"Genealogists, because of their strong volunteer ethos, were among the first Internet users to make public data available free of charge on the Web."

Genealogy and History
Sheila O'Hare

Part I | II | III | IV

The Websites: Joint Projects, Data Archives, and Paid Subscriptions

Some of the best historical sites on the Web are the result of the direct collaboration of professional historians and local historical organizations (a traditional bastion of genealogy). The Ohio, New York, and Eastern Washington State Historical Societies, for example, are contributors to The American Memory project from the Library of Congress and its over one hundred thematic historical collections. Other sites like Historic Pittsburgh are university-historical society joint projects. Still others make extensive use of sources collected or compiled by local historians. What these sites acknowledge, openly or tacitly, is that the primary sources they present will be used for multiple purposes by historians and nonhistorians (particularly teachers and students). As a result, these Websites minimize the role of scholarly interpretation, choosing in some cases to present an assortment of documents--an evidence file or dossier, so to speak--to encourage the user to follow his own path through the material. The result is somewhat analogous to documentary films that eschew the "voice-of-God" narration," and it presents some of the same issues and opportunities (see Jay Ruby's article in Visual Anthropology Review). Three highly acclaimed Websites in the academic or professional history category illustrate the history-as-dossier model--the phrase is a useful oversimplification--to different degrees.

Do History ("[a] site that shows you how to piece together the past from the fragments that have survived") is an interactive case study based on eighteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard's diary and the research that went into Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990) and the film based upon it. The site was developed by Harvard University's Film Study Center, with an advisory board of historians. According to the site's authors, "Although Do History is centered on the life of Martha Ballard, you can learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in History. We hope that many people will be inspired by Martha Ballard's story to do original research on other 'ordinary' people from the past." In keeping with this philosophy, the site includes a how-to section on transcription and a "History Toolkit" of research tips and forms--familiar items on genealogy pages, but something rarely seen on a history site. All of Ballard's diary entries are included on the site, both in transcribed and image file formats; the reader has the choice of browsing the journal or of selecting one of a number of stories and themes to follow. (Ballard's daily diary entries were brief and mundane enough for previous historians to dismiss them as inconsequential, but as Ulrich noted, "the trivia that so annoyed earlier readers provide a consistent, daily record of the operation of a female-managed economy.")

The award-winning Dramas of Haymarket, created by the Chicago Historical Society and the trustees of Northwestern University, has been recognized for its accessibility, excellent content, well-written text and engaging arrangement. Moreover, the Haymarket site actually serves a twofold purpose. The Dramas of Haymarket is linked with The Haymarket Digital Collection, a collection of key documents and artifacts. The Dramas of Haymarket presents primary sources, but they are accompanied by an interpretive text designed to explain the sources from the viewpoint of scholarship. The Digital Collection, on the other hand, explicitly disavows an interpretive purpose: "The digital collection presents images of key documents and artifacts in their historical context with a minimum of interpretive information. Much like the witness testimony and exhibits introduced during the Haymarket trial, these primary sources are pieces of evidence which enable the user to reconstruct and interpret the historical events to which they relate." The documents are posted as transcribed and as image files, allowing the reader to assess the accuracy of the transcription.

Lastly, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, co-authored by Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, is an "invented archive" or cross-repository collection drawn together specifically to create an online resource. Valley of the Shadow takes two communities, one Northern and one Southern, through the American Civil War via an archive of sources: newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. As the site's introductory text states, "Students can explore every dimension of the conflict and write their own histories, reconstructing the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families." The prize-winning site was the focus of a New York Times article entitled "An Historian presents the Civil War, Online and Unfiltered by Historians" (June 29, 2000), and it is designed to operate as a do-it-yourself history kit, allowing users to track ordinary individuals from diary entries to newspaper articles to census records, without the mediation or structure imposed by an historian. The process encourages amateur research, and it creates the same sense of uneasiness in academicians (per Gary J. Kornblith's review of the site in the Journal of American History): "in practice there is a thin line between destabilizing received narratives and promoting a nihilistic view that the historical record is so fragmented and complex that it makes no sense at all."

Thus the method of presentation of primary source material on the Web gives rise to some of the old history-genealogy issues. Should the historian's role as scholarly interpreter be altered to take advantage of the Web's possibilities for hands-on, user-driven research? If the Web is best suited to serve as an historical archive, should the historian's role be that of the less obtrusive presenter or facilitator instead?

Indeed, the characterization of Websites as "genealogist-sponsored" or "historian-sponsored" falls apart entirely when the user encounters some collaborative sites. One such example is The Canadian Letters & Images Project. Canadian Letters, run under the auspices of the history department at Malaspina University College, is an online archive of the wartime experiences of "ordinary" Canadians. On the site's "About the Project" page, the authors (who appear to be members of the history faculty) note that "[w]e do not edit correspondence or select portions of collections, but include if at all possible all materials submitted to us.  Our place is not to judge the historic merit of one person's experiences over those of another; we instead let those voices and images from the past tell their own story . . . We believe it is important to collect and recreate the personal side of the wartime experience as soon as possible, before such materials are forever lost or destroyed." Thus the site includes both pages on "How to Contribute" to the site and "Saving Family Heirlooms," a set of links to preservation and conservation tips.

Though less explicitly, other digital historical collections partner with individuals as well as institutions (one example is the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections). Other sites are less openly enthusiastic about outside contributions; as stated on its FAQ Web page, the Library of Congress's National Digital Library Program does not solicit scanned material from individuals, though potential donors are referred to the library's acquisitions department.

