This is a day when we think about the discovery of the New World. It is a good time to think about the meanings of discovery.
There are probably places where the question “Who discovered America?” could provoke a fight or at least start a heated argument, because there are several possible answers.
Paleo-Indians
The ancestors of modern Native Americans certainly arrived in the New World long before anyone else. Yet they also would have had no idea that they had “discovered” a new place. No peoples of 20,000 years ago would have had a concept of the world advanced enough for the concept of discovery to make any sense. My ancestors certainly did not suddenly realized that they had “discovered” Europe either. They followed herds and looked for edible plants and water and shelter, and ended up in a place that they had not been before—something that probably happened with some regularity.
On the other hand, if a native of 500 years ago had overheard European explorers discussing how they had “discovered” this great new place, that hypothetical native observer could be excused for thinking “Ahem…we noticed this place just a bit before you. Actually, wait a moment, beards, funny hats…haven’t I just discovered Europeans?”
Vikings
About 1100 years ago, Vikings reached what is now Canada. They were looking for new places and they certainly found a place that was new to them. Yet, they could have had no idea that they had accomplished a sea voyage to the edge of another continent. Their settlements didn’t last. Instead of leading to a spreading knowledge in the Old World that there was land far to the west, that information faded into legend. What they did was a dead end. Permanent contact across the Atlantic would have to wait.
Columbus
Here is where the credit traditionally goes. He reached the New World roughly 500 years after the Norse but his knowledge spread throughout the world. It wasn’t a dead end, but, though the evidence is mixed, Columbus seems to have gone to his grave believing that he had not discovered a new world, but that he had reached Asia.
Amerigo Vespucci
Though Columbus’s misidentification of the natives of the places he reached as Asians led to the term “Indians” being used for them, Vespucci’s Latinized given name, Americus, led to the a new name for the New World. There will probably always be room for doubt, but he may have been the first explorer to realize that it was not Asia that had been reached but rather someplace else entirely, a New World.
Discovery
So who discovered the New World? The people who reached it first but who would have had no way of knowing what they had accomplished? The people who knew that had reached someplace different but whose knowledge faded into legend? The man who spread the knowledge of land far to the west of Europe but who may never have thought of it as a truly new place? The man who was far from first in reaching it, but who seems to have realized that it was a New World? Did they all discover the New World? Did none of them “discover” it?
Genealogical Discovery
We make discoveries in genealogy all the time, and those 4 types that appear in the story of the discovery of the New World appear in family history as well.
- Sometimes we are nomadic hunters of clues. We follow herds of hints across the landscape but don’t actually know that we are first to reach a whole, new area. The knowledge to help us realize that is just not something that we have.
- Sometimes we’re genealogical Icelanders. We set off to explore. We find the tip of the iceberg and realize this is something new but further progress eludes us and we aren’t able to spread our information.
- Sometimes we make a discovery. We know it is big. We shout it from the mountaintops but in the end, we don’t really know what it is.
- Sometimes we find a little something. We think about it and combine it with other discoveries, often made by others, and suddenly we know that things are very different from what we thought. It may not be a whole new world, but a piece of the past has been discovered and put on the map.
In our genealogical voyages of discovery, the goal is the final step to that fourth type of discovery—to have the evidence, know what it means, and pass the knowledge on.