Internment of German Americans in the U.S. Heartland

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I became interested in internment experiences of German Americans during the two World Wars when I found out that roughly 11,000 German Americans were, in fact, interned – a history few of us know. While none of my German-American ancestors were interned, one of my great-grandfathers, a German Methodist minister born in Germany, could well have been interned during World War I had flames of xenophobia had been whipped up more than they were, since everyone born in Germany were targets of suspicion. Over time, the xenophobia underlying the internments didn’t go away, but rather shifted to other groups, today principally Mexicans, Central Americans, and Muslims. Ironically, many people with German ancestry, unaware of our own history, participate in today’s xenophobia. This is why I believe that Critical Family History is, well, critically important.

So I was excited to discover Heartland: A Historical Drama about the Internment of German-Americans in the United States during World War II. Heartland, published by Sense Publishers in 2014, was written by playwright, dramaturg, and journalist Lojo Simon  and political activist and playwright Anita Simons. The play has won several awards, including Dayton Playhouse FutureFest 2008, and Long Beach Playhouse New Works Festival 2008. Sense Publishers recently released it as a book that can be read easily and used readily in schools.

The play tells a story of a German-born widow and her three children, living on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Before he died, the widow’s husband had applied to employ prisoners of war through the U.S. War Manpower Commission. When the play opens in 1941, the family is notified that his application has been approved, and two German prisoners of war are on their way. The widow is thrilled, as she and the children cannot manage the dairy farm by themselves. As the story unfolds, the family gradually develops a friendship with the two German prisoners, partly because they share a language, and also because the two young men are good workers. But non-German townspeople begin to worry that the widow may be a traitor – she has become too close to the German prisoners of war, and speaks with them in German rather than English. She is arrested, then sent to an internment camp. She never recovers from the trauma of what she is put through.

The authors explain that they became interested in writing this play in 2005 after viewing a TV documentary about the internment of German prisoners of war, paralleling imprisonment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo. They began researching German POW camps in the U.S., which led them unexpectedly to accounts of imprisonment of German-American citizens under the Alien Enemies Act, signed into law in 1798. The authors tracked down stories of German Americans who had been imprisoned, which they used to create Heartland.

Readers and family historians who want to know more about the interment of German Americans can consult the German American Internee Coalition, formed in 2005 for German-American and German Latin-American citizens and legal residents who were interned, and their descendants. There, you will learn, for example, where camps existed throughout the US and Central America that detained mixtures of German Americans, German Latin Americans, Italian Americans, and Japanese Americans.

If you are a teacher, there is much you can draw on. Heartland itself can be used in classrooms from high school on up. It is fairly short, and reads easily (although there is a fair amount of German dialog with translation available). The German American Internee Coalition provides curriculum guides for teachers. They are mapped against California's History-Social Science Framework, but could be used anywhere. The curriculum guide consists of seventeen lesson plans and three one-act plays. The lesson plans deal with issues such as the Alien Enemies Act, motives behind imprisonment, black lists, and stories of prisoners.

I believe this is a piece of U.S. history that all of us should know. To me, it demonstrates that none of us is safe from xenophobia, but also that our collective memory of imprisoning U.S. citizens continues to be eradicated, even when it's part of our own family stories. Perhaps if we knew our history better, we would be less likely to repeat it.

Book Review: The Hummingbird's Daughter

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How would you approach writing a novel -- or even a short story -- about someone in your family tree? This is a challenge I have wrestled with, and I found it incredibly difficult. On the one hand, I feared straying too far from the facts I was able to find about my ancestors and their lives, concerned that my imagination might be taken as “truth” in the minds of readers. On the other hand, however, their lives seem to embody stories worth telling about what it means to be human in specific contexts. In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea brilliantly straddles this dilemma as he “recounts the true story” of a distant relative, Teresita Urrea.

Luis Urrea’s deep insights into living a bicultural life, as was Teresita’s, probably stem from his own birth in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother. Currently Urrea is professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago. A best-selling author of thirteen books, he has published extensively in multiple genres, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. 

