Last updated: April 28, 2022
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Ancestry and Genealogy: Dan Finamore Interview
Introductions
My name is Dan Finamore and I'm the Associate Director for Exhibitions and the Russell W. Knight of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum.
How would you describe your job to someone unfamiliar with museum work?
I think that museum curators, generally speaking, work with historical objects and contemporary works to present to the public concepts and ideas that are of relevance to them. Ideas that can be absorbed visually rather than through text-based sources like books and whatnot. The basis of museum work is to create experiences that connect the future and the past, as well as places and cultures, in ways that resonate with them and create meaning in their own lives. I know that sounds very big picture in its own way but that's how we think about museum work.
The significance lies in the intangible. One of the things I like most about museum work is bringing a group of people in front of an object or a work of art and simply letting them absorb it in ways that can't be described verbally. You have an emotional and intellectual connection there that is hard to explain in words. It is a wow factor; I don't know why I am fascinated but I know that I am.
On a day-to-day basis what are the tangible things you interact with?
I think that when I research the collection, for instance, I look at the objects that have been created and identified as important enough to be part of the museum collection. I then delve into their stories. Why were these objects created, who created them, what were they intended to convey as utilitarian objects and/or as works of art? How can I find out the important facts about their story to weave into a tale that is meaningful for a visitor today?
One of the most amazing things is to tell stories about people’s lives that are wholly different than our experiences but also to get to a point that we recognize that their thought processes have a lot of similarities to our own. I might be talking about 1950 or 1650 -- to think about what it was like to be that person and reflect on the commonality of the human experience in some cases. I find that fascinating living in a town that is 400 years old and regularly encountering the local architecture, or Native American collections found in a farmer’s field in the 19th century, and to think about other people and how their lives progressed.
Significance and Relevance
Why is ancestry research important?
Well I do think history and, in particular genealogy, is something that can be a rabbit hole that people can go down and connect dots for its own sake. And that one can diverge from a path that was originally intended simply because you can. This leads to that which leads to this and you find wonderful discoveries that are inspiring but can also stray from your original intention of what you wanted to know. I still wrestle to know whether there is any significance who my Great Great Great Grandfather is and what that person’s life was like and why that is important to me and what your Great Great Great Grandfather was like because I don't know how important genes are in my physical makeup in my daily life and why should I care more about my ancestry more than yours.
As a professional museum curator, I spend a lot of time looking into historical archives and looking up people’s ancestry, social connections, and family connections that give me useful information to do my work. I don't spend a whole lot of time looking into my own family.
I would love to! But I'm afraid it wouldn't be as interesting as some of these other ones. I grew up in a place where people didn't record that kind of information. Whereas here, in Salem MA specifically, they were convinced of the importance of this kind of material and have been preserving it since the 17th century. That is fascinating to me that people recognize that this is critical to their own personal identities and in other parts of the world less so.
Why is it significant to New England?
There’s a historical exceptionalism that has happened in Salem where they have believed that it is particularly important to the world -- the history is important to America, founding of America and the world. I try to view it more as a case study as something that was happening around the world to the extent that I can. The historical stories that we tell and write about are the ones that are based in preserved history and the vagaries of preserved history. I have done a lot of my research over the course of decades looking specifically towards people whose histories have not been documented or documented as well. I am trained as an archaeologist originally and I worked in central America and studied people who were enslaved in Jamaica and transported to the coast of what is now Belize. They were cutting wood, forests, they were cutting mahogany to ship up here to new England and to England to make furniture. Those people’s histories are not documented as people who grew up in Salem at the same time period. But you can find some of that information through archaeology.
The same can be said of people right here in Salem whose histories were far less documented than the wealthy who had mansions and published newspapers and so on. There’s a full range of this community of well documented the stories that have been written since the 19th century and then those that we know less about and so on down this chain to people for whom there is very little documentation. Sometimes just a name, sometimes you can’t find anything more about somebody who lived at a certain property. If they didn’t own that property there are fewer documents about them, there are so many different levels by which we have to dig through in order to recapture the history of certain individuals. Some of them are right here in Salem. This is one of the best documented towns in America from a historical perspective.
Conducting Research
What are some of your research projects and why are you researching them?
