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Are you kidding? Now you want to call the parents guilty of neglect victims? A child died because of their action or inaction. The parents should be blamed. Medical professionals called it neglect and posters here are trying to make excuses for them. They were not the only poor and uneducated people at that time. Did all of of those peoples children die when they had a similar disease? No!
I wasn't talking about situations when there was inaction or action that caused the death, just plain old poverty.
Are you kidding? Now you want to call the parents guilty of neglect victims? A child died because of their action or inaction. The parents should be blamed. Medical professionals called it neglect and posters here are trying to make excuses for them. They were not the only poor and uneducated people at that time. Did all of of those peoples children die when they had a similar disease? No!
I'm not sure you fully understand the hardships that people in history have faced. Starvation and illness was a very real threat for those suffering from extreme poverty during times like, for example, the Great Depression. During the Depression, in NYC alone, there were hundreds of deaths caused by starvation/hunger. It's easy for us to be judgmental when we live during a time of relative prosperity and have systems in place to help support the poor, like welfare, and provide children from poor families with medical insurance, like CHIP. These systems didn't always exist - many families faced the very real fact that they often could not afford food or medical care.
Even today children around the world, in undeveloped countries, are still dying of starvation (as are adults). Does that mean their parents are guilty of neglect too, or do you accept the reality of their situation, that the parents also face starvation and there's nothing they can do? We live during a time when people in our own country thankfully only die of starvation if they are indeed intentionally neglected, or starving themselves on purpose, but that does not mean it was the same in history, or that it is the same today in other countries.
Additionally, medical professionals aren't social service workers and aren't qualified to say whether a death caused by malnutrition was the result of deliberate neglect, or the result of the family not having enough money for food for anyone of them, let alone medical care. In history, medical professionals probably weren't even trained to identify signs of abuse like they are today, so claiming that their opinion must be correct is a little shortsighted.
How do you handle it? Do you document the information, document and hold it back or pretend you never knew? I know of a few skeletons. The people involved are gone. I've tried to handle it delicately for living relatives, but the information is out there if you look.
Getting back to your original question, I have also pondered what to do when I've found skeletons.
As a historian, my files contain everything including all the factoids that one wishes weren't there. No one but me sees these files - not because I keep them locked up, but frankly they're quite boring with all enormous amounts of data and notes and documentations and no one is interested. Maybe in the future when I'm long gone someone will pick up where I left off and be interested in all the nitty gritties.
For that reason, in my files, I don't sugar-coat nor fabricate. I do not want to rewrite history - it's so unfair for the future. However, if there is a controversy or perceived controversy about certain facts, I record these controversies - that's what is fair for the future. This is especially the case when a piece of data is of a subjective nature or anecdotal in origin. For example, I never take a cause of death found on a death certificate as anything but a subjective piece of data. My mother's death certificate states the primary cause of death was lung disease. So very very wrong, and yet forever in the "official" records. However, my files contain that piece of data AND contain notes explaining the error and giving the true cause of death.
When it's time to share family history in an interesting readable form, I make a judgment call how to present certain facts. In some instances I give the "official" fact and the controversies and disputes. In other cases I use omission. In some instances I've privately asked the one who would be most hurt by the publication of a skeleton to ask how I should proceed. I think sometimes an individual has the right to know and to make the decision. BUT not always. There are other times when I look at a skeleton and I decide to keep it to myself, to use omission because I truly wonder if a person's life is actually enhanced knowing a hurtful truth. It's something that they cannot change, and yet learning about this something can seriously alter a person's life, and not in a good way.
Sarahsez - in the case of the death of the child and the controversial cause, I would probably use omission and only include the death date and place and not give a cause. Or I might give the "official" cause and continue with the controversial aspects - laying it all out in a nonjudgmental way. However, it would depend on who among the living is directly connected to the child's parents, and how fully publicizing or partially omitting the information might affect them.
Dealing with hurtful truths is a delicate situation. I always contemplate the end result. Does bringing a hurtful truth out into the open cause a positive change? Or does it do nothing but cause pain?
Mightyqueen, it is clear to me that you are not as sensitive to these things as others. Finding out that your parent fathered one or more children with someone other than your mother can be devastating. Some people will roll with the punches -- that would probably include me -- while others would be brought to their knees. A friend of mine is going through this right now. While she thinks it's all very interesting and wants to get to know her half-sibling, her brother is completely horrified and wants to hesr nothing more about it. Reactions vary.