The Hummingbird’s Daughter chronicles the first half of the life of Teresita Urrea, who Urrea grew up believing was his aunt, but later learned was actually a more distant relative. Teresita was born to an Indian mother and philandering Mexican land-owning father in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in 1873. She lived several years in the state of Sonora, then was exiled with her father to the U.S., where she eventually died in 1906. (A sequel, Queen of America, picks up her life after exile). 

The story is set in antecedents to the Mexican Revolution against president and dictator Porfirio Díaz. Teresita grew up learning to navigate the worlds of Mexico's Indigenous people and the landowners who descend from their colonizers. She learned arts of healing from Huila, a beloved Indian curandera. She identified with the People (Indians who worked the ranch), and more generally with the various Indian tribes she encountered, particularly Yaqui and Mayo, even though she came to live in the house of her father, with whom over time she developed a strong bond. A turning point in her life, and in the novel, is when she rose from the dead (or from a grave illness, depending on one’s interpretation), and became a healer working miracles. To the Indians, she was a saint; to Porfirio Díaz, she was "the Most Dangerous Girl in Mexico." 

Urrea tells her story through the genre of magical realism, which was how she was interpreted by those around her. He had considerable historical records to work with (explained in Author’s Note at end of book): writings by a friend of Teresita’s father who became a journalist in the U.S.; a tape-recorded eye-witness account of her; time spent with a distant relative who was medicine woman; a trunk full of documents, letters, and pictures related to her; many scholars who had studied and written about her; and considerable time immersing himself as best possible in the context of her life.

Urrea explains on his blogsite that the twenty-year process of writing this book was incredibly difficult, partly because he is a story-teller rather than a historian: “I had to learn a lot of things. I had to learn Mexican history, revolutionary history, Yaqui and Mayo cultural history, Jesuitical missionary syncretistic history, family history. I had to study with medicine people and shamans, midwives and curanderas. That’s a big load of study for someone who didn’t much like school. But fortunately for me, I had all this juicy mind-boggling story to play with.”

In my estimation, The Hummingbird’s Daughter masterfully synthesizes history, family memory, and story-telling. The book breathes life into the facts Urrea was able to amass. In the process, he tells a larger story of what he learned from Teresita’s life about love (between child and mentor; between a father and children born out of wedlock), spiritual power and healing, the ongoing injustice of violent conquest, possibilities of personal transformation, and human survival. 

I had a hard time putting the book down. When I finished reading it, I had not only learned a good deal about Mexican history in a specific place and point in time, while enjoying a well-told story; I also gained a sense of how I might approach deeper storytelling based on my own family history.

Family History Books for Kids

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How might teachers or parents guide young family historians? Just like considerable information exists in books and on the Internet for adults, so too are there many websites and books for kids. Here, I review three books for kids in the U.S. I selected them more or less out of a hat. When I realized how many have been published, I decided to start with three from Amazon that appear to sell well, and that differ from each other.

The Kids’ Family Tree Book (C. Leavitt, Sterling Pub Co., 2007) targets ages 7-11. This delightful, beautifully-illustrated book is loaded with detailed steps that appear very user-friendly for children. It begins with guidance on building a family history scrapbook; subsequent chapters flesh out various kinds of records and information that can be included. The book concludes with guidance for planning a family reunion and family website to share all that has been learned. Of the three books discussed here, this is the one I’d go to first because it is comprehensive without being overly detailed, and has nothing I’d be tempted to skip over.

Climbing your Family Tree, 2nd ed. (I. Wolfman, Workman Publishing Co., 2002) targets ages 8-12, and features an accompanying website that includes links mentioned in each chapter as well as downloadable charts and other tools. Chapters are organized around questions (such as what surnames can reveal or how immigration policy worked) and kinds of sources (such as family interviews, and libraries and archives). Each chapter is illustrated with photos and copies of documents, and includes specific guidance on what to do and questions to ask, as well as background information about relevant concepts (such as how to interpret conflicting dates in records). Chapters also include personal examples and interviews, connecting concepts with real people (including Alex Haley, who wrote the Introduction for the first edition). The book’s main drawback is that kids may find the amount of information and detail overwhelming, especially if just starting family history research.

