Genohistory

Genealogist and historian (and now Genohistorian), Donna Cox Baker has recently begun a new website Genohistory On Purpose - Understanding Our People in Their Own Time and Place. The website has a page for Genohistory On Purpose blog posts which, as it populates, will make for interesting reading.

As, Donna explains in her first post of her Genohistory series - Genohistory: The Middle Ground on Purpose (10 May 2020), Genohistory is a concept she created to bring together her interests in Genealogy and History.  As she puts it in her post, "I don't want to move back and forth between them. I want to cultivate the spot where they intersect" .  She sees Genohistory as being "the cross-disciplinary study of an interconnected group of people, often a family, within the context of its own time and place".

Read more about Donna and Genohistory on her website:
https://genohistorian.com/

My Thoughts on Genohistory

This concept of Genohistory really interests me.  For me this interest comes not so much from an interest in history per se but more from a combined interest in genealogy and a curiosity about people, what they do and why they do what they do, in light of the environment in which they are living.

My first university degree was in the social sciences majoring in social anthropology.  Social anthropology is very much about understanding people and their family, social, and cultural interactions within their own context (time, place, social, religious, cultural environment ...).

It is a lens I try to understand my ancestors through in the context of my own genealogical research.  Understanding the context of our forebears requires, to some extent or another, an understanding of the times in which they lived (history).  This seems to me to be very much a Genohistory lens.

I have started to write up some ancestor narratives with varying degrees of success.  Generally speaking, while I have a sense of the times they were living in, I haven't explored the historical context in depth.  Perhaps, the closest I have come so far is my post Loyalist - Rebel - Justice of the Peace: Richard Lang (1744-1816). This started as more of a stocktake of evidence and ended up with me learning quite a lot about life in Spanish East Florida and the 1795 Rebellion in which Richard took part.  However, there is more context that perhaps could have been found, particularly in relation to the American Revolutionary War and Richard's place within it as a Loyalist. This would, however, have taken a lot more research.

Similarly, in my post Transported to New South Wales Australia 1832 - James Kirk (1794-1877)  more could be added about the historical context of England and Australia at the time James was arrested, convicted and transported. For example, the economic, social and political conditions that contributed to crime and resulted in transportation to the colonies; sometimes for a crime that, today, would be considered a relatively minor offence.

Capturing a person's life beyond mere birth, marriage and death dates and places to better understand what they did during their lives, their interactions with others etc. is important.  It is also important to do that with a sense of historical context.  While I generally have a sense of what the historical context of my ancestors and their families is, enriching that story with more detailed context of their broader environment (the history and influences of the time) to deepen an understanding of them in the context of their own time, place, environment etc., is far more challenging.

With so many relatives to write about, there is always a tension between focusing too long on one at the expense of others. Both in depth historical research and genealogical research take time.  It seems to me that finding the spot where they intersect, and discovering just what that looks like, is an important thing to do.

Donna Cox Baker has certainly given me something to think about and I look forward to her future posts in her Genohistory on Purpose Blog space .