effectively initially by genealogists, and their work in indexing them for more rapid use has been prodigious. The focus on the county courthouse, where the great majority of the vital materials for social history still lies, has occupied the attention of genealogists far more than that of historians. In fact, the frequently expressed disdain by historians concerning the usefulness of these records, often allowed to decay by neglect, borders on archival irresponsibility.

Here I would like to develop the argument for a closer relationship between the new social history and the new genealogy. On one side, the concerns of historians can add a wider dimension to genealogy, and on the other the work of genealogists can provide crucial evidence for social history. Both, in turn, rely on the same records and could benefit from a common approach to preserving and organizing historical sources and to making them accessible.

The new trend in social history in America has come from dissatisfaction with a narrow political history, preoccupied with the big event, the dramatic and highly publicized episode. The traditional focus has been on the presidents, the wars, the dramatic election, the prominent writer. Now there is more interest in society as a whole. Since the concern of history now encompasses everyone in the social order there is a concerted attempt to seek information about as many in the entire population and their activities as possible. Over the last decade, for example, county, township, and precinct election returns have been used extensively to analyze voting patterns at the smallest geopolitical level.3 One township or one ward votes differently from another, and the pattern persists over the years-why? Such an approach seeks to relate variations in voting to differences in group cultural values. But even this data is not individualized and recently there has been an effort to ferret out what information remains in poll lists, individualized records of whether people voted or how they

A good introduction to such studies is Joel H. Silbey and Samuel T. McSeveney, Voters, Parties, and Elections: Quantitative Essays in the History of American Popular Voting Behavior (Lexington, Mass., 1972). A study based upon urban small-unit voting data is John L. Shover, "The Emergence of a Two-Party System in Republican Philadelphia, 1924-1936," Journal of American History 50 (Mar. 1974), pp. 985-1002.

voted.4 All this reflects a shift in focus toward the grass-roots and day-to-day human affairs. Other aspects of grass-roots social life also soon came under scrutiny. The most extensive recent foray into the manuscript census returns has come from historians who study geographical and vertical mobility. This research requires information about individuals, for which the manuscript census returns are the most complete source. A number of these studies examine the degree of community in- and outmigration. How many people there at the beginning of the decade leave by the end, or how many there at the end of the decade are newcomers? The evidence demonstrates a high degree of moving about, far more so than we had previously believed. But the studies are limited because the manuscript census does not tell how far a person moved; it might have been only into the next county, or it could have been several states distant. Mere departures, if added up, might give a false notion of extensive movement or in other ways distort the conclusions.

This problem immediately raises the possibility of genealogical inquiry that focuses on the life span of individuals and generations, the mini-mini biographies from birth to death, which implicitly rivet attention on the place of residence in between. Full genealogical information would provide just the kind of data that migration studies require. Moreover, some of the most promising approaches to the vexing problem of "Where did they go?" use genealogical materials. One such study, now underway, is based upon pension records of Civil War soldiers from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The pension records indicate their place of birth, their moves thereafter, and their place of

4 A review of current poll-book research and a case study of Greene County, Ill., is John M. Rozette and Paul E. McAllister, "Voting Behavior in the Late Jacksonian Period: The Conceptual and Methodological Significance of Poll Book Research," a paper delivered at the sixth annual conference on social and political history at the State University of New York, College at Brockport.

5 The difficulties of tracing migration within the United States are dealt with effectively in Stephan Thernstrom and Peter R. Knights, "Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations About Urban Population Mobility in NineteenthCentury America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (Autumn 1970), pp. 7-35.

Doctoral dissertation undertaken by David Pistolessi at the University of Pittsburgh.

death. From this research project the patterns of migration-the number and distance of moves - for at least one group of people will be described. Such moves are a fact of life for the genealogist, and much effort is spent trying to fill in the data lacking in the records. How simple it would be if each individual who moved had been required to record the place to which he went or from which he came.

in

The new social history has brought a variety of inquiries into the history of the family.7 What have been the changes over the years the size of family, the spacing of children, the activities and roles of young people, middleaged, and older people? Recent interest in youth and the elderly has stimulated new historical research in those fields. We hear of "lifecycle" as an important way of looking at more general social change. We focus on the social relationships among members of the family, between husband and wife, and between parents and children. We describe the long-run change from male dominance to more coordinate relationships between parents and changes in patterns of child rearing from the adult-centered to the child-centered to the adult-directed. Interest in the history of the family has given rise to a variety of conferences and there is a newsletter to stimulate communication among interested researchers.8

Social history has focused increasingly on vertical mobility, the changing occupational and educational levels of Americans as they move up or down the ladder from one rung to the next.9 Who moves up or down and who doesn't? The analysis has remained for the most part on the level of broad social characteristics: what percentage of people at one occupational level have children who move up or down to another; what percentage of people at one level of education have children who

See, for example, Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York, 1973).

