Above: Genealogical research has become a popular past time for some people, but, done with a critical lens, it also offers an important way to understand social power and privilege leading to a more accurate understanding of the present for students.
Most historians know that senior citizens love doing genealogy. Over the years, I have visited many libraries and archives that hold state and national records to do research, and I have always been impressed at how many folks in retirement are there scouring Census and municipal wedding records trying to know more about who they are and where their families come from. With the recent popularity of DNA ancestry kits, more middle aged and young adults are getting also involved in researching their family's past (related, here is an article on how DNA ancestry tests work better for white people). This has been made even easier in recent years with more records becoming digitized and many can now be easily accessed from the comfort of one's home.
However, in my recent book with Kaylene Stevens on teaching history for justice, we suggest that ancestor research, especially when it involves critical historical analysis, can be a powerful tool for younger people to also engage in history. More importantly, when used in the classroom, it can help make history more relevant to their lives and helps students understand a more complex and honest story of their family's past.
What are Critical Family Histories?
As Christine Sleeter described it, critical family history is a tool for understanding how one's family history relates to larger social power relationships and cultures (here is a special issue of the journal Genealogy on it). While her work focuses primarily on its use by white people, I would like to describe how it can benefit all students within the history classroom (it also can be a way to get around prohibitions on teaching race and racism that have emerged recently in politically conservative states).
For white students, critical family histories can serve as a place to consider how their families may have struggled and achieved accomplishments overtime, but also how systems were in place to ensure their success and accumulation of wealth and social stability. Sleeter wrote, "White people, especially those of middle class status and above, tend to think of ourselves and our stories in individualistic terms. But since who we are involves not just the work of individuals, but also how individuals’ lives were shaped by local culture and power relationships across generations, ... this illuminates the social contexts of family lives, and that would help to unearth memories we have lost."
For students of color, critical family histories can serve as a place to understand how their family's stories have been shaped by the realities of oppression, but in a way that uplifts by providing examples of resistance, survival/survivance, and accomplishment. It can help explain to students why ancestors made certain choices (sometimes forced), and allows students to draw connections between their family's past and their present. It is important for teachers to also be mindful that the only times that students of color often learn their histories is when topics involve their ancestors' oppression (Black students often only see their ancestors in the curriculum through enslavement and segregation. Indigenous students see their ancestors through white colonization. Asian American students see their ancestors through Japanese incarceration during World War II or poor treatment during the building of the Transcontinental railroad. Latinx students see their ancestors through undocumented immigration in the past half-century). The point of critical family histories is to not only teach about historical oppression, but also fill in the gaps of perseverance and success between those difficult moments.
Usually when people construct family trees, they locate as much information as possible about their ancestors without thinking much about historical context or social structures. Like any family tree project, critical family histories begin with the individual and starts working background, collecting information, drawing connections, and tracing family histories. However, unlike traditional family histories, each step of the process must also involve a contextualizing of ancestors' experiences with the events and social structures of the time.
For instance, if a white student is researching about their grandparents who were born after World War II, it is essential that they look at the social policies and practices at the time. For instance, if they learn that their family moved from an inner city to a suburb in the 1950s, it is important to also examine local redlining practices (here is a great website that maps the inequity of redlining) and describe how it may have played a role in giving certain groups advantages over others. When a student is researching their great grandparents who immigrated from Europe, they should also examine the impact of the 1924 and 1965 Immigration Acts, and how first created the concept of so-called "illegal immigration" and that Europeans arriving before it, came with relatively few restrictions (and it dramatically restricted immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa).
Critical Family History Questions and Process
When engaging in critical family histories, Christine Sleeter suggests students should be guided by the following questions:
- Who else (what other groups) was around?
- What were the power relationships among groups?
- How were these relationships maintained or challenged over time?
- What does all this have to do with our lives now?
She also offers a process for helping engage in critical family histories, which involves several steps:
Step 1 is to expose students to critical frameworks (such as the Historical Context Questions Framework and the Hidden 4 P's of Immigration), so they better understand how power dynamics and social structures operate. I recommend reading books on how concepts of race, racism, and whiteness have changed over time and led to certain groups gaining power and privilege over time (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are few excellent books to excerpt).
Step 2 is to have students engage in oral history interviews with their relatives. Have them ask family members to bring old photos, records, letters, artifacts, etc. This will often help students begin creating a list of "clues" that need further researching. Students may want to make digital scans of these items, so they can preserve them for themselves and family members. Also, realize that some students may be adopted or may not have much information on their families for a host of different reasons. I suggest giving those students different options for the project (especially if looking into their family history may cause duress or harm), including working with a classmate on their family history or researching the family of a famous person.
Step 3 is to have students take whatever relevant evidence that they have received about their family's
past and then construct a family tree. There are a few good websites
that can help students manage family trees and some offer some free access to certain
records and documents (here, here, and here
are some popular ones; some websites are run by religious groups or share family trees with other members-so you will want to
let your students and their parents know that, so they can think about confidentiality).
