Including architecture and folkways in your genealogical research

by Susan Chance-Rainwater

You’ve just received a scan of an old letter from a fellow researcher. Written by a distant relation, the letter tells the story of the Depression-era tax auction of a farm that had been in the family since the 1860s.

The letter describes a farmhouse with three shed dormers, a tobacco barn, a hog barn, a stone well house, and a two-seat outhouse. To the east of the house, there’s a running-rail fence along a dirt road. In her mind’s eye, the letter’s writer will always be able to see the old home place. The question is, can you?

At some point in your family research, you begin to focus on the details of your ancestors’ lives. Those details should include the landscape and buildings in which they lived.

Perhaps the most engaging approach to this problem can be found in regional sketchbooks. I’ve just acquired one of these, Nancy Sawin and Virginia Carper’s Delaware Sketch Book, which contains 88 pages of beautiful pencil drawings of historic homes, barns, outbuildings, churches, bridges, boats, and even a few of the Mason-Dixon markers. Printed at a local press, the hardest part is finding out that these books exist. I learned about mine on a Facebook group focused on Delaware history, and bought it at Amazon.

For a more scholarly approach, try Henry Glassie’s Patterns in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States and Vernacular Architecture. These books combine drawings, photos, folklore, and good explanations of building function and design.

Artist-historian Eric Sloane’s Americana series includes books such as Our Vanishing Landscape and America Yesterday, covering homes, farm buildings, churches, hand tools, even waterways. Sloane provides detailed diagrams for everything from outhouses to mill wheels, forges to fences. These books are slim and to the point. These books are a really good starting place.

For the architecture of homes, you can’t beat A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage McAlester. McAlester was a Dallasite, one of the activists behind the creation of the Swiss Avenue Historic District and a founder and past president of Preservation Dallas. The book is packed with photos and diagrams, and covers both formal and folk architecture. I also like Carol Rifkind’s A Field Guide to American Architecture, for its inclusion of commercial and farm buildings, which aren’t covered in McAlester.

Coffee table books are surprising resource. These books are short on scholarly prose, but contain lots of photos. Need to know the difference between a skipjack and a bugeye? A coffee table book on Maryland’s Eastern Shore is bound to have a good photo of these sailing oyster boats. During the golden age of book clubs, publishers churned out these books on every conceivable subject and region.

Finally, the Foxfire series, which now runs 14 volumes, covers the folkways of the Appalachians, preserving knowledge that goes back to colonial days. Wondering how your ancestors planted crops, foraged for food, or made their own clothes? These books are a treasure-trove of regional customs and skills known to your ancestors, but nearly lost today.

By adding a few books to your reference shelf, you can put together a good mental picture of the family homestead and their daily life, without ever seeing a photo.

Bibliography

All of these books are available through Amazon.com. Most are also available at the Dallas Public Library.

Henry Glassie

• Patterns in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States
• Vernacular Architecture

Eric Sloane

• Our Vanishing Landscape
• America Yesterday
• American Barns and Covered Bridges
• An Age of Barns
• A Museum of Early American Tools
• The ABC Book of Early Americana

Virginia and Lee McAlester (1st edition) and Virginia Savage McAlester (revised edition)

• A Field Guide to American Houses

Carole Rifkind

• A Field Guide to American Architecture

Foxfire Foundation, Eliot Wigginton, George P. Reynolds, Kaye Carver Collins

• Foxfire, Volumes 1-12
• Foxfire 40th Anniversary Edition
• Foxfire 45th Anniversary Edition