I think, just taking a case example of a painting, we have a set of paintings in the collection of ships that are in an Italian port. It was painted by an Italian artist of an American ship and it has the name of the captain or first mate at the bottom. It has the name of the ship and the ship is decorated with celebratory images: the flag, the figure head, all the crew standing on the deck. We know who owned the ship because it is very well recorded in the registries and customs documents. The captain’s name is emblazoned at the bottom because he is probably the one who commissioned or purchased the painting for his home before it entered the museum collection. But there are other people standing on the deck. They’re just little dots you can’t see them all that well but there they are. The whole crew of the ship. Which includes: the second mate, the steward, the able bodied seaman, the ship’s boy who would run back and forth on errands to take care of things for the officers. It was an entire community that ship so to look at it and say he owned and mastered the ship so he took the ship to this port and conducted trade is really reductivist.
The entire crew and one could even go further and say the whole community that supported these people built the ship and created all of the materials that required to build the ship. They were all part of that investment. Some of those people sometimes we have, for this town in particular, a very rare survival of the crew lists of these voyages that date back over 200 years. We know each voyage in some cases who signed aboard at all the different levels on that ship. We can take this particular painting and say it was arriving from Leghorn in Livorno, Italy, in 1806 and there’s the captain’s name we can figure out exactly which voyage it was. There may have been twenty voyages of that ship those are the names which document the faces that you see looking out over the rail at you. In some cases, the crew list identified the ethnicities of the sailors. It was fairly common for them to be of mixed race. The maritime industries were well known to be much more mixed than other kinds of activities and shoreside activities. In some of these paintings you can see a black mans face looking out towards you. If you look at the crew list and there is one black man listed on the crew, then you will know who it is.
I have taken that information and have delved into it to the extent that I can with existing resources and see who this person was and what this person’s experience was as a lesser told story of maritime activity in Salem where the dominant stories have been about the richest men in America who owned the ships, who rose up through the ranks to become well known people. Not all of them did, but some of them have had incredibly life experience – sailing around the world, making their fortunes, losing their fortunes, never making a fortunes but working ship-to-ship throughout their days. It really is a much more nuanced and complex tale of American maritime history.
How can non-professionals support ancestry or genaological work?
In the years I’ve been doing this kind of work to aid other kinds of research, I’ve delved into the archives to answer genealogical questions for so many purposes. Sometimes just to find somebody’s relationship to somebody else. But more often to find out about histories of objects in the museum’s collections. The world has become far more integrated and networked in this and the digital revolution has allowed us to access so many more archives. You used to have to literally travel the world sometimes to get to these archives. I’ve traveled to Europe and central America and to California to look in archives in the days before all this was all available on the internet. It’s not all available, of course. I paid people lots of money to make microfilms that they would send to me and then I would pour over the microfilm. Some of that still does go on in a digital version now.
There’s the time lag and the expense but the expense is much much lower now than it used to be. And some European archives subsidize it, so they’ll send me page after page of digital photo or scan for much less money than it used to cost to do. But what I’m continually finding is the spotty nature of the preservation. Some archives have been very well preserved and are very accessible and that’s what everybody goes to over and over and over again. Certain very prominent websites that are subscription websites that you can go on and conduct ancestral research for instance. They have tons of material, but they certainly don’t have everything. There are lots of families that are sitting on their own genealogical heritage and these story lines that are not integrated. And so, how does that happen?
For instance, I have been researching for several years now, survivors of a shipwreck. There were ten people that headed out on this ship in 1811. They were wrecked they spent six- two of them survived-eventually towards the end. There were only two survivors who picked up off the wreck, six months later. One of them they stepped ashore in Kennebunk, Maine, one of them told his story over and over and over. It appeared in newspapers, he had three children each of who did prominent things and became well known in their fields and their stories are very well told and their descendants are alive today and can tell you about what their ancestor did and his experience on this ship in 1811. The other crew member stepped ashore and there is zero documentation about what happened to him after that. I have been desperate to find out what happened to him. There’s nothing and I have searched every public archive, every online database, I’ve contacted professional researchers in two or three countries. I’ve--I’m not giving up, you know this could be my life’s work. It could be this person went into the woods in Vermont and never communicated with anyone else and there is no record. Or it could be that one day somebody will load that information on to a database and I’m going to find it and all of my questions will be answered and that’s what I hope for. So the vagaries of what’s available, what has yet to be digitized and made accessible to the public versus what might have been destroyed in a fire in 1890 and is gone forever. It’s something we just don’t know.