Step 4 is to begin searching vital records to learn more about the people in the family tree (it would be helpful for students to get from family members as many names, birth and death dates, and home locations of relatives as possible). Birth, marriage, death, and immigration records often reveal additional information about relatives and events. In this step, students often uncover more members of the family tree by
finding connections in the public records (the Census can be especially
helpful as it shows who is living in the same household and includes
the names of family members and shows their relationship). Here are some great places to gain free access to individual records: U.S. (more here and here), Canadian, and Mexican Census Records, West Coast and Ellis Island Immigration Records, American Indian Federal Records, Federal Slavery Records, Federal Freedman Bureau Records, Japanese American Relocation Records, Chinese Immigration National Archives Guides, Jewish Global Records, Grave Records, Newspaper Archives (also here), Land and Deed Records, Bureau of Land Management Records, or even putting ancestors names in Google or other search engines (this may reveal unconventional family documents or stories). Many communities also have historical societies that can help locate information or documents.
Step 5 is to search for additional resources that give context to the students' ancestors' experiences. This is the most important step, as it is what adds the "critical" to family history. I suggest before proceeding to this step that teachers explicitly teach about some important oppression-related historical concepts that may arise as students research their ancestors, including settler-colonialism, slavery, segregation/redlining/employment and education discrimination, anti-immigration policy, and the role of race and class in military drafts. This would also be an important place to have students research major events of their ethnic/racial communities.
For instance, if a student is Japanese American, it would be important for them to learn about Japanese American incarceration during World War II (they may or may not have learned about it from their family, as many Japanese Americans are still unable to share about their experience), which was an event that impacted the entire community, even if certain members were not imprisoned by the government. However, it would also be important for the students to research other important components of the Japanese American experience (and Asian American experience more broadly), such as Angel Island, Asian exclusion acts, discrimination of Japanese American farmers, kibei or returning for education in Japan, survival of Japanese American communities and creation of the Japanese American National Museum, Immigration Act of 1952, and redlining housing practices), but this should be done in tandem with the students asking about the experiences of other ethnic/racial and social groups groups during those same periods (for instance, how did other Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and white people experience World War II? What aspects were similar or different for Japanese Americans?). Be sure to avoid essentializing experiences. For example, teachers will often problematically teach the experiences of a group as a monolith. For example, there has been no one Latinx experience in U.S. history-for each group, it varies based on ancestors' country of origin, geography, and period.
Step 6 is to have the students "go public" with their critical family history findings. This can be done by having students create a report or presentation on their family emphasizing the critical and contextual findings. I recommend that white teachers first model this by sharing their own family histories modeling how to discuss the role of privilege or power in their own family stories. Teachers of color may want to pair with a white colleague sharing their stories together to help white students see how historical experiences often contrast based on race. The purpose of sharing is not to have everyone find oppression in their stories, but rather provide a more honest and complex contextualization of family histories. It is important that teachers continually ask students to return back to those critical frameworks as their lenses, which will help them see their families' histories within a larger and more complex social context.
If done well, critical history projects can be incredibly powerful for students. They can evoke a sense of pride in students (including white students) by learning of all that their ancestors did (much of it positive), but also adds important context and reveals power dynamics, making it more truthful and helping students understand how the structures that governed their ancestor's experiences influence their lives today and in many ways continue in the current day.
Example: My Own Critical Family History
Above: (Left) My great grandfather (with hat; as a child standing behind his tenement in Holyoke, Mass.), whose family immigrated from Québec in Canada and (Right) my great grandmother (on right, in an family portrait taken in Chicopee, Mass.), whose family immigrated from Galicia in Poland.
As
a white person with ancestors from French Canada and Poland, I was long told that my ancestors struggled as a result
of their
difficult choices to immigrate to the U.S. (which is certainly true in many ways), but engaging
in critical
family history helped me understand how my family also enjoyed certain advantages and privileges that influenced my opportunities in the present.
My great grandparents were French Canadian immigrants who took trains from Montréal, Québec to Holyoke, Massachusetts in the 1890s (my great grandfather actually grew up in a tenement building right next to the train station). Like many farmers in Québec, my ancestors struggled during a major economic depression in the mid- to late-1800s and made the same choice as 900,000 other French Canadians who moved to New England to work in the factories (as well as logging and farming industries). Holyoke was a paper mill town where they found dangerous and low paying jobs and faced discrimination from the Anglo and Irish populations that had already settled there.
However, that is only part of their story (and might have been the only one revealed, if my family history only focused on my ancestor's experience without a larger social context). When I traced my family history through Québec genealogy records, I found that the first Martel (My
family lore said that my great grandfather changed the spelling of our
last name to avoid debts, which I was able to partially confirm through various
records) was a person named Honoré Martel. He was a soldier in the French Army from Paris who fought in the Caribbean and Canada. He would marry Marguerite Lamirault, a woman from Paris who came with the filles du roy or King's daughters (a program created by Louis XIV to ensure a long-term French settlement in Canada). This was the first evidence that I had that my French Canadian ancestors
benefited from systems that privileged white people. My 8th great grandfather had participated in the killing and taking of land of Indigenous people, including the Abenaki, Atikamekw, Huron-Wendats, Mohawk, and others. My 8th great grandmother came as part of a settler-colonial project to permanently inhabit those same peoples' land. This was a
troubling part of my family's past, something I needed to directly confront as
my part in a settler-colonial system that still exists and that I still
benefit from today.
