Immigration, Identity, and Genealogy: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper examines the life and experiences of a 19th-century immigrant from the British Isles to the United States and his family. It examines his reasons for immigrating, as well as his experiences after arrival. In this case, the immigrant chose to create a new identity for himself after immigration. Doing so both severed his ties with his birth family and left his American progeny without a clear sense of identity and heritage. The essay uses a variety of sources, including oral history and folklore, to investigate the immigrant’s origins and examine how this uncertainty shaped the family’s history in the 19th and 20th centuries. New methodologies centering on DNA analysis have recently offered insights into the family’s past. The essay ends by positing a birth identity for the family’s immigrant ancestor. Importantly, the family’s post-immigration experiences reveal that the immigrant and his descendants made a deliberate effort to retain aspects of their pre-immigration past across both time and distance. These actions underscore a growing body of literature on the limits of post-immigration assimilation by immigrants and their families, and indicate the value of genealogical study for analyzing the immigrant experience.

Family History: Fact versus Fiction

“…In addition to my father's versions-as is pointed out by so many authors working in the area of genealogy-I was also armed with my own memories of family stories told to me either by someone from the older generation who experienced things or repeated from their memory of stories told to them by their own ancestors (Hatton 2019;Knight 2017Knight , 2019Schroer and Hine 2017;Smith 2018). (Kretsedemas 2016(Kretsedemas , 2017 discusses these as socially constructed family narratives, which are inevitably affected both by how a family sees itself (or wishes to see itself) and by the narrative mythology of the times.…”