Genealogy;

genealogy and the Historian

H, listory, as a study or discipline, is the record of past events of societal impor-tance. Genealogy is the record of descent from some ancestor. What does genealogy have to offer the historian?

In the case of Doris Muncey Haslam's book, The Wrights ofBedeque, we have a prodigious piece of research, 992 pages in length, based on many varieties of sources, and more than 40 years in the making (albeit interrupted by a hiatus of some 25 years). Despite its formidably size, this two-volume work is good reading. A study of the descen-dants of one man, William Wright of Bedeque, a Loyalist from Westchester County, New York, and his unknown wife, it offers many fascinating stories about individuals. There is the Methodist missionary who eloped in 1865 with a 15-year-old girl and was married by an Anglican priest in St. Eleanors (p. 73), or the case of Lydia Wright (ca. 1793-1862), who, after her first husband, John Bell, disappeared following an ocean voyage, married John Pearson, a thrice-shipwrecked sailor — only to have Bell, according to a family tradition, apparently return one day when Mr. and Mrs. Pearson were absent, encounter their young sons,

assess the situation, and disappear again, this time forever (pp. 41-2). Such stories may raise eyebrows and even provoke skepticism, but they are cred-ible, since the author's work is distin-guished by careful weighing of evi-dence. If she prefers the authority of a formal record to a memory, even concerning one's own birth-date, she is not afraid to say so (p. 85). It is in the scrupulous and critical use of apparently mundane sources like tombstones, church records, land records, and wills that the thorough genealogist has some-thing to teach the historian, and espe-cially the biographer.

The value of The Wrights ofBedeque goes beyond spicy anecdotes. The social historian is offered insights into such matters as wide seasonal variations in the rate of pay by an employer to the same employee for the same work in the same year (p. 10). Labour^power was a commodity like any other, ruled by the vagaries of the market; when work was scarce and labour-power plentiful, i.e. in winter, which also happened to be the season of the labourer's greatest need, wages fell. When workers were scarce, their labour-power increased in market-

value. One is also reminded of other accepted facts of life in earlier times, like high mortality owing either to epidemics (black diphtheria wiping out five of eleven children in a family in the first two months of 1843, p. 31) or to inherited susceptibility to a disease (consumption causing the deaths of a father and five of his seven children who reached their teens, p. 39).

The Wright genealogy provides in-formation one does not necessarily expect to find in a family history. The reader learns how common people survived great catastrophes like the Miramichi fire of 1825, which burned to death some 160 people, but no Wrights (pp. 30, 43-4), and how they were affected by cataclysmic events of their time. In the case of the California gold rush, Charles Nathaniel Wright1 died at age 20 or 22 of yellow fever a few months after his arrival in San Francisco (pp. 33, 89-90). Other relatives also went, and one was killed by Indians (p. 16). It may be worth noting, however,

1 Referred to in Stephen MacCallum, "The Voyage of the Fanny" The Island Magazine, Number Four. Spring-Summer 1978, pp. 10, 13.

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J. Clinton Morrison Jr.

that Stephen, the father of Charles Nathaniel, would have resented greatly a reference to his son as one of the "common people," for he took inordi-nate pride in his social connections. This and other, similar information — for instance, the strong disdain of several Methodist Wrights for the McDonald-ism2 of certain relatives — serve to undermine flattering myths about the 19th-century Island forming one har-monious, egalitarian community based on mutual respect and forbearance. Intermarriage with such people as McDonaldites was regarded by some of the Methodist Wrights as unthinkable, and one family tradition has a woman in her early twenties going into a terminal "decline" after being refused permis-sion to marry a McDonaldite. These tid-bits are tantalizing to the historian who wishes to gain a realistic apprecia-tion of the texture of the times. Whether this account of Jane Wright's death in 1841, or another, attributing it to tuberculosis, is correct, is less important for the historian (although perhaps not for the genealogist) than the revelation of rigidly sectarian attitudes, inhibiting social intercourse even between Protes-tant denominations (pp. 28-9, 32-3).

Other patterns emerge more gradu-ally from a reading of the work. For

2 See David Weale, 'The Minister': The Reverend Donald McDonald," The Island Magazine, Number Three, Fall-Winter 1977, pp. 1-6.

example, regardless of how much the original Loyalist refugee family suffered at the hands of republicans, their descendants displayed little reluctance about emigrating to the United States. No reader could fail to note how frequently the 19th-century Wrights moved to Massachusetts, Maine, California, or other states. One is especially reminded of this upon en-countering, on p. 88, Wright descen-dants actually moving to the Canadian West in 1896 to seek their fortunes. The historian is tempted to ask whether, in the collective family memory, the an-cestral Loyalism became unimportant. It is true that prior to 1896 the Canadian prairies were not attracting significant numbers of immigrants from any place of origin, but Montreal and Toronto seem also to have been largely ignored by the Wrights as possible destinations. It is in such matters that the limitations of genealogy become most apparent to the historian. History is more than the sum of individual and family biographies, and order must be imposed upon the material. Yet there is inherent in geneal-ogy a lack of thematic unity other than that derived from the structure of the family. The information in a genealogy is miscellaneous and its distribution is as unpredictable as the survival of sources and the predilections of an almost infinite number of individuals. Only an index of unimaginable complexity could make all the information in such a study as The Wrights of Bedeque readily accessible, and hence there is no substitute for a thorough reading.

The second book under review focus-ses on Robert W. Morrison Sr. (ca. 1831-1916), an emigrant from the Scottish Highlands who accompanied his parents to Lot 21, Prince Edward Island, in 1841, and his descendants. The author, J. Clinton Morrison Jr., has adopted an organizational format somewhat different from that of Doris Haslam in her study of the Wrights. There is an explicit attempt to link the family history to a wider historical context, for it is only after rather general chapters on the Morrison clan in Scot-land and the social history of the Highlands in the 19th century, and 19 pages of genealogical charts, that the actual genealogy commences. It is in the genealogical sections, however, that knowledge is advanced. Like The Wrights of Bedeque, Morrison's book adds much colour and concrete detail to certain aspects of Island history; but it is

Doris Muncey Haslam.

evident that a firm editorial hand could have improved the text by sharpening the line between speculation and fact and by eliminating stylistic cliches.

Thus genealogy can provide the historian who is sufficiently patient with much raw material for his trade, as well as reminding him of the potential of oft-neglected sources. Yet if history, the record of past events of societal import-ance, is to be written, the historian needs to impose his own order upon his material, based on the questions he, as an historian, must put concerning causa-tion, historical significance, and change over time.

Sources The books under discussion in this

review article are: The Wrights of Bedeque: A Loyalist Family by Doris Muncey Haslam (two volumes), privately printed, Summerside, 1978, 992 pp. $34.95 paperback; and Robert W. Morrison Sr., Emi-grant from the Highlands, and his Descendants : The Geneal-ogy of a P.E.I. Family ( 1 8 3 1 -1 9 7 8 ) by Clinton Morrison Jr., pri-vately printed, Summerside, 1978, 365 pp., $12.95 paperback, $18.95 hardcover.

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