Many thanks to for her fascinating program today and for all of you in attendance, including , Anne Young, , , , , , , , , , , and so many in our community for joining the talk live today.
Today’s very special event came together through the magic we’re brewing here in a shared community of family historians, genealogists, and others. Lisa Maguire’s insight as a professional historian led her to pay attention to the nature and scope of some of the stories shared in the community. The result was her observation that many of us had started to explore microhistory.
Lisa designed today’s program as an introduction to the field. As you’ll see in the recording, the result inspired ordinary family historians and made us appreciate the importance of our work.1
In anticipation of today’s program, Lisa published a post last week that might be helpful as background:
She’s also provided the slides below you can use to dive deeper into the six approaches she mentioned:
Finally, the presentation wouldn’t be complete without the opportunity to use it to curate a series of recent posts here in the Substack genealogy community. These are by no means a compendium of all microhistory-relevant pieces. Instead, these provide an easy way to find the links she mentions in the talk.
First, is
, whom Lisa reminds us is an academic and has taken to the careful work of microhistory quite naturally. This is the post Lisa referenced.’s Culinary History publication is a delightful example with an examination of community cookbooks or her Ration Book post.
Here is a piece on the anti-slavery society. Lisa described it as an outstanding bit of microhistory that ticks all the boxes!
has many pieces about the Ojibway community on Lake of the Woods. Lisa mentioned her series about the various "legal" ways the land was taken from them.
Here’s the piece that
used to introduce his 1937 Flood Journal.
From Ann G. Forcier of Acadiann who comes to this work from the perspective of ancestral memory. Lisa describes it as a community identity that comes from memory of the event. She also references
’s recent program on Memory for Projectkin for a discussion of semantic memory.
Lex Knowlton’s work on her publication, Lex Knowlton | Knext Gen Genealogy, in the story about Jo Couche caught Lisa’s eye because it retold the same history of the Irish Civil War that her family told her but from the Protestant minority perspective.
kicks off with a story of Dominion Day.
We hold various events for family historians, storytellers, and genealogists several times monthly. I hope to see you at more of these kinds of events. Explore our Projectkin publication and join us. Our calendar is available at Projectkin.org/events. Thanks to the support of our patrons and speakers, these events are free, and everyone is welcome.
To learn more about Lisa Maguire’s work at Ancestory, please visit:
Should you be interested, here’s a link to The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, by Robert Darnton, that Lisa mentioned.
