Oftentimes we research honed in on a single person. That is the genealogical norm. True, many of us have multiple ongoing bits of research but we are still researching individuals, one here, one there but individuals nonetheless. Any one person comes into focus sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
Sometimes that way of working takes us nowhere. Then it might be time to research a whole community with all its complexity
. No one comes into quick focus, but the fog may slowly lift on a whole village and allow us to pick who we want out of the crowd. It can be a laborious process. It can mean defining people not so much by who they are, but who they aren’t. It can mean figuring out who was neighbors with whom, who had come of age and who had passed away, a sort of fencing in of people in space and time. They might be people that you have no idea why you might be interested in them. Yet every little adjustment of the lens that brings them into better focus, brings the whole community into better focus. Eventually, those obscure references in records start to make sense and provide clues instead of confusion. Eventually, you might be able to pick your ancestor’s face out of the crowd.
Lately I’ve been researching a rural community in Tennessee back into the 1780s. There are no easy answers, so following ill-defined land sales and figuring out who was neighbors with who is the order of the day. The men I’m researching at any given moment may have nothing to do with the immediate problem, but that they were neighbors tells me something of the spacial relationships between their other neighbors and starts to show where other people might have lived, or if they still lived there at all. When a man sold what seems to be his last piece of land in the county, it hints that he may have moved ons and the picture becomes just that little bit less fuzzy.