![]() I have been teaching U.S. History for over ten years in the public schools and also have been a director for a local history museum. One can posit that my interest in history is due to being an adoptee (see my first post "Beginnings"), that my desire to learn the tools of research to interpret the past is really a veiled unconscious drive to reclaim my own past and identity. Perhaps. It can also be that I just found history to be fun. And nothing is more fun than working with primary sources. The National Archives calls primary sources, or original sources, "History in the Raw". What a great phrase. "...they are real and they are personal; history is humanized through them." Finding the cache of Family Munro primary source documents in November of 2019 was overwhelmingly personal. One document was a 1765 land grant from King George to Donald Munro of the "Seventy Seventh Regiment of Foot" very possibly my 5th great grandfather. Holding a document older than the Declaration of Independence, I imagined the numerous family hands and obstacles the document overcame through the centuries only to lay in my hands. Primary sources however are not infallible. They are very fallible. A piece of paper can hold any lie. Here is a personal case in point. In the early 1990s I began to search for my birth family. Michigan adoptees from closed adoptions such as myself were limited to only non-identifying information however I was one of those who wanted to know my past, no matter the limits on that information. My initial search landed me at the doorstep of the Catholic Social Service of Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my adoption originated. The office at that time was in a craftsman style house from the early 1900s. It was at this homelike structure, where 20 plus years before I was a week-old infant waiting for placement, that I returned to receive a typed, one-page fact sheet of my past, all information being non-identifying, the closest thing I would get as a primary source about my past. On January 7th, 2019, I read that form to my birth mother during our first phone conversation. It reads that my birth father had "knowledge of the pregnancy." She confirmed for me that night that he did not. As the fates would have it, he would pass away in 2016 without knowledge of his first-born son. Primary sources are the bread and butter to any research. One must take caution however. Documents are made with an intent and sometimes an intent to distort or cover facts. Granted, the 1765 land grant has more legal precedent than that typed-up fact sheet given to me in the 1990s. But with this cautionary tale in mind, what can be learned from this invaluable document that has stayed in my mother's family for over 250 years? More on the 1765 Donald Munro document to come.
3 Comments
Joyce L Thompson
3/8/2020 09:52:51 pm
....so interesting ...looking forward to hearing more....
Reply
Patricia Fuller
6/7/2020 07:45:20 am
Well written John. Death certificates are considered primary sources, but can be rife with errors, whether well intended, by human error or bad memory during times of grief. A second source is always great to help back up a source, but if not, I'll accept the first source if nothing else available. With doing genealogy as long as I have, I have discovered many sources can be wrong, even headstones.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
John A. StempienJohn A. Stempien maintains the blog and website, Family Munro and is the co-editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion. He lives in west Michigan with his family. Archives
June 2024
Categories
All
|