As I started to think about what to say on April 10th, and what to bring by way of illustration, I was faced with 50+ years of files and projects that have some sort of genealogical relevance. The idea here is to give you some idea of who I am and what I was talking about on April 10th. There's a lot more collected here to amuse and incite than I had time to talk about, but looking through what follows will give you some idea of what I'm drawing upon, and may generate questions and comments, and suggest adaptations you might make in your genealogical endeavors. I'd be happy to correspond further: hughblackmer@gmail.com.
It all began when Stephanie Aude encountered this map (somewhere, somehow ...because interwebs, right?):
I had drawn it while concocting an assignment for students in a course on Human Geography, at Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1976 (where I taught from 1973 to 1990). The prompt was to "draw a map of your world as you remember it from when you were 10-12 years old". In those years (1953-1956) I lived in Shawsheen, and went to Andover Public Schools for grades 5, 6, 7. I was amazed at what remained in my memory, and what the exercise called up. I'm still amazed by the flood of memories unleashed as I look at the map almost 49 years later. (see some of my subsequent discoveries from the last couple of weeks)
The draw-your-world assignment was very productive: some lovely maps were drawn, and students encountered what geographer Carl Sauer said about maps:
If we ask ourselves WHY we're engaged in genealogical research, we'll surely find a wide variety of interests and purposes that generally resolve back to personal understandings of FAMILY and of IDENTITY. My concerns reach beyond the [interesting] details of my own descent, and into demography and history writ large, and always into unfolding stories. As we anthropologists are wont to say,
and what do we do with data but contrive ways to visualize and explore it (or them...) for the stories contained.
All sorts of things are mappable, and spatial presentation of genealogical and demographic data helps us realize and illustrate the emerging narrative that lies behind the family trees we're at pains to discover. I want to show you some examples that may incite you to creativity with your own materials, and lead you to a landscape of tempting rabbit holes.
I'll begin with some maps from the genealogical work my wife and I did on our families, using birth and death places for our 17th and 18th century ancestors:
The 12th generation (counting backwards from ourselves) didn't spread out much: some (the Eastmans) decorated the North Shore (Ipswich, etc), some (the Parmenters) were to the west of Boston (but none were in Boston), some (the Blackmers/Blackmores and Reeds) were south of Boston (Scituate, Plymouth), and some (the Roots) were in the Connecticut River Valley. Over the next two generations the families spread out quite a bit. By the mid-18th century the Blackmers were in Bennington VT (having wandered thence from central Connecticut), and the Roots were in the Springfield MA area. The Parmenters had made their way to Antrim NH. And then in the 1820s, Holland Blackmer walked from Bennington VT to Boston and seeded my branch of the Blackmer family in the near suburbs of Boston (Chelsea, Malden, Melrose).
Another example of mapping that intersects with genealogy takes us to Nova Scotia, where I did dissertation research in the early 1970s. Almost the first thing I did on arrival was to pick up the phone book for Southwestern Nova Scotia, which I was surprised to discover was divided by exchange... and I noticed the clumping of surnames, and started counting, and eventually made maps of what I called 'patrihearths'. My first attempts at surname mapping were homespun and clumsy:
but I kept counting names and imagining the maps I could make if... By the mid-1980s I was using a TI-Pro personal computer (with digitizing tablet and plotter) to make maps of surname distributions at different points in time (data from telephone books for the 1980s, and from Directories for 1896 and 1914):
Compare the distributions of Smiths:
and then look at some surnames in southwesternmost Nova Scotia"
To continue thinking about migration as a feature of personal, family, and population lives, it occurs to me that each person's life can be mapped for changes of location —tracing a personal odyssey across the landscape— and that making such a map unlocks questions that are just the sort of thing a genealogist or family historian would find fascinating. Thus, my mother, born Carolyn Abbe Joerndt in Chicago in 1899, into a rather stodgy family of North Germans who had emigrated from Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the 1850s (she was the third generation in America) followed a wayward path across the US... Just writing down the peregrinations opens floodgates of memory, and just imagine the map it would generate. Here's my first attempt:
Talking about migration as a population phenomenon would take us into tales of the migration of Nova Scotians to The Boston States, and all the Nova Scotia-born great grandparents claimed by people all over New England... don't get me started, but check out Harry Bruce on summer incomers.
