160 patented acres for a family, or 40 acres for a single person, paying only the cost of the patent and surveying. (According to Williams [2000], while theoretically any citizen could purchase land, few African Americans were able to buy land; the vast bulk of it went to Whites). In 1876, the U.S. admitted Colorado as a state. In the Yampa River area near what became Steamboat Springs, White families began to build homes. The more White people arrived, plowing up land for farms, building ranges for cattle grazing, and hunting animals, the more difficult it was for the Utes to survive. White River Indian Agent Nathan Meeker taunted and browbeat the Utes until a group of them finally retaliated, ambushing the agency in 1879 and killing eleven White people. Newspapers quickly published articles urging that, "The Utes must go," viewing the massacre as evidence that the army and agent system could not control them. In 1880, the Colorado State legislature overwhelmingly passed resolution a demanding expulsion of Utes; many Whites wanted simply to exterminate them. By 1881, the U.S. government had deported the Utes from Colorado to a reservation in Utah on very arid land Whites did not want. In 1881, my great-grandfather O.McC. left Tennessee for Colorado with a party of other young men, in search of gold. He did not find gold, but he homesteaded a year later west of Steamboat Springs on what had been Ute land until just two years previously (Crawford, 2015).

Building White Wealth on Stolen Land

My Tennessee ancestor G.C.H. was a speculator who regarded land as a commodity for wealth accumulation; the 160 acres he bought from the state of Tennessee in 1827 was only part of his portfolio. Deeds records in Monroe County show a pattern of him buying and selling land continuously. By 1860, the census listed the family's wealth (real estate + other property) as $30,000 ($719,152 in 2010 dollars). Between the 1830s and the Emancipation Proclamation, he also owned between 3 and 6 slaves.

G.C.H. and his first wife had 14 children. One of their eldest, B.J.H. from whom I descend, went to Arkansas where he obtained land for a small plantation worked by six or seven slaves. (I cannot tell whether he bought the land, or took possession of it on the death of its owner, whose estate he administered, and whose widow he married.) When B.J.H. and his wife's three children were still small, he died from injuries sustained in a duel (Arkansas Ties, 1846), leaving considerable debt (Reed and wife, et al, 1861). The three children (one of whom, D.E.H., was my great-great grandfather) went to Tennessee to live with their grandfather, G.C.H. and his second wife. When G.C.H. died, his will divided his estate equally among his children and the offspring of his deceased children. On the basis of a wealthy grandparent having raised him, then inheriting a portion of that grandparent's estate, D.E.H. was able to complete his education, buy a small farm, and later become Monroe County Clerk. One of his daughters was my greatgrandmother, who married a descendant of W.McC.

W.McC. was a neighbor of G.C.H., and like him, bought and sold land to expand his wealth, although not as aggressively as G.C.H., and without slaves. By 1860, the census listed W.McC. family wealth (real estate + other property) as $9,000 ($275,746 in 2010 dollars). The will of W.McC. directed that his wife and children each be given $700 ($16,766 in 2010 dollars) plus an equal share of his estate after other bequests had been made.

One of his sons was my great-great grandfather J.H.McC. In 1860, W.McC. deeded 132 acres to this son for the equivalent of about $40,000 (2010 dollars). At some point, my greatgreat grandfather built a two-story brick house (still standing) on the farm. One of his sons, my great-grandfather O.McC., married D.E.H.'s daughter, C.F.H.

In 1881, O.McC. left Tennessee for Colorado with a party of other young men, in search of gold. He did not find gold, but he homesteaded a year later west of Steamboat Springs. Returning to Tennessee in 1884, he married C.F.H. and took her back to Colorado with him. The couple and their children (one of whom was my grandmother) moved into Steamboat Springs in 1892, where, over the next seven years, O.McC. worked various jobs and managed to buy at least twenty-one city lots, presumably with proceeds from the sale of land he had acquired as a homestead. The family relocated to California in 1899, where O.McC. continued to drift from job to job. In 1912, he transferred the title of several Steamboat Springs lots into C.F.H.'s name, for reasons I do not know. In 1919, he arranged the same transfer of three more lots, which C.F.H. immediately sold. Shortly after that, he abandoned the family and moved to southern California, eventually ending up in prison. Great-grandmother C.F.H., who was renting a house in San Francisco, managed to accumulate money over the rest of her life. Most likely part of it came from sale of Steamboat Springs property and part from her parents. Although neither parent left a will I have been able to locate, I suspect they transferred financial assets to her while they were still alive when it became apparent her husband was an unreliable source of family support.

The eldest daughter of O.McC. and C.F.H. was my maternal grandmother. Both she and my grandfather invested in property (as well as the stock market) in the San Francisco Bay area. Since my grandmother did not hold a job outside the home, I can only surmise the money she had available to invest came from her mother. These were the grandparents who helped my family when my father died, put me through college, and established trusts that supported my mother and later helped me.

