Genealogy Portal

In its popular form, genealogy is a dismal psuedo-science. It draws out every bad habit and arrogant tendency to jump to pretentious conclusions in a mad dash to prove genetic superiority and diminish one's own insecurities. But there is a better, less insecure way to approach the shared past; in honest genealogy we find the pursuit of human connectivity over exclusivity, ancestors multiplying exponentially generation by generation until the numbers begin the tell the story of entire human populations and histories rather than individuals, families, or even nations. "Blood and soil" disintegrates into specious anti-science gibberish under the microscope of history. An honest genealogy is not one of individual greatness or hagiographic mythologization, but one that traces the sinews of inherited perception back to a singular shared project of humanity: the inescapable reality of living in, and bequeathing, a world entirely of our own creation but not in any way truly our own. In this way, superiority and hierarchy are nothing but inherited human value judgements with no basis in reality; the solidarity of the human condition exists not in external classification and competition but in the human experience itself, passed on to posterity as a growing mound of inescapable filth upon which we stand to reach for the stars. By refusing to acknowlege the shared heritage of the human project, those pretentious star-reachers and frontiersmen of tomorrow expose a deep insecurity underlying their supremacist rejection of shared history and methodical genealogy: if "genius" is an ephemeral act and not an inheritance, divisions of class and caste are as arbitrary and cruel as the systems used to enforce them.

This genealogy portal is intended to host archival materials and resources I have found in the course of researching my New England and European ancestors who migrated to California between 1854 and 1920. In addition to serving as vital family records, many of these documents are also of wider general historical interest for historians of frontier colonialism and the American West, and serve to provide an authentic picture of life on the "frontier" beyond the fetishization of rugged cowboy individualism in popular culture and Hollywood Westerns. The story of the Shafters and Edminsters in many ways runs parallel to Frederick Jackson Turner's 19th century myth of the creation of the modern American through the settling of the frontier, but as we follow the families through the 19th and 20th centuries we see that the rugged individualism that so often occupies the contemporary imagination when regarding Old West history crumbles under the competing realities of shared struggle and fierce competition, mutualism and conquest, and sophisticated debates regarding the types of societies that were taking shape in the 19th century American West.