The Family in Historical Perspective: An International Newsletter, edited by Tamara K. Hareven and published by the Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill. Subscriptions are available through the Department of History, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610.

9 Two excellent examples of work on vertical mobility are Howard P. Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York, 1972) and Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).

reach another level? All this can be examined with more insight within the context of the family. What is the family climate for occupational or educational mobility? Is there a drive for more education for the children or not? To what extent are occupations passed on from father to son and to what extent is there an effort to move out of old patterns into new ones? Within the same family, changes in education and occupation vary with different children. And certainly the historical trend can be visualized as a sequence of general changes within several generations of the genealogical family.

The new interest in ethnic history has also stimulated research on the individual, the family, and the close network of community and kinship relationships that are reinforced by a common ethnic or racial background.10 The concern for ethnic or racial identity can be explored in a general and aggregate manner with evidence drawn from ethnic sources, such as newspapers and religious documents, the writings of ethnic leaders or the fortunes of ethnic institutions. One can approach ethnic and cultural history through the medium of ideology, the self-conscious expression of identity. Yet the more fundamental context is the family itself, and the process by which cultural values are retained or modified as they are passed from one generation to the next. The impact of modernizing tendencies on traditional ethnocultural loyalties can frequently be observed most clearly in the genealogical biography. Awareness of this has prompted an increasing number of teachers to ask their students to write such genealogies, as a means of developing ideas about long-run historical processes affecting ethnicity, religion, and family.11

More recently the history of women has received increasing attention. 12 Historians have long neglected many aspects of this subject,

10 A review of recent trends in one aspect of ethnic history is Robert P. Swierenga, "Ethnocultural Political Analysis: A New Approach to American Ethnic Studies," Journal of American Studies 5 (Apr. 1971), pp. 59-79.

11 See Allen F. Davis and Jim Watts, Generations: Your Family in Modern American History (New York, 1974), a manual for stimulating student research in family history; and Samuel P. Hays, "History and the Changing University Curriculum," The History Teacher (Nov. 1974), pp. 64-72.

12 An example of the new interest in the history of women is Susan Kleinberg, 'Technocracy's Stepdaughters: The Impact of Industrialization Upon Working Class Women, Pittsburgh, 1865-1890," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1973).

assuming that the history of women was covered adequately in general histories. But younger scholars have demonstrated that this is not at all the case. As they have investigated the role of women in the family, the community, religion, work, organizations, and public affairs, such as the antislavery crusade of the pre-Civil War years, their research has opened a variety of new fields of social history. The history of women is infused with many elements of the new social history: a concern with grass-roots life rather than national events and leaders and an interest in patterns of experience, life, and thought.

Current interest in social history can be followed in ways too numerous to detail here: a shift of focus in the history of religion from theology and denominational controversy to religious values as an important reflection of human outlooks and preferences; development of a new interest in the history of youth and childhood on the one hand and the elderly on the other; a concern for the history of recreation and leisure; a marked shift in labor history from preoccupation with trade unions to a focus on work and the human setting of work; and the history of the community, of the network of personal relationships that develop within the small geographical context of the home and its related institutions. Once the perspective shifted from national events and national history to social life within the entire society, then the appropriate subjects for historical research encompassed all its activities.

A great number of questions being posed now by social historians focus on the family, its generational sequences and its kinship networks. What is being suggested is that a wide range of historical processes can be understood if seen within the context of patterns of relationships fashioned by the individual family and the intergenerational continuities or discontinuities brought out by genealogy. Rootedness within a community or migration can best be understood as choices not of isolated individuals but of individuals with different kinds and degrees of family relationships. Continuity or discontinuity of values, of customs and traditions, and of old and new perspectives can be seen in the degree to which one generation passes on those characteristics to another or ventures into new and different paths. Involvement in the processes of modernization, including education, new occupations, and new

social attachments, is a differential process in which change can be best understood within the context of family values and activities.

