SAVING FACE
in the library or archive ILLUMINATING YOUR RELATIVE NOBODIES REBECCA FENNING
Most of us are related to non‐famous people, folks who may have made it into the newspaper when they were born, married, sued, graduated high school or died, but who otherwise did not make much of a dent in the archival record. However, just because you’re not related to the @irst female Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull [Link] like a friend of mine is doesn’t mean you have to despair of ever @inding anything relevant or illuminating about your relative nobodies in the library or archive. There are plenty of places to @ind tidbits about average people, even if there aren’t @inding aids out there with their names on them. Because March is Women’s History Month, we can take those sometimes elusive and quite average female relatives as an example. It’s not for nothing that genealogy publications and educators often dedicate whole sections of their pages and presentations to researching female relatives. From the dif@iculties of connecting maiden and married names to the simple fact that women were often excluded from the formal historical record in the past, it can be hard, to say the least. However, new efforts at inclusion, equality and historical practice make it much easier to @ind information about women in the archives than it may have been previously. Larger cultural movements concerned with civil rights and feminism aside, revolutions in the practice of social and material history have made the everyday documents produced by women of the past – such as diaries, cookbooks, letters and needlepoint patterns – valuable resources in the libraries of today.
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