Scotch-Irish into the genealogical fold. Yet for the DAR the genealogical world was confined to those who were descendants of eighteenthcentury immigrants before 1783 and, as time went on, they constituted a more exclusive and limited group in the face of growing numbers of post-revolutionary migrants and their descendants. What had at one point in history expanded the scope of genealogical interest served in later years to limit it.

The recent burst of energy in the area of genealogy constitutes a marked change from the DAR perspective. No longer is the search for ancestors tied so strongly to their involvement in historic episodes. The interest of Mormons in the ancestors of any present member or future convert of the church has expanded the range of genealogical inquiry to a far broader number of people. Genealogical work by church members has tended to stimulate research into ancestors and families of western migrants far more than those of post-1890 immigrants to the U. S. For example, there is a magazine devoted entirely to the search for ancestors and relatives in Scandinavian countries. Yet there are important beginnings for the families of later immigrants. The Mormon records include materials from southern and eastern Europe, and the Genealogical Helper contains articles to aid in the search for ties in Poland and Italy, relations among eastern European Jews, and the ancestors of American blacks. Full development of genealogical inquiry for these newer Americans is yet to come. But its beginnings have already been stimulated. The drive for identification with an exclusive and select ancestry has been replaced by an interest in ancestry as such. The search for cultural roots is dominated by the desire to find out about one's particular past no matter what that past might be.

4

All this has been accompanied by another subtle yet significant shift, a change in per

3 The Scandinavian Genealogical Helper is published by the Everton Publishers. See also Charles A. Hall, ed., The Atlantic Bridge to Germany, vol. 1, "Baden-Wuerttemberg," and vol. 2, "Hessen and Rheinland Pfalz," and Hall, A Genealogical Guide and Atlas of Silesia (in press), all published by Everton.

4 See, for example, Peggy J. Murrell, "Black Genealogy," Genealogical Helper 26-5 (Sept. 1972):280, 415-417; Phyllis P. Preece, "Guide to Genealogical Research in Italy," ibid. 27-1 (Jan. 1973):1, 4-9; Larry O. Jensen, "Genealogical Research in Poland," ibid. 28-1 (Jan. 1974): 1, 4-6.

spective from tracing one's family back to some point in the past to tracing it forward through history from more remote ancestors to the present. The search for ancestors, of course, continues; filling in gaps in the family tree remains a major objective of every genealogist. While many of the earlier searches for Revolutionary War ancestors stopped when proof of ancestry had been pinned down, today there is increasing interest in working out patterns of descent through children and grandchildren down to the present generation. There is a growing desire for the researcher to be able to visualize himself not simply as having a remotely historical family connection but as having a kinship with hundreds, even thousands, of people tied together by a common ancestry.

There is an important change in direction here that has brought the perspective of the genealogist closer to that of the historian. The historian inevitably focuses on the flow of history: on change from some point in the past moving toward the present. Much of the older genealogical thrust was contrary to this perspective. It looked backward with a limited vision that was content to stop once a remote ancestor had been found. But the new genealogy has reversed this. More and more, genealogists are shifting to a frame of mind similar to that of the historian. The flow of thought is from a previous generation to a succeeding one, from parents to children, from the past to a point closer to the present. Until this shift occurred it was difficult for the historian and the genealogist to share a similar point of view. But the change now under way in genealogical perspective makes cooperation far more feasible. This shift in perspective has prompted the genealogist to focus on two problems familiar to the historian. The first is migration. To the historian movement in space appears to be one of the important processes in examining the continuity or discontinuity of human institutions. While one can observe outmigration, not knowing where the migrants went leads to painfully limited conclusions. For the genealogist lack of knowledge about migration is a fundamental obstacle. The task at hand is to acquire information about migrants in their new homes; without knowledge of their destinations, the family history is truncated. If this problem cannot be solved then the entire

inquiry fails. No wonder that one of the many genealogical magazines is called "The Ridge Runners: A Magazine of Migration." 5 It is concerned with genealogy in the middle belt of states from Virginia and North Carolina on the east coast through Kentucky, Tennessee, southem Indiana and Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas to the Ozark region. The area shows a coherent pattern of migration. Again, a recent genealogical publication contains an inquiry concerning the migration routes traveled by early Scotch-Irish settlers. Migration has become a subject of great interest to social historians. Genealogy, viewing history from the bottom up, through individual and kinship movements, provides evidence of migration as a process in human lives.

The genealogist has devoted considerable energy to overcoming this obstacle, and the U. S. manuscript census has been the main instrument for doing it. Until recent years this was confined to searching through the census for names of individuals in the county where they were thought to live. More recently, statewide census indexes and the federal soundex for 1880, though limited in coverage, have assisted in this. The state-wide printed index to the 1850 Ohio manuscript census enables one to find an individual name quickly; similar indexes are available for Indiana and Illinois, though in card files rather than in printed form. If each state had its censuses indexed in this way, the facts of migration would be far more readily available.R

The second perspective that comes from the newer genealogical inquiry is a sense of place and of the persistence of a family in a given place. Such a perspective is salutary in an intellectual climate in which we are prone to describe only motion, continual movement of individuals through space and time. Despite the important fact of movement, many individuals put down roots and played an important

"The Ridge Runners" is published by William A. Yates of Sparta, Mo. Another local source is the "Emigrant Registry," a file of persons who have lived in a given locality and moved away, with information about their destinations. Such a file is maintained for New Jersey.