Fast forward to the 20th century. My great grandfather Donat Lapointe lived with his family in a part of "The Flats" of Holyoke called Frenchville. Most of his neighbors were French Canadian immigrants who work in the factories there. They attended a francophone Catholic Church called L'Église-du-Précieux-Sang (Precious Blood Church). They played in the back lot of their tenement (the only picture that we have of his childhood is of him with siblings and cousins there). However, French Canadians began moving out of Holyoke in large numbers in the 1920s. After getting married, my great grandfather bought a farm in the neighboring town of Ludlow, where French Canadians created their own new church called Église-Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Saint John the Baptist Church). In fact, by the New Deal, the area that my grandfather had grown up in was redlined in a process where the map was literally colored red which meant "hazardous." As the French Canadians moved out, Polish, Greek, Russian, and Italian immigrants moved into the area. In the 1950s, Puerto Rican migrants settled in that same area. This was another troubling aspect of my family's history, as they participated in the "white flight" of the era. In this process, my family benefited from a system of whiteness that allowed them to own a house and land after one generation, where Black and Latinx residents were essentially redlined from their suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts. Additionally, with the movement of white people to the suburbs, places like Holyoke were given less government resources to maintain and improve their communities. Highways, like Interstate 91, 291, and 391 were built through Holyoke and Springfield (dividing neighborhoods), so people like my great grandfather (who by the 1950s worked at a Westinghouse Factory in Springfield in addition to maintaining their farm) could drive to work from the suburbs.
This same story repeated for my Polish ancestors, who fled poverty in Galicia in the early 1900s and immigrated directly to Ludlow where they worked in factories. While the work conditions were poor (they may have participated in the 1909-1910 Ludlow Strike led by Polish immigrants), the factories generally practiced employment discrimination against the area's African American population. Much like my French Canadian relatives, they benefited from changing definitions of whiteness and owned land and had stable employment within a generation. Moreover, my Polish grandparents were able to help establish a Polish Catholic Church in Ludlow, where they were able to preserve their religion, culture, and language (Polish is still spoken there), and no one accused them of being disloyal to the United States (unlike my wife's family's experience when they formed Japanese American communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, as it resulted in a very different treatment by white people in the area).
Example: My Former Students and Critical Family Histories
As
a former teacher in the Framingham Public Schools, which is an
immigrant community just west of Boston (that has a very similar New England factory town story to Holyoke), I would have my students
interview their family members and research their family's immigration, forced migration, or Indigenous histories.
White students were fascinated to learn most families came before 1924
without restriction, which troubled the "my family came here legally"
narrative. Many traced their roots to the mass Irish, Italian, or Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Others were descendants of the first white people to settle in the town in the 1700s, or the smaller African American community that developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, with a few students' parents being members of the Nipmuc or Wamponoag tribes. Many of my students' families had migrated from Puerto Rico to work in the town's farms in the 1950s and 60s. The most recent wave of immigrants came from Brazil in the 1980s and Central America and East Africa in the 2000s. For many, this project was their first time hearing of their families' struggles to come to New England.
Many of Latinx and Asian American students learned of the sacrifices their parents made (sometimes forced to come undocumented) due to 1965 immigration changes (one student even learned that his family came here in a container ship-risking his life). Puerto Rican students often heard stories of their families not being seated at local fancy restaurants along Route 9. Some African American students learned about their grandparents or great grandparents moves to the North during the Great Migration, but also that they could only find housing in certain areas just outside downtown. One student relayed a story that his father told him about being a stowaway on a container ship from Brazil, where he risked his life to come to the United States.
White students would often learn about the sacrifices that their families made when they immigrated from Italy or Ireland. However, they also learned about how the town had long had racial divisions between the north side and south side (which was divided by two main highways, Route 9 and the Massachusetts Turnpike) due to racial covenants and other racist housing policies and practices. Students who were descendants of the first settlers in Framingham learned how their ancestors participated in numerous acts of violence toward Native people. They learned that an important act of Native resistance, where often recorded in the town history through white narratives (such as the Nipmuc Uprising traditionally called the Eames Massacre or the numerous acts of resistance by Tantamous). Students grappled with the ways that these events led to a town where their people benefited at the expense of others.
For my students and myself, critical family histories helped us understand how we were advantaged and disadvantaged by different forms of oppression, how the complicated histories of how our ancestors experienced the world frame our present, and how we can use that knowledge in the future to seek more fair and just outcomes from everyone in our communities. As students continued to learn U.S. history through the remainder of the year, I saw how they know could imagine where their ancestors appeared within the historical periods that we were studying, but it helped give them lenses for understanding other peoples' ancestors experienced those same events.
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