I had this feedback recently in response to one of my posts about my ‘plantation ownering ancestors’ from some called Mike Naismith:
He is a uneducated person popping off at the the mouth with out doing proper research!!! Should not put unverified history to print unless you are 100 percent otherwise u may cause irreparable harm to…
As someone who has spent some of their career in academia, I think I could hold my own discussing both the ontological and epistemological connundrums of research methods in the arts, humanities and social sciences with Mike. And for that matter, that despite its growing professionalisation, how I am not sure that genealogy is yet recognised as an academic discipline for the most part.
If and when that does happen more univerally, I hazard a guess it would most likely be seen to be part of the arts and humanities like other areas of history, although I am sure there is study of genealogists and family historians as an anthropological or ethnographic area of enquiry.
I think that line of enquiry must be a fascinating one as participant observer, particulary given Mike and I am guessing others who seem to ‘believe’ their ‘research methods’ make them some kind of arbitators of historical truth and that one, therefore, “should not put unverified history to print unless you are 100 percent” otherwise ”irreparable harm” can be caused.
I mention all this, in part, in response to Mike accusing me of being uneducated. I actually have an MSc and studied Philosophy as part of a joint major as an undergraduate, so would be happy to discuss theories of truth with him and specifically the notion that what is actually knowable rarely being interesting. Hence, why I have said often that the ‘whom begat who’ of genealogy not being what really floats my boat.
If Mike had read a little more on this blog before “popping off at the the mouth,” he might have got a better idea of what I write about and why including the Shandean-like nature of my posts being a kind of unfolding shaggy dog story. I don’t actually consider myself to be either genealogist, or family historian for that matter. But I am interested in Creative Non Fiction and even considered that as a possible PhD. Sadly, that possible trajectory ends up competing with a possible more vocational one and, so, neither end up getting of the ground.
It just that ancestry and family history have over the years become an interesting means to those Creative Non Fiction ends and as a sort of reflective practice. That is encapulated by the quip I found as part of looking into my plantation owning ancestors (see more here):
Sometimes in family history research wandering down an unrelated byway reveals a story you could not have invented.
The blog forms part of that practice and by helping ‘nudge possibility’ when it comes to the manifestation of stories. Sometimes I go out in search of stories and by reflecting on them on here, they sometimes come to me, Put more simply, the blog acts as a light house for those who may be researching some of whom I mention, and those who get in touch almost always have something positive to contribute even it is a simple correction or amendment.
That has included a Murder Mystery as with the email back in 2009 from Jeremy Bird about my great uncle Roddy that I have been writing about recently. And the official version of his death late last year from Mike Chapman (see here, here and here), who also pointed out a likeminded approach to this kind of thing and that being about viewing the reaching of a conclusion as an iterative process and how the recording the twists and turns in that journey also being as personally important and interesting as the bottom line.
Yet more food for reflective thought and not least because of recent encounter with medium friend of my eldest who had completely different take on Roddy’s death. But the falling down of that rabbit hole is another story.
a tale of downward social mobility 