So I got a job as a historian at a historical museum
I've got an astounding archival and special collections library right there where I work, I've got the background skills in researching people, so this is when I started digging on my own family tree, right? Well, no. I did do a lot of research on people's family histories, and created family trees, only they weren't for my family.
No, like other historical societies, our collections and interpretations favored the rich families of the region. We collected their old furniture and decorative arts, their family papers and photographs, and their lives and experiences dictated a lot of our exhibits and interpretation. And visitors often wanted that. They wanted to see rich people stuff, or hear about their lives. There were many of us on the staff who wanted to showcase working-class history and related artifacts and stories, but we also found out that it didn't quite resonate with a lot of visitors. Some were indeed tickled to see things they remembered or experienced in a museum, but a lot of people still wanted to see rich people's pretty things. We knew what side our bread was buttered on, so we made sure to still collect and feature the pretty things.
I did get to be pretty good with the Census. I had to, because not only was I doing research in it, but I also had to write grants to try to get us money to be able to afford to acquire the forthcoming 1930 US Census ... and that would be a LOT of microfilm, and it wasn't cheap. So I wanted to make sure I was very familiar with the ins and outs of the Census so that when I wrote grants, I knew what I was talking about. I also got familiar with social directories, and investigating people via old newspapers (which of course was easy for old money bluebloods, because they were always in the paper, especially the society pages, a concept that you just don't see anymore in today's newspapers). I had also had an internship in a newspaper archive in my first grad school, so I knew a lot of tips and tricks for dealing with old papers (i.e., women didn't have their own name, except when they were unmarried; once married, they always went by their husband's name as "Mrs. John Smith").
The gig with the history museum lasted 8 years, but then a financial setback hit the place, thanks to an economic slowdown, so I and a great many other staff members were invited to leave. I sent out emails to everyone in my contacts, and heard back from a former coworker, who had moved on to another institution, and they let me know that their employer had an opening for a grantwriter. I had been writing a lot of grants to help fund exhibits and archive projects, so I applied, interviewed and got the job ... and it was essentially falling upwards, because taking the new job ended up raising my salary by more than $10k/year. But in the new job, there wasn't much in the way of historical researching, but I was busy with my new role, and I enjoyed what I was doing, as the institution had a really good mission, and I felt good contributing to that mission.
That lasted a few years until the opportunity arose to jump to a bigger institution, again primarily to write grants. I made the move, which again was good for salary, as I got another large bump, and this was an institution that had another great mission that I was happy to support. And I was a successful grantwriter. I did actually use my research skills, because I would look into various funders and see what they liked to fund, what they didn't like to fund, what they were looking for in terms of projects, etc., to make sure that my grant applications would have a higher chance of success. And actually, I WAS successful. I did write some very good grants that funded some needed projects that had a nice impact.
Until one day they sat me down and said they needed me to take on a new and different role; they had a small team of staff members who focused on researching the backgrounds of donors and potential donors, to help their fundraisers focus on potential donors who could have the money to support the institution philanthropy. The lead researcher who led the team had left to go work at a local college, and they needed to find someone to replace him, and a couple of the senior staff of the department knew I had a history degree, so in their mind, that meant I could do research on people. So they offered me the job (and another nice raise), so I took it. The researchers I would be leading sat me down and taught me the specific skills to do the kind of research they did. I knew how to research, but this was all about learning the right tools and also look for the right things they wanted to see.
So I picked up those skills, and very quickly got into the role, and it was very interesting, and I enjoyed it. And not surprisingly, the institution I worked at had long had board members who were members of the old money bluebloods that I was familiar with from the history museum, so was able to revisit that old research, and actually add to it. In fact, there were so many old bluebloods in the institution's board history that I soon needed a way to keep track of all of them, so I ordered up a copy of Family Tree Maker, and proceeded to create a family tree of these old money families. And I quickly learned that they had all intermarried, so that ultimately I ended up with a big tree with several thousand people over a host of families all connected together via marriage (and also a few small trees of some individual families who never married into the big money family). This was a good exercise, because I had never made a family tree before, and I found it was enjoyable filling in the blanks and finding out the key information. I was able to use primarily old newspapers, old social directories (we had a stack of them at my institution), and the research tools that I used in my current job, because these were not people who hid or were under-the-radar; they had money, they were living very public lives, and their lives unfolded in the society pages of the local and (in some cases) national papers.
After a number of years working at my job, my Dad approached me, as he was retired, and looking for things to keep him busy, and he decided to fool around with genealogy and try to find out more about his family history. He had never really expressed any interest in this before, but I thought it was a great idea. So he subscribed to Ancestry.com, and started digging, ordered a variety of birth certificates, marriage certificates, and death registers of ancestors from the General Records Office (GRO) in England, and I helped to answer some of his questions. He was able to find a few things about his ancestors, particularly his English ancestors, though he also ran into a number of brickwalls because of the key reason that our surname is REALLY common where the family came from in England. In fact, our surname in this particular English city, Bolton, is like Smith would be in an American city. So he came up with a LOT of folks with our surname, but couldn't determine if they were ancestors or not. I did help where I could, but this was really his thing, so I only lurked in the background, offering advice. Eventually the brick walls got too hard to break, so he essentially gave up.
I was impressed with what he had found, and was pleased with it, but didn't feel obligated to pick up the slack. I wasn't a family historian, I was a formerly professional historian, and I focused on big things (well, big in terms of local history), not doing the tasks of amateur historians. Which yes, is a dumb viewpoint, because frankly, the best and most important history is done by "amateur historians," because professional historians (academics, not public historians) are spending years and years studying more narrow topics that ultimately are not really contributing to a greater narrative of our history, or really inspiring people to learn about the past. No, it's really those public historians who are working in museums and archives, or writing popular history books that are really getting people excited about history. More people are learning by watching a Ken Burns documentary, reading a David McCullough book, reading Bruce Catton books, or going to a Smithsonian history museum than are being influenced by history Ph.D.'s in colleges.
It's a harsh statement, but I've been on both sides of that world, and I've seen how folks in academe have really denigrated popular works, and focused on things so narrow that only a few people out there might be interested in learning about it. And I found that I prefer popular history. I've enjoyed pursuing my interests in history which have meandered all over the spectrum of time. No longer focusing on the industrial and labor history I focused on in grad school, I instead moved on to learning about the Civil War ... and then the Byzantine Empire ... and then Rome ... and then English history ... and then coal mining history (thanks to my internship) ... and then cultural history ... and then art history ... it was lovely, I could go anywhere, and didn't have to worry about my professors or the history department coming down on me for not pursuing my narrow interests.
My interests were broad ... but they weren't yet focused on my own history. I'm really not sure why. It was always there, always around me. I enjoyed looking at old family photos that my maternal grandmother had, and hearing the old family stories from her and my mom. I liked learning about my relatives and ancestors, but never thought to actually turn my skills and background into pursuing all that.
But then something happened that changed my mind.
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