Carmack, Sharon DeBartolo. Discovering Your Female Ancestors: Special Strategies for Uncovering Hard-to-Find Information about Your Female Lineage. Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1988.
Though Carmack’s book is nearly twenty years old now, it holds up astonishingly well. For instance, seeing a section on matrilineal genetics in a book that was published in 1998 is more than a little surprising. Additionally, the book underscores the importance of studying case studies and utilizing a variety of methodologies to help discover the answers to your questions on female ancestors. Further, the author stresses the importance of writing up your findings even before there was such as a thing as standards in the field of genealogy.
Unsurprisingly, this book appears to have received a rather lukewarm reception over the years. Finding female ancestors is one of those topics that people tend to view as a “brick wall” problem. Often, people are looking for that one magic document, or that one super secret resource to help them find their way. So when they open a book that tells them to go out and get educated about the records available in the locale they are researching, to really study and understand what each of those resources are saying, to learn about the social context that may have had an impact on their person of interest, and to correlate their findings and write them down, it’s no surprise that those “magic” solution people might be disappointed.
While it’s true, this book does not give you the location of that one document that will solve all of your problems, it does go over some of the common sources that might help you formulate a conclusion on your own. And not only does she go over the sources, she further advises you on a number of other published works where you can find additional information about them and where to find them. The section on women in legislative documents, particularly in legislative petitions, is especially informative. But sources are only part of her multi-step approach to success with finding your female ancestors. The next step involves integrating the social history by learning about the kinds of lives our ancestors were living. Like the sections covering sources, she also mentions several reference works for more information on topics like the immigrant experience, slavery, Native Americans, Jewish women, rural and urban life, to name a few. The book closes by bringing sources and social history together in an example of a case study which serves to underscore the importance of writing up your findings.
But sources and examples of methodology are not the end of this book. Carmack also includes a glossary, a discussion of a selection of laws effecting women, the previously mentioned section on matrilineal DNA, endnotes with further information and sources mentioned in the text, a source checklist, and a comprehensive bibliography more than twenty pages long. These sections alone should reserve a place for this work on anyone’s bookshelf.
For all of the value included in the work, there are a few shortcomings. The author, likely attempting to provide a simplistic approach for readers of all skill levels, divided her discussion of sources into two categories: “Sources Created by Women” and “Sources Created About Women.” While the idea of trying to keep things simple is understandable, these categories are not effective, and in the case of “Sources Created About Women,” can even be considered misleading. For instance, military records, which are included in this section, are most likely not records about women. The majority of the time, they are records created about men, which often include information about women as a sideline. While there may be exceptions to this rule, such as the rare female soldier who earned a pension or whose military service generated a service record of her own, telling people that these records are created about women is most definitely misleading. It also can impede the interpretation because it confuses the “how” and the “why” a record was created during the analysis. This category can give people a mistaken idea about the creation of the sources included under that heading.
Leaving the less-than-successful headings aside, the other shortcomings are primarily stemming from the age of the work. For example, The Board for Certification of Genealogists did not publish its The BCG Genealogical Standards Manualuntil twelve years after the publication of this book, so readers will not find specific information on how to meet the Genealogical Proof Standard (or GPS) in this work. But this actually highlights what makes this book so great: Even without a formal set of standards, the author informs the reader on how to construct a sound foundation that will likely lead to a conclusion that meets today’s GPS.
If you’re looking for a book that tells you exactly how to solve your particular problem, or how to find that one magic document, you won’t find it here. If you’re looking for a work that was developed to be a reference, to help you think and find your own way, you’ll be more than pleased.