The Great Ancestor Hunt (L. Perl, Houghton-Mifflin, 1990) targets ages 12-16. Published before the explosion of Internet research, this book focuses on analyzing paper and other hard-copy documents such as needlework and passports, in addition to more traditional documents such as census records and family Bibles. Of the three books, this one presents the most U.S. and world history, including a quite interesting introductory chapter about how and why people around the world have kept oral and written family records. Although the book contains much useful information, I would be less likely to choose it than the other two, partly because it is dated, but also because the others provide more hands-on guidance.

All three books begin by considering why family history might be personally relevant. Leavitt and Perl explain that it helps you understand yourself; Wolfman describes how he personally became hooked. All three then guide young people to begin the process of investigating family history with what they already know about their life and family. The books offer questions for analyzing available records, family photos, and other family treasures. They also help young people consider what their surnames might reveal about the family’s past.

The three books then provide detailed guidance for locating and examining public records, such as census records, old passports, birth certificates, death records, marriage records, and property records – kid-sized versions of the kinds of tools in this blogsite. Wolfman provides a particularly extensive collection of ideas about how to record data on family members and family groups. Leavitt and Wolfman give wonderful guidance for oral histories, along with encouragement for young people to talk with older family members. I enjoyed Leavitt’s interesting sections on medical history, what maps can tell you, and reflections on what life might have been like for ancestors when considering things that hadn’t been invented yet.

The books share some limitations. One is simply that availability of Internet resources has expanded since these were published. Wolfman’s website and chapter on use of the Internet are quite helpful in this regard. At the same time, however, since so many resources are not on the Internet (and some, such as family interviews and family documents never will be), and since many others such as census records look the same whether accessed digitally or in paper, the research and thinking process these books present is valid, even if one might add additional resources and steps today.

A second limitation is their largely shared, tacit assumption of two-parent, unblended families as the norm, particularly in presenting family tree charts, although Wolfman gives some attention to diverse family structures. Elsewhere, one can find useful tools that expand how families can look. I encourage teachers to begin with the assumption that there will be diverse family structures in any normal classroom, and to offer a variety of charts and diagrams children can use, as well as questions they can pursue, based on this assumption.

A third limitation of Perl and Wolfman is their assumption about what the “normal” historical experience in the U.S. has been. Both include history chapters about U.S. immigration, framed within a European immigration narrative to which “others” are added, similar to what one finds in U.S. history texts. Wolfman also includes a chapter near the end of the book for “special situations”: adoption, African Americans ancestors, American Indian ancestors, Jewish ancestors, blended families, LGBT families. These features “normalize” a European immigrant narrative about U.S. history, on top of the two-parent family template. My interest in Critical Family History attempts to destabilize such dominant narratives. While Ellis Island, for example, is more relevant to European immigrant ancestors than to anyone else, one can ask who was included and excluded by its very existence.

In sum, while teachers and parents should review kids' family history books carefully before purchasing, there is quite a lot available, as this sampling shows. What I haven't found yet, however, is a kid's book that situates family history within a critical social, cultural, and historical analysis like this website does. Maybe a reader will create one!

A New Zealander's Story of Italian Family Roots

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A couple of years ago while I was in New Zealand, a friend who knew of my interest in family history gave me a copy of Tessa Duder’s book In Search of Elisa Marchetti: A Writer’s Search for her Italian Family. My friend’s grandmother was a sister of Duder’s grandmother. Tessa Duder is a prolific and well-known New Zealand author of children’s books (as well as a medaled swimmer and a pianist). Her lively writing contributes to this being a very readable, interesting chronicle of her attempt to connect with distant relatives in Livorno, Italy. The book also reveals her growing understanding of why family history matters, and how to go about researching it.