Insofar as improved historical understanding can proceed in this fashion, and it certainly has enormous potential, the historian is moving towards the concerns of the genealogist. In terms of common subject matter the approach logically calls for a variant of family reconstitution to include several generations, what one might term genealogical reconstitution. The format could be an extension of the family genealogical charts so familiar to the genealogist and the family reconstitution charts developed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in England. 13 The basic data as well as the method of compilation for ready use could be worked out jointly by historians and genealogists. One such effort has already been promoted by bringing together family histories written by college students under the direction of history teachers, but the success of this venture, because of its large, nationwide scale, seems questionable. A more workable form of cooperative genealogical reconstitution might well focus on mobilizing resources for community genealogy.

All this emphasizes information about individuals rather than collections of statistics and calls for the historian to take a major interest in preserving records of individuals. Until recently the majority of such records were local, rather than state and national. They were collected daily by local agencies in carrying out the functions of government. The few that were generated by national governmental activities, such as military service records and the federal census, have been the most carefully preserved and widely used. But only recently have historians begun to use such records, especially census records for migration studies, and rarely has the concern for individual data concentrated on use of state and local records.

In this area genealogists have taken the lead and shown the way. They have spent an enor

13 The reader should examine Local Population Studies, a periodical based on the Cambridge Group's demographic studies. It serves as a link between historians studying local demography and the research center at Cambridge and is published twice yearly in association with the Nottingham University Department of Adult Education, Nottingham, England.

mous amount of energy in making the individual records available. There is hardly a manuscript census index among the several hundred counties that have been indexed for 1850 which has not been a product of genealogical activity. 14 Only one such project, to my knowledge, has been initiated by professional historians. For a host of counties there are now indexes to marriage records, early land records and deeds, mortality schedules, wills and probate proceedings, and tombstone inscriptions. In view of what needs to be done the work so far is only a beginning. But compared with the state of affairs two decades ago, the change is remarkable. It now seems accurate to state that if one wishes to become acquainted with the world of local records and the data about individuals in them, one turns to genealogical organizations, publications, and publishers. 15

Historians and genealogists have been working independently of each other, and most historians do not see the wisdom of a closer relationship. But the new social history could profit

14 Progress in indexing can be followed regularly in the Genealogical Helper. For example, a genealogist, Sam McDowell of Richland, Ind., is indexing surnames in the 1850 federal population census for Kentucky. Others are indexing entire states for 1800, 1810, and 1820 or counties for later years. Few go beyond 1850.

15 Two such publishers are the Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., of Baltimore, Md., and Polyanthos, Inc., of New Orleans, La.

greatly if the energies and activities of genealogists and local historians could be coordinated with those of historians. A major requirement is that historians develop a more active interest in genealogy and community history through the medium of genealogical reconstitution. Historians should use their influence and resources to encourage the preservation and use of local and family records and the effective entry into state and national records that provide genealogical information. The efforts of genealogists could be aided by the cooperation of historians.

The expansion of higher education in the past several decades, not only through the college and university but also in the community colleges, provides an excellent opportunity for historians in those institutions to encourage community history and genealogy. To encourage their students to write family genealogies as case studies of long-run social change is one method. For the institution to use its influence to see that these records are preserved is another. The development of effective oral history programs that have a broad social context and that are not limited to the leaders of the community is still another. In varied ways an institution of higher education can work closely with genealogists in the community to mobilize the resources that are of value to genealogists and historians.

The administrator of general services is authorized by law to accept for accessioning as part of the National Archives of the United States the records of a federal agency or the Congress that the archivist of the United States judges to have sufficient historical or other value to warrant their continued preservation by the U. S. government. In addition, certain personal papers and privately produced audiovisual materials that relate to federal activities may also be accepted. Normally, only records at least twenty years old are considered for transfer; the chief exceptions are essential documentary sources of federal actions and the records of terminated agencies.

Excluded from the recent accessions described below are those that merely fill minor gaps or extend the date span of records already in the custody of the National Archives and Records Service. As noted, some of the accessions have been made by the archives branches of the federal archives and records centers and by the presidential libraries.

CIVIL ARCHIVES DIVISION

DIPLOMATIC BRANCH

Richard Nixon's letter resigning the office of president of the United States was transferred to the National Archives by the Department of State on August 16, 1974. Also accessioned were Presidential Proclamations 38844320 and Executive Orders 11443-11757, dated 1969-74, and electoral college papers for 1972. Included among the proclamations are President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon and Ford's amnesty program for draft evaders and deserters during the Vietnam War. Copies of these documents may be obtained from the Diplomatic Branch, National Archives (GSA), Washington, DC 20408.

The Department of State has transferred to the branch copies of the International Wheat Agreement of 1972, the International Grains Arrangement of 1967, and other treaties and