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REVIEWS
JACOB'S WELL: A CASE FOR RETHINKING FAMILY HISTORY
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by Joseph A. Amato
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| Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 2008. Photographs, notes. 268 pages. $32.95 cloth.
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| Joseph Amato is Professor Emeritus of History and Rural and Regional studies at Southwest Minnesota State University and a founder of the Society for Local and Regional History. Amato now offers Jacob's Well, a study of his own multiethnic and migratory family, as a companion to his 2002 book Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History (University of California Press). His stated goal is to "expand the historical imagination of those who wish to write family histories that have significance for national, economic, and social history" (p. ix). To achieve this, Amato employs what he terms the "trinity of family history: genealogy; history, especially local and micro-regional history; and storytelling" and links his family to broader social and cultural developments (p. 242). Yet, this family history is also a specific personal journey and memoir. Family history, Amato believes, "provides a distinct type of self-knowledge" (p. ix). |
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After a methodological overview, Amato begins with a history of his two grandmothers — Sicilian immigrant Rosalia Notaro Amato and "American" Frances Boodry Linsdeau. Their distinct lives and personalities inspired him to trace his family's past. He then provides chapters that comprise a general chronological reconstruction of his family's experiences. He reaches back to the Acadian origins of the Bodrot family in Nova Scotia and traces their eviction and exile to Massachusetts, then to Maine and Wisconsin, where the Sayers branch joined the family tree. Parts of the family migrated to Ohio and Kansas farmlands. Others moved to mill towns like Appleton and Menasha, Wisconsin, in the late nineteenth century. Amato's grandparents came to Detroit, and his own parents, Ethel Linsdeau and Joe Amato, embraced consumerism, weathered the Depression, and claimed a measure of postwar security in this city of industrial modernity and "progress." Amato believes that family history should be connected to broader themes and should provide a narrative. He contends that his family history demonstrates the dreams and challenges of the poor across generations and their belief that something better lay ahead, with migrations first to marginal farmlands and then to jobs in industrializing cities. |
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Amato uses secondary sources to analyze such big picture developments as the Acadian exile, the Sicilian immigrant experience, the development of working-class Detroit, and the importance of the automobile to upwardly mobile families. He also utilizes family records, interviews, letters, and other genealogical sources such as city directories, census data, pension applications, and property records. Throughout, he weaves the stories of quarrels, generational differences, family celebrations and traditions, and successes and disappointments, all gleaned from his mother, uncle, and other members of his extended family. To this trinity of family history sources he adds his own reflections and suppositions about the psychology and motivations of his ancestors and extended family members as well as his own memories and experiences. |
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Jacob's Well is at times a chronological narrative and at others a stream-of-consciousness rendering of subjects, ideas, and connections. Amato is present in every chapter as a first-person narrator, as a travel guide linking present sites to past events, and as a tutor on research sources. He is a psychologist, a philosopher, and a poet. The chapter that centers on his great-grandfather James Boodry provides an illustration of this wide-ranging content. Amato begins the chapter with the image of James Boodry and Ella Frances Sayers at their wedding in 1867 and remarks on the resemblance he has to Boodry "as if he and I were the same person" (p. 127–28). He says that Boodry's violent death from rabies helped define his family and then takes several pages for a discussion of the different kinds of deaths among his relatives through the years. He recounts James's death in detail and comments on sources from local newspaper accounts to family stories to his own visits with relatives. He includes a poem that he wrote about this death. Then he discusses Boodry's life in Appleton, Wisconsin. He returns to Boodry's death and wonders how his own grandmother was affected by the dramatic and public end to her father's life. It "must have humbled and angered her," Amato writes, "I know it angers me. I find myself shouting out, 'God, why do you let us, our kind, die the worst of deaths! Dogs' deaths!'?"(p. 145). |
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The chapter on Amato's own parents' lives in Detroit is one of the strongest in terms of the relationship of their experiences and beliefs to the larger historical developments of twentieth century work and gender patterns, consumerism, and mass culture. In this chapter, he also offers his own memories and the impact of his parents' choices on his life and development. Here Amato refers to his mother as "Ethel" but also as "Mom," thus blurring the distinction between writing of her as a historical subject and as an extension of his own memories. But perhaps Amato wishes to make the point that, in his view, the two are not really distinctions after all. |
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Readers looking for a strictly chronological, third-person narrative of family history will not find it here. A paperback or second edition would offer the chance to amend a number of proofreading errors, particularly in the first sections of the book. The review copy had no index. But, overall, Amato succeeds in linking his family story with broader social and cultural trends and uses the "trinity" of secondary sources, genealogical sources, and "storytelling" to "expand the historical imagination of those who wish to write family histories" (p. ix). Throughout the book (and particularly in a final chapter on his own life and in the conclusion) Amato connects his individual story and psyche with the history of his ancestors, making Jacob's Well as much a personal memoir as family chronicle. |
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| Kimberly Jensen
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| Western Oregon University |
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