You don’t want to miss Dr. Daniel Hubbard’s lectures! He started researching his family history when he was just a kid, and has a wealth of information to share with ISGS Fall Conference attendees. A former particle physicist who lived 20 years in Europe, he is a full-time genealogist, writer, and book designer; he is also president of the Lake County (IL) Genealogical Society and on the Genealogy Board of Chicago’s Swedish-American Museum.
Illinois State Genealogical Society: How did you become interested in genealogy? How long have you been researching?
Daniel Hubbard: When I was a kid, we had lots of family gatherings. My father had five siblings that lived nearby and it didn't take much to get us all together. I usually ended up listening to the adults because I was a lot younger than my cousins. I heard many family stories that way. It was when I was about nine that I realized that some of the stories that a pair of my aunts told weren't things that had happened to them. They weren't things that had been told to them. They were things that they had figured out themselves, doing something called "genealogy." I thought figuring things out like that sounded like fun. By the time I was eleven one of my aunts was regularly taking me on research trips with her. She even wrote a letter to the Newberry Library in Chicago to get permission to bring me along even though I was much too young to be allowed in normally. That was forty years ago.
ISGS: What has been a defining moment in your career as a genealogist?
DH: That is a tough question. It feels more like a continuing evolution. I suppose I would have to say either the first time one of my aunts took me on a research trip with her, when I must have been 9 or 10 years old, or, when after saying no twice to a genealogy client who wanted me to write a book for her, I said yes the third time. That was my first book for a client and I have been writing and designing books for clients ever since.
ISGS: What are you most looking forward to at the ISGS annual fall conference?
DH: I always look forward to learning from other lecturers. Lecture audiences are also a great source of new knowledge. People often ask interesting questions or make great comments. I also really look forward just to interacting with fellow genealogists. There are always fun and interesting conversations to be had!
ISGS: What should conference attendees look forward to at your lectures?
DH: My two lectures are actually closely related. My presentation “Writing Family History: Using Narrative in Genealogy” is about why one should write and how to get started, but most importantly, how writing can be a research tool. Writing is often thought of as what one might decided to do when the research is "done." Of course, the research is never really done. Writing should be part of the research process, not just because that prevents putting it off but because it is useful. For example, it allows you to see things from a different angle, which can lead to breakthroughs. It can also cause you to research something that you hadn't worked on because it seemed like a small unimportant tangent. Once, while writing something about one of my own ancestors, I looked into the identity of an item whose name I didn't recognize, just so that I could describe it for my readers. It turned out to be far from a minor thing for my research. It led directly to many discoveries, and in fact, to my other presentation at the conference. “When a Life Becomes Myth: History, Myth and Family Stories” can be looked at as a case study in how preparing to tell a story can really change the research. I start from a somewhat odd fragment of a story of an ancestor that was passed along in my family for a century before I heard it. Then I tell the story of that man's journey, and it turned out to be quite an amazing journey, both physically and mentally. I weave in documents, and mention the logic so that it functions as a case study, but I do it as a storyteller. I couldn't have reconstructed his life the way I have, if I hadn't been focused on writing his story.
ISGS: In what ways are you expanding your knowledge in the field of genealogy?
DH: I love to attend presentations. There is always something to learn. Even when the main topic is something that is outside my normal focus, the presentation might include a technique important for, say, an ethnic group that I don't normally work with, that can come in handy in other situations, or a casual comment by the lecturer might lead to an "a-ha" moment.
Much of my new knowledge comes simply from "learning by doing." I spend most of my day on client work, and often turning up a new document leads in a direction that brings new knowledge with it. That means that I learn a lot through reading and through studying the documents themselves.
ISGS: Why do you research your ancestors?
DH: I wrote a blog post (Not How-to but Why-do?) that I just reread, and a few things in that post really sum it up.
"At one level it is a pastime. A way of pleasantly wiling away the hours. It is a seemingly endless series of puzzles against which to match our wits. It is a chance to search for clues, draw conclusions and exercise our minds. For those with a playfulness about them, it can be a way for us grown-ups to play detective without being found out. It is, after all, fun."
"I get a special thrill from finding connections to history, both writ large and writ small. There is a certain connectedness with time that comes from investigating and pondering the actions, motives and chance occurrences that somehow helped lead to all of us."
"Also, there is the drive to immortalize, in some small way, the people of our personal past, that feeling that they should not be forgotten. Perhaps too, there is the motive that in a hundred years or more, when some descendant reads what we have learned, they won't just come to remember our ancestors but also us."
ISGS: You began researching your family tree when you were only 11 years old. How has getting your start at such an early age benefited your family research?
DH: First, the two aunts that inspired me to get started were still around to be mentors. Also, because they were researching my father's side of the family, I decided to research my mother's side of the family. Both her parents were still alive and so were a few other relatives of their generation that they could point me toward. Being able to talk with them and get their stories was wonderful.
