Abstract
My exploration of the life and thoughts of my great, great grandfather, William McCaw (1818–1902), blended what are often regarded as separate pursuits: family history and academic history.1 In 1880 McCaw, a shepherd, writer and amateur theologian, moved from Scotland to New Zealand with his large family. Generations of my extended family have preserved the memory of McCaw, treasuring his letters and newspaper articles and passing down photographs, objects and stories relating to the McCaw family. I mined my family archive in order to build up a holistic picture of my ancestor and his views upon the world, through which I accessed and explored wider historical theories. I undertook this research on McCaw for a postgraduate degree at the University of Otago, but until I attended the 2005 public history conference at Ruskin College and began to write this chapter I had not looked into public history. The new works I read made me reflect more closely on the history I had written. Where did my research sit — and did this matter?
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Notes
A. Else, ‘History Lessons: The Public History You Get When You’re Not Getting Any Public History,’ in B. Dalley and J. Phillips (eds) Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History ( Auckland: Auckland University, 2001 ), pp. 125–7.
J. Liddington, ‘What is Public History? Publics and their Pasts, Meanings and Practices,’ Oral History Journal, 30: 1 (2002) 83–93.
D. Thelen, ‘Afterthoughts’, in R. Rosenzweig and D. Thelen (eds) The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 ), p. 190.
G. T. Tanselle, ‘The World As Archive,’ Common Knowledge$18: 2 (2002).http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v008/8.2tanselle.html accessed on 2 February 2004.
W. McCaw, ‘A Brief Biography Read on the 50th Anniversary of his Marriage: 5th January 1849–January 1899’, in W. Armstrong McCaw (ed.) Memoir and Remains of William McCaw: Cormilligan, Tynron, Dumfriesshire, Scotland and Glenore, Otago, New Zealand 1st edn (Invercargill: Family Publication, c1947), pp. 6–8.
McCaw Family Reunion Committee, Memoir and Remains of William McCaw, 2nd edn ( Milton: McCaw Family Reunion Committee, 1982 ), p. 51.
See the sixth edition: W. McCaw, Truth Frae ‘Mang the Heather, or Is the Bible True?’ 6th edn (London: S. W. Partridge and Co, c1884).
R. Wilson, ‘Cormilligan,’ Lallans, 62 (2003) 12–33.
P. Ashton and P. Hamilton, ‘At Home with the Past: Background and Initial Findings from the National Survey’, special issue of Australian Cultural History, 22 (2003) 27.
A. Portelli, ‘So Much Depends on a Red Bus, or, Innocent Victims of the Liberating Gun’, Oral History, 34: 2 (2006) 30.
H. Kean, London Stories: Personal lives, Public Histories ( London: Rivers Oram Press, 2004 ), p. 10.
For example, C. Fitzgerald (ed.) Letters from the Bay of Islands: The Story of Marianne Williams ( Auckland: Penguin, 2004 ). This volume has been deservedly popular with historians and the general public.
A. Anderson, The Welcome of Strangers: An Ethnohistory of Southern Maori A.D. 1650–1850 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press/Dunedin City Council, 1998), figure 10.1, p. 168.
See J. Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, 4 vols (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993–1999).
C. Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994 ).
A. McCarthy, ‘A Good Idea of Colonial Life: Personal Letters and Irish Migration to New Zealand,’ New Zealand Journal of History, 35: 1 (2001) 1–21
D. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia ( Cork: Cork University Press, 1994 ), pp. 26–7.
Tanselle, ‘The World As Archive’. See also E. D. Swain, ‘Oral History in the Archives: Its Documentary Role in the Twenty-first Century’, in R. B. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006 ).
P. Gibbons, ‘The Far Side of the Search for Identity: Reconsidering New Zealand History,’ New Zealand Journal of History, 37: 1 (2003) 39.
T. Ballantyne, ‘Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2: 3 (2001).http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v002/2.3ballantyne.html accessed 2 October 2002.
See for example C. Cumming, ‘Scottish National Identity in an Australian Colony’, The Scottish Historical Review, 72: 203 (1993), 22–38.
P. O’Farrell, ‘Varieties of New Zealand Irishness: A Meditation’, in L. Fraser (ed.) A Distant Shore, Irish Migration and New Zealand Settlement ( Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000 ), p. 25.
D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 232–4, 246.
P. O’Farrell, Vanished Kingdoms: Irish in Australia and New Zealand: a Personal Excursion ( Kensington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1990 ), p. 50.
R. Arnold, New Zealand’s Burning: The Settlers’ World in the mid 1880s ( Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1994 ), pp. 118–20.
J. Stenhouse, ‘God’s Own Silence: Secular Nationalism, Christianity and the Writing of New Zealand History’, New Zealand Journal of History, 38: 1 (2004), 52–71.
M. Stewart, ‘Calvinism, Migration and Settler Culture: The Case of William McCaw’, in J. Stenhouse (ed.) Christianity Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History ( Adelaide, Australia: ATF Press, 2005 ) pp. 32–56.
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© 2009 Mary Stewart
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Stewart, M. (2009). Expanding the Archive: The Role of Family History in Exploring Connections Within a Settler’s World. In: Ashton, P., Kean, H. (eds) People and their Pasts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_14
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