Duder’s quest was influenced by Maori people (the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand), for whom whakapapa (a rough translation is genealogy) is very important. Duder explains that, “Maori children are better served by their culture’s emphasis on whakapapa. Taught little history at school, Pakeha [New Zealand European] children are craving it in their families and in an understanding from the past of what it means to be a New Zealander now” (p. 25-26). In her own family, her adult children wanted to know more about who they were: “Why was I here, why were my adult children eager to know more about their antecedents at a time when the prevailing poplar culture says history is of no account, it’s boring, who cares, let’s live it up in the here and now? The Maori had a good word for it, I said, whanau, which having deeper resonances than simply family, had passed into general use in New Zealand” (p. 91).

Having grown up with fictionalized family myths (such as the idea that the name Ferrari in the family tree was connected with Ferrari cars), Duder finally decided to investigate. So, with only a photo of her great-grandmother and a life-long awareness of Italian ancestry (for instance, her grandmother had loved to sing Italian songs), she decided to seek out long-lost relatives in Livorno, Italy, starting with the Lenzinis (Elisa Marchetti’s married name, less common in Italy than Marchetti).

Duder did her research backwards. As she explains, first she should have gone to the Auckland library, rather than to Italy. But she had no idea of the resources available in the library and online (such as census data, marriage records, death records, and books about researching Italian family history). So she arrived in Livorno without a game plan, other than attempting to contact all the Lenzinis. Much of the book reads like a travelogue of Tuscany, since she spent considerable time sightseeing while awaiting responses (she got very few, none useful). In the Livorno archives, however, she struck gold with a scholarly essay published in 1938 about the emigration of 300 Livornese to New Zealand, twenty years earlier than she had been aware of any such emigration.

When she returned to New Zealand, using resources available in the Auckland Central Library, Duder found reference this wave of Italian immigration, as well as records that allowed her to piece together her own family’s story (a process that was complicated by her great-grandparents emigrating under the names of other family members). For readers of Italian ancestry, this book may offer some useful resources (particularly its appendix of resources). For all readers interested in family history, I see it as providing two important insights.

First, the histories of poor people as well as women tend to be neglected, which distorts what we know. Duder shows that the history of her Italian immigrant ancestors, who were very poor (her great-grandfather worked as a sand-shoveller at the time of emigration), shed important light on New Zealand immigrant history. During the 1870s, the New Zealand colonial government had sought skilled workers in specific trades, contracting with Italy, since immigration from Germany had slowed; the New Zealand government agreed to pay costs of transportation and lodging on arrival. In Livorno, the man who took the job of recruiting was contracted to send a target number of people. Since he couldn't get enough volunteers with the specific skills New Zealand wanted, he began to accept anyone, which turned into disaster for the recruits. The immigration process itself required a long train ride to Hamburg, then four months at sea to New Zealand (the ship’s surgeon’s records, available through the library in Auckland, gave an extraordinarily detailed account of the voyage). On arrival in Wellington, the lack of fit between the immigrants’ skills and those the New Zealand government expected became obvious. The New Zealand government tried unsuccessfully to resettle them in different locations where they might be able to find work. Eventually, those who remained in New Zealand (some went to Australia, some returned to Italy) were brought back to Wellington where they survived as best they could, given limited work options and strong local resentment.

Writing about the invisibility of women in history, Duder commented: “As a wife and a foreigner and a Roman Catholic in a land where the white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon male and all his values reigned supreme, she [Eliza Lentini] was trebly invisible” (p. 195). Yet the women are usually the ones who hold families together in adverse circumstances. Duder describes the self-reliance and strength of Eliza and her daughters that she discovered from knowing some of them, and hearing stories about them.

The second significant insight has to do with who we are culturally. Although we learn culture from our parents and grandparents, we do not inherit culture in the same sense that we inherit genetic material. At the outset, Duder imagined arriving in Italy and basking in an Italian culture shared with long-lost family members. Indeed, she had learned some Italian culture at home, particularly her grandmother’s love of Italian music and art. But culturally, she was Kiwi New Zealand, which is evident in her descriptions of frustration she experienced in Italy as she came face-to-face with cultural differences in how things are done in everyday life. Time, for example, does not follow the same rhythms in Italy as it does in New Zealand, and her own sense of time was not Italian. Culturally, we are members of the world we live in today. Family history, rather than being a celebration of imagined cultural roots, can be better understood as knowing something of the lives one’s own life rests on.