On the genealogy side, the trend is in the other direction: from the stand-alone family tree to the rest of the world. Genealogy Websites have also created cross-repository collections of difficult-to-obtain primary sources: census data, manuscript census images, pension records, out-of-print biographical and local history material, and source materials in private hands, via images or transcriptions. These sources have always provided important corroborating evidence of historical accuracy, and this role continues in the electronic environment. Mary Beth Norton provided a good recent example (1998) in her study of a fraudulent seventeenth-century diary purportedly authored by "Hetty Shepard" in 1675-77. As Norton notes, "[I]n the last few years, excerpts from three nineteenth-century fakes have been reprinted as genuine, even though two of them already have been exposed as fraudulent." Genealogical sources either contradicted or failed to confirm the Shepard account (which also contains multiple anachronisms). Norton concludes that reputable scholars placing credence in the Shepard diary have been misled by bibliographic guides to published women's writings, which tend to be picked up, errors and all, by later compilers. Norton's point is well made: currently, Shepard's diary is reproduced in the academic database North American Women's Letters and Diaries (offered by Accessible Archives/Alexander Street Press), with absolutely no mention of its questionable authenticity.

So what do genealogy Websites offer? Genealogists, because of their strong volunteer ethos, were among the first Internet users to make public data available free of charge on the Web. One example is the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), a searchable database of over fifty million records created from SSA payment records, provided free of charge by two genealogy Websites, Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. The database contains names, social security numbers, dates of birth, dates of death, and last residences when available; in late 2001, the database included information through the end of September of that year. The SSDI has also been available via the Web in the 1990s on various private investigative or public records sites, but only on a paid subscription basis; the genealogy sites have long been the only free online source for the database.

FamilySearch.org, authored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (AKA the Mormon Church), is an especially valuable tool for biographers and historians as well as genealogists. It provides free access to the church-compiled International Genealogical Index (IGI), an index by surname of births, baptisms and marriages from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. The online version includes source information (batch and serial sheet number for microfilm or fiche) for most records, thus providing a means of verification. (The site also makes available two other databases, Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File, which display lineage-linked records with submitter information when available.) The Mormon Church has made other historical data available via CD-ROM, including records from the post-Civil War era Freedman's Bank. The records include detailed biographical information about the account holder, including names of family members, the birthplace of parents, military history, employment, the names of plantations and former slave owners, and, in some cases, even brief oral histories. The records represent 484,083 people from three to four generations of African Americans. The church obviously recognized that interest in the product extended beyond the genealogy community, and in fact the low-priced CD is widely held by academic libraries.

The USGenWeb Project is a volunteer-run, noncommercial operation designed to provide Websites for genealogical research for every county of every state of the United States. The GenWeb state and county sites vary in quality, but most contain transcribed records and documents, scanned out-of-print books, digital maps, and photographic archives. They are often good sources for information about industries, occupations, or activity patterns. The project also includes a national-level Archives Project, which was developed to present transcriptions of public domain records on the Internet; the Website states that file submitters (all volunteers) encompass genealogical societies, departments of the United States government, and local and county offices, as well as individuals.

Even as some genealogy sites build free online archives, the "Private Web" noted by Rosenzweig in the history context is part of the genealogy realm as well. Ancestry.com is a commercial site owned by MyFamily.com, Inc. Ancestry.com delivers an impressive amount of information, but access to most of it requires a paid subscription ($69.95 per year without census images, $99.90 with census images, and $129.95 with census images and the UK/Ireland collection). These charges are admittedly small when compared to the several-thousand-dollar price tag for a comparable academic database; nonetheless, the genealogy community has been somewhat nonplussed by MyFamily.com, Inc.'s unabashed commercialism. In a controversial move, MyFamily.com acquired the RootsWeb site, one of the earliest and most extensive of the Web's free genealogy sites; the RootsWeb data was incorporated into the Ancestry.com collection--to the horror of some of the genealogists who had researched and assembled the information at their own expense and were now unwitting contributors to a paid-subscription database.

A subscription to Ancestry.com includes access to many bibliographic sources held by academic libraries in CD-ROM format: most notably, the Periodicals Source Index (PERSI), a comprehensive subject index to genealogy and local history periodical articles since 1800; the Genealogical Library Master Catalog (GLMC), a sort of WorldCat equivalent for genealogists, with bibliographic references to over two hundred thousand family histories, genealogies, town and county histories; and the Biography & Genealogy Master Index (BGMI), a Gale Research Company product, which indexes numerous collective biographical sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including the ubiquitous Who's Who series. The Website's Census Collection includes complete image files for the 1790 through 1920 manuscript federal censuses, viewable county by county, accompanied by searchable indexes of the heads of household (a project still in progress). Two other databases, Newspaper Obituaries, provided by Bell and Howell, and the Civil War Research Database, compiled by Historic Data Systems, are also excellent resources for historian and genealogist alike.

Today Genealogy sites are filled with bibliographic, public record, and private material; they are no longer solely family-tree driven. In fact, one of the foundations of traditional genealogy, the Genealogical Date Communication (GEDCOM) used in lineage-linked databases, may be on its way out (see an article in Genealogical Computing, an Ancestry.com publication, entitled "Is GEDCOM Dead?"). The reason for GEDCOM's rumored demise? Many genealogists want to use image, audio, and video files in the Web environment, and GEDCOM's name/date/place tags are simply too limited.