Discussion

As Kuhn (1995) explains, "the past is unavoidably re-written, revised, through memory (p. 155). The memories I grew up with minimized the existence of family wealth, linked what we had with hard work of my grandparents, and placed our family narrative within the dominant rags-to-riches mythology of Horatio Alger. Critical family history challenges family historians to situate the family within larger socio-cultural and power relationships in order to look below transmitted family stories, and to tease out the impact of larger socio-cultural relationships on the family over generations. One can also re-read the nation's history through the story that emerges from such an investigation. Frank and Ryzewski's (2013) narrative of a plantation in Providence, Rhode Island, does exactly that.

In my case, having discovered through land records a pattern of my ancestors acquiring land directly from the federal or state government, I wanted to examine relationships between my White ancestors and the Indigenous peoples whose land it had been. Using a combination of family history research tools and historical scholarship, I traced the violent transfer of land from Indigenous to White hands, and its eventual impact on me.

The larger story my research uncovered is one of White Americans amassing wealth at the direct expense of Indigenous peoples, then reframing historical memory in terms of hard work, omitting the history of violent theft. White North Americans generally see conquest as having happened in the distant past, "tragic" in its treatment of Indigenous peoples, but not personally relevant today (Norquay, 1998; Solomon, Portelli, Daniel, & Campbell, 2005). Yet, the wealth disparities remain. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2012), in 2007 the median wealth of White non-Hispanic families was $170,400, while that of non-White families was only $27,800 - less than one-sixth that of White families. I could not locate data on American Indian household wealth, but I could do so on household income and poverty. In 2013, while the median household income of American Indian families was $36,252, for the nation as a whole it was $52,176. While 29.2% of American Indians lived in poverty, this was true of 15.9% of the nation as a whole; American Indians have the highest poverty rate of any racial/ethnic group (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014).

There are historical reasons for these disparities. White people constructed a system that enabled land and other forms of wealth to flow into, then remain in, White hands. At its inception, this system rested on very different views about land itself. According to Churchill (1993), Indigenous peoples have traditionally regarded the land as part of the sacred natural order, whose health is "an absolute requirement for their continued existence" (p. 17). Humans live in relationship to other elements of nature; humans "own" none of these. In contrast, Europeans, especially in the context of capitalism, came to define land not as sacred, but as private real estate people could buy and sell for profit. European American founders who brought this conception of land were largely English patricians, many of whom owned slaves to work large plantations. Small-scale settlers (like O.McC.), who obtained homesteads to use for their own wealth creation, followed (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Over time, various laws related to property and transfer of wealth disproportionately kept land and profits in White hands (Hodge, Dawkins & Reeves, 2007; Shammas, Salmon & Dahlin, 1997).

White people's institutionalized desire to gain wealth and keep it in the family over generations (which my family history research illuminated), and Indigenous peoples' continued marginalization and poverty, reflect ongoing colonial relationships. Similarly, White historical narratives that minimize genocide and land theft, and that distance White ancestors from violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples enable White people to claim moral innocence and to view White wealth as legitimately accumulated.

Conclusion

Family historical research is increasingly popular and accessible. Most family historians wish primarily to document their individual families rather than critique dominant national narratives. This focus on the decontextualized family appears to be particularly prominent among White family historians (Gardner, 2003; Parham, 2008). Yet, the combination of nostalgia and amnesia reproduces a national mythology about immigrants arriving to an empty space, and having the opportunity to pull themselves up through hard work. In the process, that mythology perpetuates ongoing relationships of racism and colonialism (Brayboy, 2005).

Critical family history prompts us to probe beneath national narratives by situating the family within larger contexts that identify other co-existing socio-cultural groups and probing power relationships across groups. I this article, I have shown how documentation of property (through deeds records, digitized newspapers, and wills), analyzed in conjunction with the question of whose land it had been earlier, led to an acknowledgement of the implication of my own family in the colonization of Indigenous peoples. Specifically, by focusing on my ancestors' property acquisitions, I was able to document a considerable transfer of Indigenous lands to them from the late 1600s to the mid-1800s, then eventually to me. While this may not be the story most family historians wish to construct, it represents a significant "upending" of a problematic dominant national narrative, and recognition of a different narrative that can begin the process of reconciliation between "settlers" and colonized peoples (Regan, 2010).

Sidebar

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss how critical family history differs from the way most people approach genealogy.

2. How do family stories typically incorporate national mythologies, such as those that minimize ongoing impacts of colonization?

3. How might you apply critical family history to studying your own family history?

To Cite this Article

Sleeter, C. E. (2016, Spring). Critical family history: Situating family within contexts of power relationships. Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 8(1), 11-23.

Footnote

3 I chose to use initials rather than names in order to protect family privacy, especially as I trace ancestors forward.

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