Finding Ephemeral Glimpses into Family Histories on the Internet
Both the armchair and professional historian can only be frustrated by the picture of the Internet that Google displays in its search results. For a recent project I wanted to compile a list of Websites that share family histories. Google, the search engine that is supposed to know everything, could not help me in this simple task because it is overrun with irrelevant, empty commercial pages that obviously only exist for the sake of promoting advertising. I took a simple query, “my family history”, and searched for Websites that might publish articles about people’s family histories. What Google showed me instead was worse than disappointing. Changing the query did not help much.
Why is this important? Because contemporary historians are so rare, and we are witnessing a revolution in self-documenting personal history on a scale never before seen. If we could find these self-written personal histories more easily we would be able to compile entirely new perspectives on our society and even some of the great events. But how do you find these personal accounts?
Beyond the personal experience blogger there are also people who preserve family history. Family history is often bound up with folklore, legend, and wishful thinking. Nonetheless, the historical anecdotes that families pass down from generation to generation are important to understanding how we recall the past and cherish our heritage.
Most family history is forgotten within a few generations and only the top echelons of society pass their family histories on to posterity. We may have 1 million historical references in our modern library system that record births, marriages, deaths, contracts, and other details of family histories going back several centuries but the vast majority of this information is untouched and archived in such a way that those who would most benefit from the knowledge are never made aware of it.
Some people dedicate entire blogs to their family history, and these efforts go largely unnoticed. Some people may only briefly mention their family history in short autobiographical pages. These social footnotes in history comprise a value layer of information on the Internet that is untapped and unused by historians who, as a group, should be organizing projects to harvest these anecdotes and organizing the data.
Even simple articles that attempt to explain the origins of obscure family names like Bredimus (a French/Roman name) may provide valuable insight to linguists in addition to historians. For although linguists may know better how the names originated, they do not know what additional meanings and historical associations have attenuated to those names.
And this phenomenon of data transcends cultural and national boundaries. Families around the world are recording bits and pieces of their histories and folklore on blogs, social media, and traditional Websites. The migration from the older cultures toward the west suggests that families may record historical connections for their less literate relatives in old world countries where the history is still largely confined to memory.
A Website may offer only a casual glimpse into non-English family history but a million such sites record a significant amount of data. The phenomenon is quite widespread, in my experience. I often find short blog posts explaining family names. But it was only recently that I began to wonder if anyone is attempting to collect these digital annotations into a comprehensive database.
One thing that recent history has taught me is that the Internet does not truly remember everything. Many Websites go offline and can never be found again. Over time, this bonanza of private disclosure about very personal family matters will recede, if only because people have become much more concerned about their privacy and what national governments may be doing with their once-private information.
One of the most interesting uses of private family history is in homework assignments. This kind of organized personal research has been going on for generations but students do not save their papers and teachers are prohibited from doing so. It would not take much effort to organize a national “personal family history project” to collect these homework assignments and create a database of shared anecdotes, multigenerational memories, and personal experiences.
Humanity has reached a stage where everyone can contribute to posterity not only for themselves but also for their relatives and ancestors, but we have already begun dismantling this great infrastructure of historical connections. That data will never exist again. Inevitably we have only extended the memory of past generations by a few years. We should be taking steps to extend that knowledge much further.