That is how I’ve always viewed my role. I find the truth, digitize it, categorize it, label it, file it, share it, and make sure my digital filing cabinet of stuff is accessible to anyone and everyone who comes behind me. It’s a mundane process that most people don’t find entertaining, so they assume by extension that it must be unimportant.
Then the compromised, corrupt, and conceited tour-du-force that is Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million votes. Everything in our world changed, including our relationship with the truth—about science, math, ethics, and eventually history itself.
Every time our perceptions of basic truth become pawns in a game that politicians try to play, genealogists and family historians take on a role we’re not accustomed to having. We’re accustomed to preserving the truth from influences like time and apathy from disinterested family members. But in times like this, I would argue that we have additional challenges of protecting history from revisionism and misinformation. Once those forces taint the narratives and memories we’ve accumulated as a society, it won’t matter what artifacts we’ve managed to preserve. If we can’t agree on the narratives those artifacts represent, what we’ve collected will have lost all meaning and connection to reality.
This corrosion of fact is as destructive as any mold, water damage, or any amount of acid our collections could experience. That’s what I want to discuss today.
Confronting Revisionism
Revisionism takes a lot of different forms, but the purpose is always the same: establishing and maintaining social dominance through historical manipulation. By omitting some facts and greatly exaggerating others, it becomes possible to use history as a political weapon.
The first casualty of this indoctrination and radicalization process is oral history. Trying to have conversations with relatives about the past becomes difficult, if not impossible—especially when the past touches on highly politicized subjects like immigration, slavery and race, or the treatment of marginalized groups in communities. Sources of family shame are the first items to be concealed or distorted.
How do we deal with oral history that may be inaccurate, especially through the lens of the current political climate? The same way we always have: treating nothing we’re told like it’s too sacred to challenge or examine critically. Finding sources for each and every claim and clearly documenting which ones can be substantiated (with sources listed) and which ones can’t. While this job isn’t always easy, it’s a simple one that hasn’t changed very much. It relies on all the same tools and techniques we’ve been using already.
There’s another kind of revisionism, however, that traditional genealogy hasn’t prepared many of us for: the moment when our very existence gets edited out of our family’s lives. It’s an act that is on the rise and will have long-standing consequences for family historians, even once the threat of COVID-19 ends and Donald Trump’s populism fades into obscurity. There are DNA tests that will never be taken now because relatives passed away from COVID-19, research trips that won’t be taken even when it’s safe to travel, and phone calls and emails that will never be answered because contacts are blocked now in people’s phones from irreconcilable differences due to politics.
What do we do, as family historians, about that kind of revisionism?
Documenting the Current Moment
I don’t have a magical solution to fix these kinds of divisions in anyone else’s family, any more than I can fix the ones that have emerged in mine. I won’t pretend to have those answers, like there’s any sort of bulleted list that can put us back on solid ground.
My only suggestion is to recenter the focus on what we can achieve in whatever situation we’ve found ourselves in. If we can’t get information about the past from our relatives anymore, it’s worth focusing on the present and what we can do for the historical record of the current moment instead.
Document the interactions you’re having with the relatives in your lives. Write down what they say. Record their political affiliations, individuals they support, and viewpoints that they hold. If they’ve severed ties with family members, make a record of the date for posterity and the reasoning they gave.
The choices people are making in who/what to prioritize during COVID-19 is all part of a larger story that transcends individuals at this point. Being true to that is part of the commitment we’ve made as family historians to document the truth. It’s not our jobs to make anyone or anything look better than they were in this moment. How people act is how they deserve to be remembered.
When Politeness Becomes Revisionism
Social media and virtual interactions have become invaluable now that social distancing is a normal part of life. They will be for the foreseeable future. Name any hobby or activity with which you can engage others on the internet, and the same standard rules apply. Somewhere between “Don’t be a jerk” and “no hate speech” is usually “no talking about religion, politics, or current events.”
Now, I expect that kind of rule from my knitting groups, the folks I trade recipes with, and the subreddits where I look at adorable cat videos. I abide by those rules, even when I disagree with them, because I understand that politics and religion are often irrelevant to what those communities are trying to accomplish. In the eyes of some online community leaders, the cost of potential conflict outweighs any potential gains from allowing those topics of discussion. I can understand that.
I’ll be honest though… that attitude feels deeply flawed and out of place in genealogy or family history communities of any kind. The truth is too central to what we do not to talk openly about the individuals, groups, and forces in our society poisoning that well.
The thing making our political climate so toxic is the sheer number of inaccuracies, lies, and misinformation we’re all being expected to metabolize and accept as normal every single day. That climate of deception can greatly diminish our ability to do our jobs properly, to say nothing of correcting revisionism and holding each other accountable.
How can we create communities of genealogical researchers worth belonging to if we can’t talk to each other about the truth of what is happening to us? Who benefits when we all agree to remain silent to preserve a misleadingly peaceful coexistence with hostile parties who are overwhelmingly responsible for why we have to live this way?
I expect that thin veneer of polite denial of *gestures widely* all of this from groups dedicated to succulent care, Animal Crossing, and fountain pens. Not family historians. Not the one group of people, more than any other in society, who is on the front lines of deciding who gets to be remembered and what will be forgotten.