But we live in hope, right? To try to find these things. And why is it so important? I think that it in enlivens the story of this object that’s in the museums collection and I want to tell the full story. In the end though I might have to tell the story of this person who just disappeared from public view and we don’t know what happened to them. Kind of intriguing at the same time though, isn’t it?
Exactly, yes. It’s a mystery in a way that can get under your skin. And it’s not all I’m working on but it’s always the Plan B when I have a couple of minutes I poke around and a delve a little bit more deeply and I look in some place I think I’ve never looked before and hope. I try to take a very professional view of this kind of research that I do on behalf of the museum for professional purposes: to develop these stories for the public. But it is also a very personal drive, something that really gets me up in the morning, gets me going. And I think that anyone who engages in this kind of genealogical research totally understands that. It’s a thrill when you connect with other people who are also doing it. It’s a very powerfully interconnected community of people. You just have to throw out a name, say: “I don’t understand why this person is connected to that person and how this relationship might have been…”and people will just jump on and spend hours of their time doing research for you for free because they just want to be helpful. And they get the bug as well. I find that to be really a wonderful thing to find in this day and age. People just willing to help each other for some sake.
Final thoughts
What would you tell someone who is interested in going into ancestry work genealogy work as a career?
I think that, you know, certainly the modern age people will go with these websites and play around. There is an awful lot on the websites that is the product of avocational ancestral work; some of which is very good, and some of which is riddled with errors. Once someone makes an error it tends to get repeated over and over again so there’s a learning process that takes a while to get yourself through. Certain mistakes everybody makes, certain assumptions everybody makes that are proven to be false. You have to dig your way through those and go back at every level and question: just because someone else said that this was the relationship; make sure you can document that yourself.
I think that working first hand in an archival library and looking for guidance from librarians is also a much more personally rewarding process to the extent that you are sharing your ideas with an actual person and their guiding you and mentoring you in a way. A young genealogist who has a lot to learn from a professional should develop that kind of relationship. I think it would be really helpful to go to a library ten times and then the librarians recognize: “Oh, you’re really serious.” And librarians can invest an awful lot of time in those people. They may see fifty people once who never comes back but that person who comes back over and over again; they get to know what this person wants and what they know and they don’t know. And then librarians can be very very helpful in that regard. But whether or not you have access to one of those libraries, the sources are available to start on the internet. I would start with something really simple that you actually know about and document how accurate it is. Take your own ancestries from the last two or three generations and see if it’s spelled out properly, see its complete or not, and build it from there.
Is there anything you'd like to conclude with?
I think I covered my two stories of the paths that I’ve taken and the discoveries and lack of discoveries paints the picture of the process and its likelihood and possibilities for success. You know it’s a never-ending kind of process because one question leads to another which leads to another. Which is all part of the mystery of human history. There are places in the world where genealogies have not been recorded at all and there is a time depth that goes way beyond what we know can be documented at all. My ancestors came from Europe between 1890-1910 or so, and I’ve never gone back to Europe to document them. There’s a bunch of people with similar names, it’d be interesting to know. What about 500 years ago. What about 5000 years ago? To me that is just as fascinating. Why is that of any relevance or importance in my life. I’ve never been able to figure that out, but it still motivates me. I don’t know why.
Of course, the whole notion that it all connects to the story of humanity ten and twenty thousand years ago and the interconnectedness of all of our stories. That to me, that is at the core of it all and why I think so many of us are interested in our personal genealogies. It’s the big picture. And of course, that connects in with recent studies of genetics and DNA and people’s fascination with sending off their DNA to have it tested and come back with a pie chart or some kind of a graph that tells them who they are and where they come from—as if that is of any true significance. It might be, but how it is, is telling a historical story in very very vague terms. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, having studied anthropology for many many years and having theories upended by new theories on a regular basis – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if within my lifetime, somebody comes up and shows us that what we assume today to be the truths of this DNA research was based on a single fallacy which throws it all off kilter and that actually some other direction is the true answer for us all. We shall see.
But until then, these are the best tools we have, and we’ll keep pursuing that way. I think it’s really the intangibility of it all, the intangible sort of questions of why we do it. Most people don’t ask that question, really. They are just enthused by it and when they make a discovery, they get that charge that hormonal in the brain which feels good and they go on to find another one. It’s like somebody picking through an antique shop and finding the right thing. Or opening up a pack of baseball cards and getting your favorite player. Or we live in hope that we are going to make this discovery. That were going to connect the dots and that’s somehow going to take us down the path that we want to go.