What was it like to leave your home? To leave your family behind? To cross the ocean? To come to America? To live in a land where you did not speak the language? As an immigrant, to raise a family in a new land? To be a child of immigrant parents? What was it like? A simple question that can open many doors for family historians.

Genealogists are no longer satisfied merely to learn the names, dates, and places that connect one generation to another, as researchers have been in the past. Today’s family historians seek a bigger picture. They want to know what their ancestors’ lives were like. Researching our ancestors’ pasts means learning not about major events that occurred in history, but the daily incidents and local happenings that directly affected their lives.

Genealogists view historical events through the microscope of the individual. It isn’t knowing and analyzing circumstances that changed history, it is understanding the history that affects the lives of people. The Irish famine of the mid-nineteenth century caused millions of Irish to leave Ireland and come to America. This was an event that changed the history of America and Ireland. If your ancestors left Ireland at that time, you will want to know what life was like in 1850 for the newly arrived Irish in New York City’s Five Points Section, where many Irish families resided. In knowing that an immigrant ancestor was a New York City police officer in 1880, you will want to learn what it was like to be an Irish man in New York City, to be a policeman, and if being an Irishman in the New York City Police Department was a different experience than for someone already established in the American mainstream. By researching social history and placing your ancestors in their time and place, you learn what life was really like for them.

Some of us have the luxury of being able to ask our immigrant ancestors "What was it like?" When interviewing family members, don’t stop at names, dates, and places. Though these are important clues that will lead you to the records that prove the relationships between generations, the names, dates, and places can often be found in the records. They do not tell you what your Italian grandmother was like. Did she find life difficult in a strange land or did she adapt easily? Did she have a good sense of humor? Did she like to sing or play the piano? What was her daily life like? How did she cook? What did the family eat each evening? What did she serve at holidays? The answers to these questions will bring her to life.

Some of us, lacking living immigrant ancestors, will have researched the immigrant experience in the time and place that our ancestors lived. Life will have been different for the Jewish family in New York City and for the Swedish farmer in Wisconsin. But research techniques will often be similar.

One of the first lessons you should learn is to get out of the genealogy section of the library and explore the rest of the library—the children’s section, the map area, the social science section. Leave the historical society and venture into the university library to study social history, where you’ll learn new research skills. You won’t find our ancestors listed in social history books; here you’ll be taking notes on experiences that were common to most immigrants, knowing that your ancestors probably had similar experiences.

Within the broad field of social history, look for specific topics for your ethnicity that will detail the lives of immigrant ancestors. By researching the key elements of social history in books on ethnic groups, you’ll learn about the general experience shared by many immigrants from the same country, realizing that your ancestors probably did the same things.

Focus your research on the places your ancestors lived and the time periods when they resided there, using their ethnicity as the key. Working from the general to the specific, for example, you might read about Italians in America, then about Italians in Boston in 1890 because that was when your Italian ancestors lived in Boston.

To plan a research strategy, you can use the elements of social history outlined by Sharon Carmack, CGRS (see below) as a guide while researching books on social history with these topics in mind. Instead of perusing the index of a book on the Irish in America for the McVetty family, I would look under "occupations" for "police"; instead of searching for the DeBartolo family in a book on Italian immigration, read about child–rearing patterns in the Italian community. Because social history books are not about specific families but are about general experiences shared by many people with the same ethnic identity, social histories describe everyday life as our ancestors probably encountered it.

When you narrow your research to the time and place that our ancestors lived in a particular community, you will understand hat life was like for your family in more specific terms. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1823–1863, by Robert Ernst, explores the impact of the surge of immigrants on New York City. If your ancestors settled in New York City during this time period, many of the examples of ethnic life will describe what your ancestors probably experienced in their daily lives.

Oxford University is currently publishing the American Family Album series of books on the immigrant experience. Each book focuses on a specific ethnic group. To date, five books in the series have been published. They cover Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans. In general terms, the authors, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, explain the historical events that caused immigrants to leave their homelands and come to America. They describe life in America and the social customs the emigrants brought with them to their new home. Firsthand accounts taken from immigrants’ oral interviews, letters, and diaries augment the overview of the immigrant experience. The quotations are documented so that researchers can locate the original papers, many of which are in library collections.

"We left in a two-wheeled cart that carried a big home-made trunk, my mother, two of my brothers, my sister and also a cousin . . . to Palermo, which was 40 miles away . . . " writes an Italian immigrant going to Naples to board a ship for America. "The Mediterranean was very rough and we had to travel some distance to get to the ship. It took all night. And I remember so well there was a lot of crying . . . " Does this describe what your ancestor also went through to get to Naples?

Eighteen-year-old Francis Hackett described his aerial in New York harbor in 1901. "The sky over New York was flawless, and it seemed much further away than the vaporous Irish sky. The warmth of the air was too much for a youth wearing a thick Irish tweed suit, but it was part of the novelty. Everything was like vacation; it was all so gay and foreign. Yet under the excitement, I was aware . . . that Ireland was forsaken . . . "

When we leave the genealogy section of the library or historical society and venture into other sections, we begin to take a broader view of genealogy and the lives of our ancestors. For many of us, asking our immigrant ancestors what life was like for them is impossible. We have to have other ways to have our questions answered. Researching the history of an ethnic population may help explain why your family left western Ireland in the 1880s. Reading the letter of an Italian immigrant, in which she describes leaving Palermo at the same time your ancestors did, gives you a firsthand account of experiences perhaps similar to those of your ancestors. When immigrant ancestors have passed on, their lives can be recreated by genealogists who ask "What was it like?" and find the answers using social history.

Place
Food
Migration
Time & Season
Social Architecture
Leisure
Marriage
Religion
Death
Child raising
Sex/Intimacy
Work
Superstition
Education
Naming Patterns
Health
Language
Rank/Power
Dress
Economics
Old Age
Government
War/Military

Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas. American Family Albums series. New York: Oxford University Press.
_____. The African American Family Album, 1995.
_____. The Chinese American Family Album, 1994.
_____. The Irish American Family Album, 1995.
_____. The Italian American Family Album, 1994.
_____. The Mexican American Family Album, 1994.

Suzanne McVetty is a full time researcher specializing in Irish, New York and New York City, and Long Island research. She is a consultant, lecturer, writer, and teacher of genealogy.