I thank Duder for an enjoyable and informative read, and my friend in New Zealand for passing the book on to me.

Book review: Family Tree

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What might a baby, born with African American features to a White couple, reveal about their own family? Barbara Delinsky’s novel Family Tree asks this complicated question. The question of the origins of baby’s appearance took the White couple, Hugh and Dana Clarke, in quite different directions.

To Dana, whose knowledge of her own family tree was filled with holes and silences, the source of the baby’s African American ancestry was unimportant. This was her first baby, a daughter who needed love rather than analysis. To Hugh, on the other hand, the question was very important. Had Dana had an affair with an African American neighbor? Did she have mixed ancestry she hadn’t faced up to yet? To Hugh’s parents, the question loomed even more important. Hugh’s father, a prominent historian and writer who took great pride in his ability to trace his ancestry to the founding of the U.S. (in other words, he used ancestry as a way of proving his pedigree as an member of the White elite), a grandchild with African American ancestry was a travesty.

Barbara Delinsky’s romance novels normally take on complex family relationships, although on her website she tells us that the issues in this one were new to her, and she had to push herself to think them through.

A huge issue in this novel is “passing.” In the U.S., the “one drop” rule was solidified following the Civil War, in the context of Jim Crow laws that barred African Americans from participation in numerous social institutions. As Jim Crow solidified White privilege and Black subordination, numerous mixed-race people crossed the color line, passing as White. How many passed over time? We will probably never know, as those who did so had to hide their own family relationships as thoroughly as possible.

The novel prompts readers to wonder why many White people see it as important to document an elite White lineage. What might happen to one’s sense of self if one discovers that his or her lineage is not “pure”? Family Tree also probes a complicated interplay between trust and love, on the one hand, and unexplained physical “evidence.” Should Hugh insist on DNA testing to prove that he was the one who fathered the baby? Should family members use DNA testing to identify who contributed the African American ancestry?

While I felt that the pieces of the story came together a little too readily at the end (readers will have to read the novel to find out how it ends), I found Family Tree to be a page-turner that can prompt probing discussions.

The Holocaust through the Window of Family

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A friend, knowing my interest in family history in its wider social context, recommended that I read Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes. What a wonderful book! Essentially, it is a memoir about de Waal’s Jewish ancestors in Europe prior to, then during, the Holocaust. One can read it as a moving and beautifully-written insight into a horrific historic period as people lived through it everyday; one can also read it as a personal way of writing about one’s own family and search for history.

de Waal  is a ceramicist who has had numerous exhibitions and installations. He did not start out to be an author and family historian. The idea for the book grew from his quest to know more about a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke he inherited from an uncle who had been living in Japan, and with whom he spent considerable time while studying ceramics there. Netsuke, for those of you who are wondering, are small, intricate carvings made of bone, wood, or other hard material, that hung from cords on traditional Japanese obi. 

de Waal, the fifth generation in his family to inherit the collection, became intrigued with the question of who had acquired it in the first place, and why. His drive to find out led him to spend years researching what became a highly personal story of the growth of a Jewish dynasty in Paris and Vienna, after relocating from Odessa, Russia; then its decline and dispersal in the context of the Holocaust, and subsequent Jewish diaspora. de Waal's research took him to the places where the netsuke had been (such as to Paris where Charles Ephrussi was the first to buy them). He spent months reading all he could find about the family as well as reading, seeing and experiencing as much as possible what they read, saw, and experienced. Through this process, he constructed portraits of people, telling readers as part of the story how he imagined them, what he thought of them, and how his own understanding deepened as he went along.

In the process, he tells a moving story about people living within a context shaped by class, culture, religion, and anti-Semitism. Going back and forth between stories of people, netsuke, and the cultural context of their lives, for example, in a chapter entitled "So light, so soft to the touch," we learn about japonaiseries, or items from Japan that fascinated Europeans during the late 1880s. Japan was regarded as an exotic cultural Other:

Though the Japanese were extremely rare in Paris in the 1870s -- there were delegations and diplomats, and the odd prince -- their art was ubiquitous. Everyone had to get their hands on these japonaiseries: all the painters Charles was starting to meet in the salons, all the writers Charles knew. . ., his family, his family friends, his lover, all were living through this convulsion.