"The opening of the 1900 census promises to be a boon for the genealogist and historian tracing the destinations of individuals. It contains a statewide soundex index for each state. One such project is already being conducted; see Charles Stephenson, "Tracing Those Who Left: Mobility Studies and the Soundex Indexes to the U. S. Census," Journal of Urban History 1-1 (Nov. 1974):73-84.

role in the development of community institutions. Thus, while in many cases the genealogist searches for kin who have migrated, in many other cases the search takes the form of intensive investigation of records in one locality covering a long period of time. From this comes an understanding of the relationships among families within a given community. Within fifty, let alone a hundred, years, the kinship context of community life takes on great significance. It is greater for rural than for urban communities. One is impressed with the way in which the new burst of genealogical inquiry has been responsible for the most significant movement to preserve and make available community records in the twentieth century. A host of county histories and atlases have been reprinted; local census records have been indexed; cemeteries have been located and headstone inscriptions transcribed; and wills and deeds, marriage records, birth and death records have been indexed. Most of this has occurred through local historical undertakings that seek to promote a heightened sense of community history.

Out of these perspectives comes an awareness of a number of historical problems that professional historians have not yet emphasized and which can be illuminated considerably through genealogical inquiry. One is the selective process in horizontal and vertical mobility. Generally we describe these matters in terms of broad social categories. Those who migrate are those with fewer community ties, the younger, unmarried, nonproperty-owning members of the community. Those who are better off economically tend to move upward in the occupational and social order more rapidly than those less well off. Yet focusing on family genealogy brings sharply to the fore a recognition of individual differences within these social groups. Within a single family, in which individual members are apparently in the same social circumstances, some migrate and others do not; some move to the city from the rural areas for better jobs and others do not; some reach higher levels of education and others do not. Genealogy sharpens the constant differentiating process that has gone on in American

7 The West-Central Kentucky Family Research Association, Owensboro, Ky., for example, is now in its fourth volume of transcriptions and indexes to records in the nineteen counties of its territory.

history, involving both general social characteristics and individualizing characteristics.

Closely related to the patterns of individual variation is a process of sequential community formation. As a community develops some members of the early families remain to form persisting economic, social, political, and religious institutions, while others move on to become part of a new community elsewhere. To trace a family, as it moved westward from Connecticut in the 1770s, for example, might well mean tracing each generation as it set down roots in a different locality, the first in eastern New York, the next in western New York, the next in Wisconsin, and the next in North Dakota. While the individual process is one of continual movement, the family process is one of differentiation. To look only at migrants can be misleading; the process is one of the differential and sequential establishment of communities with some family members migrating and others remaining.

Finally, genealogical inquiry gives rise to a greater sensitivity to the relationship of institutions to individual migration. In the nineteenth century, movement within the United States seems to have been confined to relatively short distances and within small-scale institutions. A sequence of short-distance rural migrations was far more common than movement over a thousand miles of terrain; movement to a town or city was far more the case when it was nearby and where the opportunities were readily perceived or known by word of mouth. For nineteenth-century rural migrants the movement was inexorably westward, rarely south or north, and even more rarely to the east. By the twentieth century, however, considerable long-distance and even reverse migration had set in, mediated by large-scale institutions. After a long sequence of westward movements, families began after World War II to move in a variety of directions. Individuals became involved in institutions of national scope that enticed or transferred them in ways

that could not be predicted. For some, higher education led to more higher education elsewhere; professional training led to job opportunities elsewhere; employment in a national corporation transferred one in any of a number of directions; and service in the armed forces took one far beyond the community of origin. A series of involvements in nation-wide institutions resulted in a pattern of movement far different from the regular sequence of farm to westward farm or farm or small town to city, characteristic of the nineteenth century.

We should not overemphasize the degree to which the new genealogy has fulfilled its promise. There is much in the records and history of family and kinship that genealogists have not yet developed. It seems to me that the major contributions they have made are twofold; first, the reorientation toward the sequence of descendants rather than a given ancestor who can be clothed with importance, and second, the perspective of migration, and the differentiating processes of migration between individuals and institutions of movement and those of community development. Yet genealogists can go much further. Just as I would urge historians to reach out to work with genealogists, so I would urge genealogists to broaden the context of their family histories to make them more meaningful cases of historical inquiry. Thus far few family historians have gone beyond brief thumbnail biographies, of birth, death, marriage, children, and perhaps migration and occupation. Some facts about education are beginning to creep in, but there is little about religion, the specifics of educational or occupational institutions, recreational activities, the nature of work or community activities, or physical descriptions of housing, farm or community. It is time that genealogists seek from historians the kind of family and kinship information historians would like to have and expand their bare-bone biographies into accounts in which the family members come alive as human beings.