Everything is Miscellaneous: Implications for Family Historians

To begin with, all experienced genealogists would agree that, at least in family history, everything is miscellaneous. In what other field does one start by digging through Grandma’s attic and Grandpa’s garage looking for… well, for artifacts and records to prove that Grandma and Grandpa existed? How does information pass from one generation to the next? How do ancient family estrangements hamper the exchange of information? If we are lucky, some former family historian has attempted to collect records and impose order, but what does this really mean? This means that collected bits and bobs of data are stored in folders. If we are lucky, the folders are labeled with surnames. If we are luckier, there could be a year written on the label. When you find a drawer full of folders all marked with the Surname “Smith” you have hit the jackpot. But could this data be sorted with more practicality? And what about other items which cannot be easily stored: annotated family Bibles, murals of family trees painted on the walls, or needlepoint wall hangings with identifying the names of siblings. How does one easily store tombstones, engravings of tombstones, and photos of tombstones? Most importantly, how to we ensure that all this data is more easily ‘findable’ in the future?

Moving away from the home, we can more easily find information, because it has been meticulously sorted and organized for us by outside agencies. Right? Well… we must look for items at the correct government agency (which is sometimes a repository in the basement of a town office; and sometimes a church basement or attic; and sometimes an old ledger at the county office building; and sometimes everything was packed up and given to a local or regional historical society; or perhaps the entire record (US Census 1890) was burned and/or destroyed by water).

The book Everything is Miscellaneous begins by outlining the history of the human need to categorize and sort information into order. From alphabetization, to numerical coding, to packaging like items together, various systems of the “first order of order” are examined and exposed as being insufficient for today’s information needs. The primary challenge in any organizational system is that of “ambiguity.” Should the book entitled One for the Money be shelved before or after the book by the same author entitled Four to Score? Why or why not? Does Dewey’s decimal system work for classifying new schools of thought and new types of information? Is sorting and classifying information in order to “filter” information for an unknown end user even relevant today?

Weinberger revels in the fact that all data, all knowledge is returning to a pool of digital miscellany. He defines three classes of order:

Books divided knowledge into discrete topics connected by cross-references to other books…. Databases similarly externalized and transformed factual memory…. The physical nature of paper no longer gets in the way of understanding, although the type of understanding databases afford is limited by the nature of their contents: disconnected facts expressed precisely…. In the third order we are externalizing meaning…. In the third order, the content and the metadata are all digital. This enables us to bring any set of content next to any other. (Weinberger, 2007, 170-171).

This “third order of order” is very promising for genealogists and other historical researchers. At last, “we have an infrastructure that allows us to hop over and around established categorizations with ease. We can make connections and relationships at a pace never before imagined. We are doing so together. We are doing so in public.” (Weinberger, 2007, 221). This allows genealogical researchers to connect with researchers from the past, and most importantly, with other researchers in the present, to sift, sort, and redefine evidence that has been (intentionally or unintentionally) buried for generations.

“In the third order of order, information not only becomes intertwingled, intertwingularity enables knowledge.” (Weinberger, 2007, 125). This means that great-aunt Shirley’s quilt with family names and dates embroidered on each square can be digitized and linked to other information in a family tree. Strangers can photograph your family tombstones and post them in one easy-to-find location online. Artifacts can easily be shared, discussed, and mulled over. Family stories and collected information can now easily be compared with government records, census data, and church documents. The miscellany of ages can be brought together in unique ways to point out patterns which were previously ‘invisible.’ Interconnectivity of data, including pieces of data missing from the first and second orders of knowledge, allows us to find and follow new clues in our research.

This moves us away from the traditional worldview of one certain ‘truth’ and closer to an understanding of perceptual realities. As Weinberger expresses it:

The first characteristic of traditional knowledge is that just as there is one reality there is one knowledge, the same for all. If two people have contradictory ideas about something factual, we think they can’t both be right. This is because we’ve assumed knowledge is an accurate representation of reality, and the real world cannot be self-contradictory. We treat ideas that dispute this view of knowledge with disdain. We label them “relativism” and imagine them to be the devil’s work, we sneer at them as “postmodern” and assume that it’s just a bunch of French pseudo-intellectual gibberish, or we say “whatever” as a license to stop thinking. (Weinberger, 2007, 100).

But genealogical research is the consummate art of becoming comfortable with “relativism.” We learn to operate in ‘gray areas’ (names can be spelled in many ways) and we learn to negotiate with doubt (two records say the child was born on the 11th, and one record says the 12th). Furthermore, human behavior and human memory are unique and dynamic. Two humans will never remember the same event in the same way. All of which means that tracking our ancestors has always been a question of looking for data that is ‘most likely true.’ We resign ourselves to tiny conflicts of information in every document and record we see, in every story we hear. Ultimately, genealogists are looking for a general pattern of relatedness that, with a high likelihood of probability, connects a set of artifacts and documents to an individual’s life. The interconnectivity of the “third order of order” will bring a new vitality and an exciting age of discovery to family historians.

Let’s get started!

References

Frigo, Esto. (2015). Geneapalooza. Online comic strip accessed at: http://geneapalooza.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2015-02-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=13

Weinberger, D. (2007).Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York: Times Books.