I also started before the concept of "online" had any meaning and before every Federal census was indexed. Doing that taught me research skills that come in handy when the going gets tough.
ISGS: How has your previous career made you a better genealogist?
DH: I've had two previous careers. The first was particle physics. Going through the process of getting a doctorate and then being a postdoc in a research field taught me a lot about clarity, both in reasoning and in writing. It also taught me about being thorough, and really attacking problems from all directions. It also made me extremely comfortable with technology, though I don't still write physics software, I do write some of my own genealogy software.
When I was a physicist I spent eight years at CERN, the huge particle physics lab on the border between France and Switzerland. That gave me a lot of experience in interacting with people who were, quite literally, from all over the world. It also exposed me to many languages, starting with French, which I had never studied in school.
My other career was in telecommunications. I spent twelve years in Sweden working for Ericsson, the telecommunications equipment manufacturer. I did everything from programming telephone switches to being a strategic product manager. Part of that time I was a systems engineer. Though that often meant drilling down into the nitty-gritty, the main thing was to have a very broad perspective and really understand the whole. Just because some isolated details make sense, doesn't mean that the whole thing is reasonable. That is a lesson that carries over to genealogy quite well. Just because one little bit of the reconstruction of a family looks right, doesn't mean that in the broader context, it won't be wrong.
Living that long in Sweden gave me a new language. Because my wife is Swedish, it also gave me a personal interest in Swedish genealogy. Today, I do a significant fraction of my work in Scandinavian records and I'm on the board of the Swedish-American Genealogical Society in Chicago.
ISGS: Both of your lectures at the ISGS Fall Conference are about writing. What's your experience with writing and family history?
DH: Many of my projects involve writing books that can run from a hundred to several hundred of pages of narrative about the lives of the client's ancestors. I love to dig up those details, sometimes little, sometimes big, that bring an ancestor to life. Once one gets to the point where the whole of what one knows about a person is greater than the sum of the parts, the fun really begins. You will never get to that point with everyone you research but getting to it at all is magical. That is one sign that writing is really a must. Other times you may not know that much about a person but have things that just don't fit into a family group sheet. Writing gives me a way to express those magical findings. One client told me that her son, who didn't know how the book had come to be, told her, "Mom, that book read like a novel." That is what I want, to make ancestors' lives feel that real.
I like to say that the books I do for clients are like National Geographic special editions about their families, so I'm actually combining book design and image editing with writing. I like to weave in photographs, historic maps, and documents to bring the people and their times back to life for the reader. I like to get the reader's head into the right time period and allow them to feel like they are participating. They can look over at an image and see the original information.
Daniel Hubbard: When I was a kid, we had lots of family gatherings. My father had five siblings that lived nearby and it didn't take much to get us all together. I usually ended up listening to the adults because I was a lot younger than my cousins. I heard many family stories that way. It was when I was about nine that I realized that some of the stories that a pair of my aunts told weren't things that had happened to them. They weren't things that had been told to them. They were things that they had figured out themselves, doing something called "genealogy." I thought figuring things out like that sounded like fun. By the time I was eleven one of my aunts was regularly taking me on research trips with her. She even wrote a letter to the Newberry Library in Chicago to get permission to bring me along even though I was much too young to be allowed in normally. That was forty years ago.
ISGS: What has been a defining moment in your career as a genealogist?
DH: That is a tough question. It feels more like a continuing evolution. I suppose I would have to say either the first time one of my aunts took me on a research trip with her, when I must have been 9 or 10 years old, or, when after saying no twice to a genealogy client who wanted me to write a book for her, I said yes the third time. That was my first book for a client and I have been writing and designing books for clients ever since.
ISGS: What are you most looking forward to at the ISGS annual fall conference?
DH: I always look forward to learning from other lecturers. Lecture audiences are also a great source of new knowledge. People often ask interesting questions or make great comments. I also really look forward just to interacting with fellow genealogists. There are always fun and interesting conversations to be had!
ISGS: What should conference attendees look forward to at your lectures?
DH: My two lectures are actually closely related. My presentation “Writing Family History: Using Narrative in Genealogy” is about why one should write and how to get started, but most importantly, how writing can be a research tool. Writing is often thought of as what one might decided to do when the research is "done." Of course, the research is never really done. Writing should be part of the research process, not just because that prevents putting it off but because it is useful. For example, it allows you to see things from a different angle, which can lead to breakthroughs. It can also cause you to research something that you hadn't worked on because it seemed like a small unimportant tangent. Once, while writing something about one of my own ancestors, I looked into the identity of an item whose name I didn't recognize, just so that I could describe it for my readers. It turned out to be far from a minor thing for my research. It led directly to many discoveries, and in fact, to my other presentation at the conference. “When a Life Becomes Myth: History, Myth and Family Stories” can be looked at as a case study in how preparing to tell a story can really change the research. I start from a somewhat odd fragment of a story of an ancestor that was passed along in my family for a century before I heard it. Then I tell the story of that man's journey, and it turned out to be quite an amazing journey, both physically and mentally. I weave in documents, and mention the logic so that it functions as a case study, but I do it as a storyteller. I couldn't have reconstructed his life the way I have, if I hadn't been focused on writing his story.