Later, in a chapter entitled “History as it happens,” we learn about the escalation of anti-Semitism in Europe:

In 1899, the year that the netsuke arrived in Vienna, it was possible for a deputy in the Reichstrat to make speeches calling for Schussgelder – bounties – for shooting Jews. In Vienna the most outrageous statements were met with a feeling from the assimilated Jews that it was probably best not to make too much fuss.

This book intrigues me, for some of the same reasons as it has intrigued others, I'm sure. The Hare with the Amber Eyes has won the Economist Book of the Year Award, the Costa Book Award for Biography, and the Galaxy National Book New Writer of the Year Award.

But what intrigues me most is the meticulous and loving process of research that de Waal plunged into through the time he spent in the places where his ancestors lived, his insightful rendering of their lives within historic contexts many of us have only read about, and his beautiful blend of his own personal inheritance in dialog with his ancestors. In the last chapter, he explains that his grandmother wished to burn the painful records of what the family had experienced. "Don't come near this. This is private." But then he goes on to explain that, "The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am in the wrong generation to let it go."

For that, readers are thankful.

Why Study Family to Understand History

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In her book about the New Zealand McCullough family entitled Kin: A Collective Biography (published in 2005 by Canterbury Press), Melanie Nolan challenges us to think about the relationship between broad social structures (her main interest is social class and gender), individual agency, and the nexus of family. She explains that, “We choose our friends, our social networks and, to some extent, our communities in a way that we do not choose our family. Yet . . . family can influence where you live, what work you do, your political allegiance” (p. 187).

A friend who knew of my interest in family history sent me this book. I kept putting it aside to get to “later” for quite a while. Part of the reason was probably that even though I have spent much time in New Zealand, I wasn’t sure how a history of a New Zealand family would speak to my own work in the U.S. Once I opened it and started reading, however, I realized that the book sheds useful light on the relationship between studying family and studying history.

Nolan is a labor historian who grapples with the tension between studying the large picture of class formation as it played out historically in a specific country, and the particulars of individuals within a working class family. She argues that histories, which tend to be broad and sweeping, obscure experiences of subgroups and individuals. On the other hand, biographies and family histories, while rich in detail, are usually parochial, saying little about the historical landscape in which people lived. Ultimately, she argued that there is tremendous normal variation in how people live and shape social relationships; that variation is part of history and important to understand. Family history can unearth what normal variation looks like.

The McCullough family, which is the subject of her book, was not her own family. As a graduate student, she delved into the biography of Jack McCullough, who was a New Zealand artisan working class leader in the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, as she carefully read his diary and reflected on it in relationship to her own academic background (such as her interest in gender and history), she began to see many more dimensions both in his life and in working class experiences. By expanding her inquiry to his four siblings and their families, she was able to present a complex portrait of the New Zealand working class.

The five siblings shared having grown up in a working class immigrant family, but their lives represent different ways to be working class in New Zealand. Jack McCullough represents the skilled working class, committed to activist unionism and an international socialist vision of society. Margaret McCullough Norrie, who became an evangelical Christian, represents a religious “other worldly” vision of a large number of working class women. Jim McCullough represents locally active “municipal socialists” who devoted their attention to quality of life issues, friend societies (especially the International Order of Oddfellows), and family economic independence. Sarah McCullough Kennedy represents the “ordinary” working class women whose domestic, non-activist lives of patriotism, conservatism, and religion formed the foundation of New Zealand working class family life. Finally, Frank McCullough represents white collar managers who worked their way up, and as managers espoused values of teamwork, personal development, and good character.

Situated within larger formations of class, ethnicity, and religion, families embed us in the experiences and ideological contexts of those interconnected social locations. Studying the family and its historic and cultural context can reveal roots of our own values and perspectives today. Yet those social locations do not determine an individual’s life – there is an interplay between individual shaping of consciousness and choices, and that shaped within family, which one does not choose. What I appreciate about this book is her probing of that interplay.