Bridging the Past is on vacation this week so won’t be posting other than to ask you to ponder the following questions:

What kind of vacations did your ancestors take (day trips became popular towards the end of the 19th century)?

Do trips to see extended family count as a vacation?

How do vacations today differ?

Have you written about your favorite family vacations?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoy lots of family time this holiday season. I will be finalizing an interview with my dad about his childhood and updating the transcription. I also plan to put up some more posts about my life as part of “The Book of Me, Written by You.” What are you plans for genealogy/social history over the holidays?

You may know that I have been working on a transcription of a handwritten collection of medical recipes from the 1600s that will be the source document for my thesis. I finally finished the 2nd pass through of transcription this week after working on it for at least 18 months. Accomplishing this milestone made me think back to why I was interested in this in the first place.

Several years ago I took a class in world history. After searching around for a topic for the term paper, I finally decided to write about medical advice and recipes for treatment of gynecological and childbirth issues in medieval England. I was surprised to find that suggested treatments for the gynecological issues were often right-on according to modern technology, at least if you think like a women in medieval England. It was believed that menstrual blood could be toxic if it built up in the body. Therefore, having a regular period was of high priority. Poor diet, however, often caused irregular periods and pregnancy could not be known until movement of the fetus was first felt several months after conception. Many of the herbs they used are known abortifacients (causing abortion) and others are known to restart a stalled period. While no doubt some women purposely caused abortions, others took these herbs without knowing they were pregnant. In any case, whether a woman was pregnant or not, by taking these herbs she achieved the desired result of restarting the period. (The treatments for childbirth issues on the other hand seemed very strange and superstitious to me).

Before this, I thought that medieval medicine was based on ignorant and unhelpful theories. Thankfully I have come a long way in adjusting my attitude to culture and beliefs in earlier time periods. In any case, this jump started my interest in social history, of which medicine is still an important part.

What caught your fancy and got you started in researching social history?

I was talking with a friend this weekend about some of the genealogy-related talks that I give, and what constitutes social history. I tried to explain a little bit to her that one lens through which to view social history is to take common documents that we use for names, dates, places and relationships and try to wring out additional information from those documents that can give us insight into the life of the ancestor. She replied, “I found in an obituary that my ancestor was a doctor and I used the census to confirm that he was a dentist. Is that what you mean?”

I replied that it was definitely a start, but social history would go further than that. It would involve learning about what it was like to be a dentist in the time period, how people viewed the dentist, what tools he used, etc. For example (keep in mind that I know nothing about the history of dentistry in the US, so the following example may be flawed in some ways), did he live in a time when people mostly came to the dentist if they needed a tooth pulled or if they had tooth pain? He might be viewed differently by the community (and dreaded even more) than a visit to the dentist today.

One of my favorite uses of documents to learn more about the social history is covered in three posts in my levisavage blog, starting with this one. Government documents and a president’s personal papers, along with correspondence from church representatives, lay out the formation of the Mormon Battalion in 1846. The government documents present a different side to the story, one that I had never heard. Reading through them helped me understand better the feelings and attitudes of people on both sides, and why the government came to ask the Mormons to join the military a few months after they had been forced out of their homes.

What are some favorite pieces of social history you have pulled out of some records–either those commonly used for genealogy and those that are not used as often as they should be?