Maria Howard in Mourning

This is a detail from a larger photograph of Maria Howard, her son Will, and her husband Charles. Back when I first started to connect photographs to my research, I tentatively dated the photograph to about 1896 based on the age of the subjects and the location. Maria's dark dress also suggested she might have been wearing mourning for her father, William Richardson, who died in October of 1895.

Recently, I became curious about Maria's brooch. As it turns out, a closer look lends credence to the idea that she was mourning her father when this picture was taken; she is wearing a glass-faced locket, a form of mourning jewelry in the nineteenth century. (Collector Hayden Peters featured a lovely example of a similar locket in pendant form on his blog in 2010.) Although the brooch isn't in sharp focus, it does appear to hold a man's photograph.

Knowing that Maria wore mourning for her father doesn't tell us anything about their relationship; a show of mourning was a prescribed form of grieving in 1896. Wearing a brooch with a visible photograph, however, seems more personal than simply wearing black, a choice you would be more likely to make if you were grieving privately as well as publicly. Its weight would have been different from a similar gesture in the 21st century—I suspect it would have been construed as a signal for discretion and quiet support rather than a conversation opener—but still there is a sense of communicating a particular loss. Combined with the evidence I've found that the Richardsons visited each other frequently, it suggests a closeness.

When I enlarged this picture, I had just spent a lot of time searching for an antique locket to hold a picture of my father on my wedding day. Even though the one I chose looks nothing like the one in this photograph, I think the gesture is the same: an expression of a particular grief and love.

The Pebbles of History

I started researching my family history at the tender age of 12, haunting cemeteries, libraries, and the National Archives in search of information. My approach was every bit as haphazard as you might imagine, but—thanks to the patient librarians, archivists, and cemetery managers I encountered—I slowly began to understand how genealogists do their work. It didn't take long before I was hooked.

I realize now that these adolescent experiences still inform my approach to research. I hear from time to time that I'm an unusually resourceful researcher; I think that has less to do with skill than it does to applying a genealogical mindset to the work at hand. When you're doing genealogical research, finding a repository of information about your subject or having well-developed context for a specific question is a rare and wonderful treat. You use the history of the place and period you're working in as a guide, but the bulk of the work is cobbling together disparate small bits of information—pebbles of history, as it were—to support an understanding of the particular experience of a community or individual.

Working at this human scale is slow, precise, frustrating, and absolutely enthralling. You need to develop a strange blend of skepticism, imagination, stubbornness, intuition, and logic, and also an understanding of when to call forth each of those qualities. You have to be able to focus intently on a tiny detail one moment, and on the entire picture the next. There are stretches of boredom and heady moments of insight, some so profound you almost can't believe they were catalyzed by a speck of information about a single person. It will keep you up at night, but reward you with a quality of understanding you can't get any other way.

I want this blog to be a place to celebrate the practice of human-scale history, somewhere to share both what I've learned about working effectively at this scale, and some favorite flashes of insight. Thanks so much for stopping by—and I do hope you'll check back to read my next post, "Maria Howard in Mourning," which will be published this week.