"[T]he Web may serve its most significant role in providing a gateway to local and geographically isolated historical collections, many of which may not be in institutional hands at all and hence difficult to access and largely unprotected."

Genealogy and History
Sheila O'Hare

Part I | II | III | IV

History, Genealogy, and the Web

Social history's influence is readily apparent in the new Web versions of traditional print titles. American National Biography (ANB), a print and online successor to the print-only Dictionary of American Biography (DAB, last supplemented in 1985), takes particular notice of the shift to social history and its sources in its Website preface:

[W]hile the value of a national biographical reference work has endured, the character of such an undertaking has changed considerably since the DAB was published . . . Virtually all aspects of the past are now seen from a different perspective. Today, historians do not regard the slave-plantation South with nostalgia or dismiss women's participation in politics as quaint or deride the doctrinal views of small religious sects or deny the cultural importance of dolls or pop music. Nor do most historians assume a proprietary omniscience in regard to their subjects or believe that History is merely a collection of facts. Nearly all acknowledge that History consists of many different stories and interpretations.

And, of course, many of these stories have made their way to the Internet. Both genealogists and historians have brought a wealth of primary source data to the Web. In fact, the Web may serve its most significant role in providing a gateway to local and geographically isolated historical collections, many of which may not be in institutional hands at all and hence difficult to access and largely unprotected. As Patterson Toby Graham points out in a recent article in the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, few researchers, relative to the number who visit it electronically, will visit his institution's archives on race relations in Hattiesburg, Mississippi (the University of Southern Mississippi's Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive. "Fifteen to thirty researchers visit the Special Collections reading room each day, a few hundred a month. In the same month, however, there are easily eight thousand hits on just one of the Special Collections Department's three Web sites. That tells me that my job and my audience are changing."

So what kinds of issues still remain for historians and genealogists? Roy Rosenzweig has examined the state of American history on the Web in two articles for the Journal of American History (1997 and 2001). In the 1997 article, Rosenzweig and co-author Michael O'Malley depicted the dichotomy posed by the Web's failure to "privilege" certain sources: conservative critics (including Himmelfarb) viewing "Web" and "scholarship" as a contradiction in terms, and "techno-enthusiasts" embracing the possibilities of a hierarchy-free democratized information forum. While noting the possibilities and limitations for American history in the realm of the Web, the authors were nonetheless "impressed--even astonished--by what already exists there for historians."

Four years later, Rosenzweig again referred to the proliferation of primary and secondary sources on the Internet, including grassroots projects by academics, teachers, Civil War enthusiasts, and, yes, genealogists. While he acknowledged that the amateur sites might perpetuate debunked theories or editing and transcription errors, his overall view of the "free and public" character of history on the Web was markedly positive. However, his approbation was tempered by the potential for the loss of this free and public character as more and more of the richest historical material was being co-opted by the "Private History Web": high-priced library-based subscriptions and/or advertising-based commercial sites. Rosenzweig concluded with a call to action: "we [historians] need to put our energies into maintaining and enlarging the astonishingly rich public historical web that has emerged in the last five years . . . Academics and enthusiasts created the Web; we should not quickly or quietly cede it to giant corporations."

The Web-related issues facing genealogists and historians are both procedural (access-driven) and methodological. From a procedural standpoint, there is a good deal of uniformity--both groups want free public access to as wide a range of hard-to-obtain primary documents as possible. The methodological issue is a thornier one in theory, but the Websites in practice illustrate a growing uniformity of purpose and presentation--and possibilities for developing a true "public history" with roles for genealogist and historian alike.