My ancestors!
One of my hobbies is to research my family’s history. Maybe I am weird, but I love learning about how my family fits into history. For example, I have ancestors that were there for the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, a great-great-…-grandmother who was expelled from Puritan Massachusetts for her beliefs, and lots of humble farmers that lived quiet lives yet had their own unique personalities. I love thinking that each of these people helped me to be me. I also love the research side of it. I get to look at lots of old documents and records and construct an entire life from little clues just like a real historian, and what is better is that I am finding out things that no one else has ever put together. (Who cares what some farmer in 19th century Canada was like? Well me, because he is my ancestor!) Our family’s history, just like any history, can also provide stories of people overcoming challenges and teach some great values, as well as perhaps some “what not to do”s (every family has some not-so-proud moments). Best of all, it makes me feel special to know where my family came from. I know I want to teach my children about their personal and family heritage for all of these reasons.
But this blog isn’t about my opinions on parenting; it is about research.
I went to look for research on how learning history benefits children and it was really hard to find. virtually every child education system teaches a nation’s history, world history, local history etc. You would think that if we spend so much effort trying to get our kids to remember all these facts and stories there would be some solid, evidence based reason, but it is precisely because everyone teaches history that there are no studies. You just can’t find a group of kids that never learned any history so you can’t compare their outcomes to those that do learn history. That being said, there is some research on how children learn and understand history.
The research gives some evidence that learning a family’s place in history may be beneficial. A study by Keith C. Barton found that for some reason American children in particular were very curious about their family’s place in history (Irish children were curious about more general historical facts), and all children turned to their family and parents for more information. When they turned to family to gain context, they were able to explain their own lives in the context of history. (“You’d Be Wanting to Know about the Past: Social contexts of children’s historical understanding in Northern Ireland and the USA.” Keith C Barton. 2010; “My Mom Taught Me”: The Situated Nature of Historical Understanding. Keith C Barton. 1995) Other researchers, Robinson and Stepien, found that when kids were asked about their family’s connection to history they displayed a deeper level of understanding. (Historical understanding, personal epistemology, and the educational experiences of students at a suburban high school: A case study.) So my instinct that learning about grandpa in WWII will help my kids understand the war might be right.
The other aspect of family history research I would like to discuss is the fact that we can teach our children how to search for and interpret primary sources. We can go into old documents and interpret for ourselves what happened in our ancestor’s lives which is a valuable skill because unlike the way most history is taught: read about in a textbook and accepted as fact, historians are analyzers and often have different interpretations. There has been a very recent resurgence of document based history classes in high schools, and the student outcomes are promising. One caveat I will add is that analyzing primary sources requires some advanced literacy skills, and without instruction on how to analyze and interpret, students in these situations were only summarizing what they read. (Stahl et. all, What Happens When Students Read Multiple Source Documents in History?, 9 Nov 2011) Fortunately, those skills can be taught, and history is a great place to teach advanced literacy. Also, when history is taught through source documents, students display a more “accurate, grounded interpretation of the past” (Chanuncey Monte-Sano, Beyond Reading Comprehension and Summary: Learning to Read and Write in History by Focusing on Evidence, Perspective, and Interpretation, 21 Mar 2011)
The first really good study of these “Reading Like a Historian” (RLH) classrooms was published in January 2012. They found that in practice, this approach does improve student’s reading comprehension, historical thinking skills, and factual knowledge. They also found that while the best readers had the best results, demographic differences were not a hindrance to the student’s learning. (Avishag Reismana, Reading Like a Historian: a Document-Based History Curriculum Intervention in Urban High Schools, 12 Jan 2012) Unfortunately, these classrooms are pretty rare, and it has been hard to get history teachers to make the paradigm shift towards RLH. Doing this type of learning at home through family history might be a way to supplement their education.
At this point, I got really excited and had to stop myself from getting lost in the research and come back and write this post. If you are getting excited too, here is a great dissertation that takes the above study and a couple others and reviews and discusses them: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vv771bw4976/Reisman_Dissertation_ReadinglikeaHistorian-augmented.pdf.
Well, that sounds fun, but I don’t know anything about genealogy research
You are not alone. Practically everything I have learned, I have learned on my own, and along the way I have found some great resources. I cannot recommend FamilySearch.org highly enough. (Disclaimer: it is run by a church, but you wouldn’t know it because absolutely no proselyting or preaching is done through this program. The only thing is that the brick and mortar libraries that are a part of their system are housed in church buildings) The reason I love FamilySearch is that they have a huge collection, and everything is free. The only fee you might run into is the cost of mailing a record to one of their satellite libraries. You can register with them and use their software to build a family tree, organize photos and records, collaborate with other family historians, and best of all get lots of research help. Go here for a step by step guide on to get started: https://familysearch.org/gettingstarted. The first thing you do is just start asking your grandmas, great uncles, etc for stories and take it from there. I think you will find that it is easier than you expect.
I hope you find a few interesting stories to share with your children. It will help them feel more connected to you, and your family. It will help them better identify with and understand history. As you get into doing some of your own research and share this experience with your children, it will also help them to understand the historian’s process, retain historical facts, and even improve their literacy. Maybe it sounds like something you want to try?
Be a Slightly Better Parent 