ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s installment of the “Roots & Branches” column talked about “presentism” – taking an (often unintentional) view that things in the past have been the same as we think of them today – as a curse of assumption that may afflict our genealogy.

While I was using that as a jumping off point to talk about personal space in specific, it got me thinking about the all so many things that we may make “presentist” assumptions about.

You’ll probably have your own list, but here’s just a non-exhaustive number of talking points that have come up in my own research:

• How about that baptismal sponsors are always relatives? Well, I’ve heard it said that anytime you use “always” or “never,” you’ll “always” be wrong. While it’s a reasonable supposition that godparents to a baptism were not chosen randomly, they could be friends of the parents rather than blood relatives.
• When you find a record in which your ancestor’s name is spelled differently than a previous record, making the assumption that the individual “changed” his or her name. This comes from thinking that name matches were important to people before the second half of the 20^th century. First of all, such matches really weren’t crucial and, secondly, many more records were created with spellings that the creators of those records chose rather than our ancestors chose explicitly.
• Honing in on Pennsylvania Germans, you might think that the Amish and Mennonite groups always have been awfully distinct from the “church Germans” – those from mainstream Protestant faiths such as Lutherans and Reformed. Well, yes and no … but maybe “not so much” is the right answer. Remember that so many things that make the Amish so especially distinctive today (think cars and electricity) didn’t exist in the 19^th century and earlier.
• In terms of transportation and mobility, today we pretty much take it for granted that you can get just about anywhere by car that travels times are more or less the same. But go back before the automobile, barriers such as mountains, lakes and rivers weren’t things so easily traversed. This is you might find people of yesterday finding spouses who might be miles and miles away – but in the same valley – rather than finding mates in an “adjoining” town that’s close in mileage but would have required crossing a mountain.

Finally, in honor of last week’s tax deadline, we’d be accurate if we portray the deadline for filing incomes as always having been April 15 (unless delayed by weekends or holidays)? Well, of course, we would be accurate to say that: March 1 was the original filing deadline for the first modern income tax in 1913, and the filling deadline shifted to March 15 a few years later (1918) before moving to the current deadline in 1955.