A Family’s Genealogical Time-Journey Trail: An Historical Geography of Industrialization and the Great Lakes

A genealogical time-journey trail traces family origins in the context of social and economic change in order to demonstrate historical geographical patterns of livelihood, migration, settlement, and urbanization that contextualize the time-journey trail. With increasing attention to DNA-based genealogical research in popular culture, the idea of tracing origin stories across time and space to illustrate historical geography and cultural landscape, and vice versa, becomes especially salient. Asking how and why then and why there, I trace my own paternal lineage of Gaelic-speaking, Catholic Scots Highland migrants who became United Empire Loyalist farmers in Canada and whose descendants mined iron ore in Upper Michigan and Minnesota and shipped iron ore on the Great Lakes, moving them to white, English-speaking, Protestant, college educated industrialists living comfortable lives in Cleveland, Ohio. My own post-World War II generation benefited from accumulated generational wealth sufficiently to be able to choose post-industrial careers and move away from Cleveland. Reflecting on the economic and social contexts each generation encountered and opportunities they enjoyed along their portion of the family’s time-journey trail helps explain how they contributed to the ever-evolving historical geography and cultural landscapes of the United States. Resources for undertaking both genealogical research and understanding historical geographical context to map a time-journey trail are magnified by the increased wealth of information available on the internet.