ISGS: In what ways are you expanding your knowledge in the field of genealogy?
DH: I love to attend presentations. There is always something to learn. Even when the main topic is something that is outside my normal focus, the presentation might include a technique important for, say, an ethnic group that I don't normally work with, that can come in handy in other situations, or a casual comment by the lecturer might lead to an "a-ha" moment.
Much of my new knowledge comes simply from "learning by doing." I spend most of my day on client work, and often turning up a new document leads in a direction that brings new knowledge with it. That means that I learn a lot through reading and through studying the documents themselves.
ISGS: Why do you research your ancestors?
DH: I wrote a blog post (Not How-to but Why-do?) that I just reread, and a few things in that post really sum it up.
"At one level it is a pastime. A way of pleasantly wiling away the hours. It is a seemingly endless series of puzzles against which to match our wits. It is a chance to search for clues, draw conclusions and exercise our minds. For those with a playfulness about them, it can be a way for us grown-ups to play detective without being found out. It is, after all, fun."
"I get a special thrill from finding connections to history, both writ large and writ small. There is a certain connectedness with time that comes from investigating and pondering the actions, motives and chance occurrences that somehow helped lead to all of us."
"Also, there is the drive to immortalize, in some small way, the people of our personal past, that feeling that they should not be forgotten. Perhaps too, there is the motive that in a hundred years or more, when some descendant reads what we have learned, they won't just come to remember our ancestors but also us."
ISGS: You began researching your family tree when you were only 11 years old. How has getting your start at such an early age benefited your family research?
DH: First, the two aunts that inspired me to get started were still around to be mentors. Also, because they were researching my father's side of the family, I decided to research my mother's side of the family. Both her parents were still alive and so were a few other relatives of their generation that they could point me toward. Being able to talk with them and get their stories was wonderful.
I also started before the concept of "online" had any meaning and before every Federal census was indexed. Doing that taught me research skills that come in handy when the going gets tough.
ISGS: How has your previous career made you a better genealogist?
DH: I've had two previous careers. The first was particle physics. Going through the process of getting a doctorate and then being a postdoc in a research field taught me a lot about clarity, both in reasoning and in writing. It also taught me about being thorough, and really attacking problems from all directions. It also made me extremely comfortable with technology, though I don't still write physics software, I do write some of my own genealogy software.
When I was a physicist I spent eight years at CERN, the huge particle physics lab on the border between France and Switzerland. That gave me a lot of experience in interacting with people who were, quite literally, from all over the world. It also exposed me to many languages, starting with French, which I had never studied in school.
My other career was in telecommunications. I spent twelve years in Sweden working for Ericsson, the telecommunications equipment manufacturer. I did everything from programming telephone switches to being a strategic product manager. Part of that time I was a systems engineer. Though that often meant drilling down into the nitty-gritty, the main thing was to have a very broad perspective and really understand the whole. Just because some isolated details make sense, doesn't mean that the whole thing is reasonable. That is a lesson that carries over to genealogy quite well. Just because one little bit of the reconstruction of a family looks right, doesn't mean that in the broader context, it won't be wrong.
Living that long in Sweden gave me a new language. Because my wife is Swedish, it also gave me a personal interest in Swedish genealogy. Today, I do a significant fraction of my work in Scandinavian records and I'm on the board of the Swedish-American Genealogical Society in Chicago.
ISGS: Both of your lectures at the ISGS Fall Conference are about writing. What's your experience with writing and family history?
DH: Many of my projects involve writing books that can run from a hundred to several hundred of pages of narrative about the lives of the client's ancestors. I love to dig up those details, sometimes little, sometimes big, that bring an ancestor to life. Once one gets to the point where the whole of what one knows about a person is greater than the sum of the parts, the fun really begins. You will never get to that point with everyone you research but getting to it at all is magical. That is one sign that writing is really a must. Other times you may not know that much about a person but have things that just don't fit into a family group sheet. Writing gives me a way to express those magical findings. One client told me that her son, who didn't know how the book had come to be, told her, "Mom, that book read like a novel." That is what I want, to make ancestors' lives feel that real.
I like to say that the books I do for clients are like National Geographic special editions about their families, so I'm actually combining book design and image editing with writing. I like to weave in photographs, historic maps, and documents to bring the people and their times back to life for the reader. I like to get the reader's head into the right time period and allow them to feel like they are participating. They can look over at an image and see the original information.
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