Last edited by randomparent; 07-03-2016 at 08:00 AM..
How do you handle it? Do you document the information, document and hold it back or pretend you never knew? I know of a few skeletons. The people involved are gone. I've tried to handle it delicately for living relatives, but the information is out there if you look.
My Grandmother slept around, got knocked up by who knows? He (My Father) committed suicide at 40..Had some past relatives get "Disfellowshipped" (Mennonites/Quakers) and a few had "Gone round the bend"...Shrug we all have had our issues...
I'm not sure you fully understand the hardships that people in history have faced. Starvation and illness was a very real threat for those suffering from extreme poverty during times like, for example, the Great Depression. During the Depression, in NYC alone, there were hundreds of deaths caused by starvation/hunger. It's easy for us to be judgmental when we live during a time of relative prosperity and have systems in place to help support the poor, like welfare, and provide children from poor families with medical insurance, like CHIP. These systems didn't always exist - many families faced the very real fact that they often could not afford food or medical care.
Even today children around the world, in undeveloped countries, are still dying of starvation (as are adults). Does that mean their parents are guilty of neglect too, or do you accept the reality of their situation, that the parents also face starvation and there's nothing they can do? We live during a time when people in our own country thankfully only die of starvation if they are indeed intentionally neglected, or starving themselves on purpose, but that does not mean it was the same in history, or that it is the same today in other countries.
Additionally, medical professionals aren't social service workers and aren't qualified to say whether a death caused by malnutrition was the result of deliberate neglect, or the result of the family not having enough money for food for anyone of them, let alone medical care. In history, medical professionals probably weren't even trained to identify signs of abuse like they are today, so claiming that their opinion must be correct is a little shortsighted.
Good post. And as far as I know, "neglect" is not a professional medical term.
Mightyqueen, it is clear to me that you are not as sensitive to these things as others. Finding out that your parent fathered one or more children with someone other than your mother can be devastating. Some people will roll with the punches -- that would probably include me -- while others would be brought to their knees. A friend of mine is going through this right now. While she thinks it's all very interesting and wants to get to know her half-sibling, her brother is completely horrified and wants to hesr nothing more about it. Reactions vary.
I'm sure it could be. However, as I've stated already, I was not thinking of genealogy as something dealing with immediate, living family members, but rather wondered what type of secrets about people long dead would be considered hurtful. I am not sure why you aren't grasping that.
Genealogy does deal with current family members. One of my favorite genealogy projects revolves around tracing the family lines of my paternal gg-grandparents forward to find all living descendants, aided by DNA. Using DNA in genealogy research is like opening Pandora's box. People start out just looking to see what their ethnicity ratios are and end up finding out all sorts of things they weren't prepared to know, including that close relatives were not who they thought they were. A genealogist once told me that if you are the least bit worried about what you will uncover during your research, you should find another hobby.
Last edited by randomparent; 07-03-2016 at 01:33 PM..
I don't hide things, I document it on my tree. But equally, I don't go out of my way to shove it in the faces of people who were close to it and might be upset by it. It's easy to say we should all just take it in stride and move on when you're not the one finding out the father you loved and looked up to cheated on your mother, had a secret child with someone else, and yet wasn't a part of that child's life and didn't take responsibility for his actions. Or finding out that your mother cheated on the man you thought was your father, but that she actually lied to you your whole life about who your father was. It's not about blushing at the existence of bastards, it's about everything you thought you knew or felt about your father/mother/etc being thrown into question. If you can't see how that could upset someone directly involved in it, that's kind of insensitive.
Yeah, now imagine you're the "secret child" or his/her offspring and people are trying to write you out of history because your existence is upsetting. That's more than insensitive.
I agree most with last post. I have a private tree on Ancestry. I don't share the information unless I choose to. However as my Mother told me when I began to promise "warts and all". It is not research if we paint our own version. Example my first cousin knows based on court documentation that I have gone to the court house to read for myself as well, that one of the son's of my great grand father was arrested for stealing during the Civil war. Their line of the family were searching every where as to why that entire line moved from their beloved Tennessee to Mississippi and then on to Texas. I finally told them how they could research his life in the Tennessee town they left. I suggested books and people in the court house to help them. They were surprised and read much more of the whole story then I was willing to do. They documented in their family trees and it is a part of what happened. It was hurtful but true.
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