Of course everybody has troves of family photos, which often encode important genealogical information. I've marshalled my father's collection into Forebears: Exploring Franklin Blackmer's family photo archive [right-click to download pdf], the primary audience for which has been my children and nephews and nieces, who wonder who were those "fools in old-style hats and coats" from whom they are descended.
During my 20 years in Nova Scotia I was also collecting newspaper obituaries and junk-store Abandoned Ancestors, and putting together vignettes that drew upon stories I was able to extract. Consider the tale of Poor Alice G. and the adventure of Uncle Naum (these are both from the 2012 version of Nova Scotia Faces, later refined to Bluenose Physiognomy [right-click to download pdf]).
I bought an orphaned photo album that had belonged to Alalia Stevens, who lived in Kingston Nova Scotia during WWII, when streams of Brits were being trained for RAF Bomber Command at nearby Greenwood Airbase. Among the photos she collected were pictures of those young flyers and (later) the pictures they sent to her after the war. Thelma, whom you'll meet in the Alalia Stevens album, moved to Saskatchewan and became a photographer herself! The surprises never end.
And see also Who was Joe Wilner? [right-click to download pdf], which I assembled from a box of snapshots (bought in a Brooklyn junk store by a friend who knew my proclivities).
Another line of inquiry comes from cemeteries, which are full of reminders of Family identity and significance. The question is often what's the story here?, and I've chased that via my Remembered: A graveyard book [right-click to download pdf]. See a few examples from that source.
And now an Andover story: Stephanie asked if I was related to Alan Blackmer, who taught English at Phillips Andover for many years. I did some due diligence to discover just how we were related, and here's some of what I found:
Alan Blackmer (1903-1975)
NYT obituaryThe Freedom to Dress: Choice May Come With Consequence The Phillipian
and his son Alan Rogers Blackmer (1937-2023)
...grew up in Andover, MA. He attended Phillips Academy where his father was an English teacher and the Dean of Students... Harvard, Peace Corps in Nigeria, etc...And so I engaged in a bit of genealogical fun:
Alan R Blackmer (1903-1975) was born in Illinois; ... 4th cousin of Herbert Clark (1875-1936) [my grandfather]
his father Ernest A (1863-1966!!) was born in Illinois ... 3rd cousin of Henry Luther (1850-1914)
his father Orlando (1827-1913) was born in Vermont ... 2nd cousin of Greene (1826-1901)
his father Hiram (1804- ) was born in Bennington VT ... 1st cousin of Holland (1801-1864) who walked to Boston
his father Samuel (1768- ) was born in Bennington VT ... brother of Jason (1770-1849)
his father Samuel (1740- 1813) was born in Hampton CT
his father Samuel (1712- ) was born in Rochester MA
his father Peter Blackmore was born in Scituate MA (1667-1717)
his father William Blackmore (1636-1676) was born in Northam, Devon, and arrived in Scituate MA in 1665
(he was "killed by Indians" defending Scituate...)So Alan-the-Elder was my 4th cousin twice removed, if I have the terminology and conventions right. And if I don't it doesn't matter much anyway. (I did a rather clumsy genealogical summary at oook.info/geneal/ about 30 years ago).
There is obviously much fun to had with such materials, and I could go on at great length (though I'll try not to on April 10th). The images I showed are available here
A few more fragments:
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(photo by Adrian Lewis)
(Kate, 3 years old here, is now a bespoke historical cartographer )
(see some of her early maps
snd for the last word:
