Should family history books contain more poetic sensibilities?
Captions, with dates and names does get repetitive and easy for readers to skim, scan, or overlook completely. Naming things can emphasize interesting details and can evoke a poetic sensibility.
There is an art to staying out of the way, and letting the artifacts and information speak “for itself,” … in as much as that is possible …
Here, we’ve labelled less, included fewer captions and taken interview material and condensed it down to report only on the most essential characteristics.
And there’s something fascinating about not interpreting documents for readers.
Instead the focus can be on providing versions of the original content -in this case a will- and letting the reader work, a bit, to see what it is, to decipher it, to see what strikes them. Often there’s more meaning in working to discover what something is and what it means …
It is interesting too, how you can take one photograph and crop, or color it to use it in multiple “frames” of information, such as with Laura, here.
Each time, it becomes a different photograph. That’s what is so fascinating about this work, how putting the same information, or photographs, into different contexts, even right next to each other can help show and tell and emphasize different things.
There’s an impossible art when trying to show family tree connections, especially past three generations …
Here is one version of a family tree (six generations) repeatedly shown in the margins, beside each new bit of information. Every family history book, especially going back more generations, can start to seem like a Russian novel. We get the same names, Jr.’s and Sr.’s. We get so many names. We get the same people, but named and described in different relationships. There’s so much that can turn even basic family connections into a puzzle that nobody wants to put together!
Maps, those things that tell us where we are and where we were and so much more …
I mean, who isn’t in love with maps -zoomed in, zoomed out. We are so lucky to have Google Maps and an endless (online and archived) array of maps and visuals for -place- that we can layer, embed information on and through, describe, put arrows next to, mark, place in time. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate maps should have their head examined! : )
