Local history studies & research projects

Collage of archival reference titles as a symbol of the many resources used in local history studies. — Local history word cloud elements, courtesy of WordArt *wordart.com*.

Please note that many of the local history articles presented on Arborealis flow from the editor’s family history research interests. Thus the depth and breadth of topics will be delimited by certain periods of time and specific to certain local districts. — Republication of transcripts under the sub-menu items, above, is pending. (2020-12-18).

Why study local history?

What is local history? One definition of this endeavour was given by Kammen and Wilson (2012), viz.:— ¹

Local history is the study of history in a geographically local context and it often concentrates on the local community. It incorporates cultural and social aspects of history. Local history is not merely national history writ small but a study of past events in a given geographical but one that is based on a wide variety of documentary evidence and placed in a comparative context that is both regional and national.

Family history without any concern for local history makes for dry reading material indeed. On other hand, aspects of local history can inject flavour, give people pause about the world in which their ancestors lived, and fill in contextual gaps where individual records are scarce or simply have not survived.

Traditionally, “reading history” at university focuses on the grand sweep of larger-than-life events: the words, art or trajectory, are often employed to describe this approach. Alternatively, local history can be viewed as the history of the people who lived more ordinary lives than not. This perspective will include the leaders and heroines, the arch-criminals and the wild-eyed miscreants, but only if they are discovered in the course of a local history project. Other ways to consider the place of local history within the broader subject is to consider it a slice of that larger history pie; as a concentric ring around the individual and family unit, like layers of an onion or more colourfully, one of the smaller matryoshka dolls. ² However, these rings and layers are not static.

Local history studies also focuses on the interconnectedness between those layers and the social networks developed thereby. As with other kinds of networks, the social is fluid and changes over time. One small change can create a very different network, and these changes are continuous. Further, local history research borrows freely from a wide array of interdisciplinary subjects such as sociology, economics, politics, anthropology, geography, and, as has become apparent recently, epidemiology.

In reading and examining elements of local history, we can discover not only the context in which our ancestors lived and the temporal changes in those contexts, but also any advantages they enjoyed or constraints under which they laboured. We can identify societal norms, and changes in those norms, at the neighbourhood level. Most importantly, the local history of almost any specific area will differ from the overarching themes identified by traditional historical research. By “doing local history,” we find out how our neighbourhoods, villages and towns, townlands, or parishes differed from the average experience portrayed at the provincial, state, or national level. It is a study that focuses on the variances around the norm at the local level. If we ignore the history set into motion by the larger actors, our understanding of local history will suffer by that omission.

Guidance for doing local history :

Detailed local history resources are difficult to find for periods before 1700. However, the list of resources is almost endless for the modern era. A reading list for local history studies can be gleaned from the word art collage at the top of this page. A short list could include:

the unit of study:—in Ireland, these can be townland studies, and in England and Scotland, parish studies. However, local history did not necessarily conform to official territorial divisions. Sometimes we have to look to other factors, for example, the landscape (a village lying between two hills in the Cranborne Chase), or part of a parish that gravitated towards the nearest market town (Glenkeen and Bohard townlands in the parish of Aghaloo to the town of Aughnacloy in the parish of Carnteel).
important international and national events that shaped conditions, and how local units of government responded and reacted;
the natural landscape and how both natural forces and human effort have changed its appearance and geography over time;
trends in built architecture;
maps, atlases, and gazetteers, and how these changed over time;
academic research and analysis published in historical journals and periodicals;
extant and changing legislation and regulations published by Acts of Parliament (or similar governing body) and in parliamentary papers, and again, how local governments interpreted and applied these laws;
archival documents and manuscripts, and other documents, including provincial newspapers, which identify specific individuals and events otherwise lost to the national record, &c.

Caveats:

It is important to keep in mind the inevitable gaps in the records and even where the records were complete, we could not describe fully or in minutiae the lives of the inhabitants of a particular village during a specified period of time. On the other hand, for local history research of events from the early 1800s, the sheer number of available resources can be overwhelming. This is a point where academic research becomes invaluable, to consult historians’ literature review, analysis of the data, and interpretations. In turn, as a consumer of data and information, the reader should have an elementary grasp of research methods in order to assess the reliability of the data. The well read student of historical sources should be able to assess the reliability and relevance of those interpretations.

Another caveat to allow for is bias, which necessarily crept into reporting, analysis, and interpretation, whether from political, religious, or other influences. A prime example is historical newspapers. Even with the bias that was (and continues to be) endemic to local news journals, the immediacy of contemporary reportage makes for fascinating reading. Finally, be aware of that old adage, “History is written by the victors,” … or was it? This perspective is challenged by Nick Sacco in his article, Bad Historical Thinking: “History is Written by the Victors.” pastexplore.wordpress.com One of his later sentences, “History is written by everybody, not just the ‘winners’” ³ is particularly à propos to this short essay on the people’s history.

Footnotes:

Wikipedia. Local history. enwikipedia.org Citing Kammen, Carol; Wilson, Amy (2012). Encyclopedia of Local History, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. pp. vii. ↩︎
Wikipedia. Maytroshka doll . enwikipedia.org ↩︎
Sacco, Nick. “Bad Historical Thinking: ‘History is Written by the Victors.’ Published 15th February 2016 to Exploring the Past, online at pastexplore.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/ (accessed 16th Dec. 2020). ↩︎

End notes :

Source citation for this page: Kilpatrick, Alison. “Local history studies and research projects.” Published to Arborealis, arborealis.ca/local-history/, accessed [insert date].

Updated 29th Dec. 2023.

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