| This dissertation analyzes the development of family history as a popular and public practice among people and groups who defined themselves as descending from Pennsylvania German ancestors from 1891-1966 (today better known as Pennsylvania Dutch).;By intertwining intellectual, institutional, and organizational developments, this study highlights that Pennsylvania German family history, as a popular, co-operative social movement and practice, reflected intellectual and institutional characteristics of social movements during the Progressive period. The practice developed as a dynamic popular, and public form of history of the everyday lives of ordinary people, which encouraged people to take the writing of their family history into their own hands, and contribute, with their historical work, to highlighting the roles of their families and of ordinary people to the history of the development of Pennsylvania, and ultimately of the nation. This development was supported by the growth, standardization, and professionalization of a library and archival system that facilitated the development of family history as a form of self-education and leisure-time pursuit. At the same time, the movement reflected the racial foundations and social boundaries of the progressive concepts of "the people" and "the public." During the late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, family history, as a public practice, was promoted and practiced almost exclusively among those people, who traced their descent to groups of white ancestors from Northern and Western Europe, who had immigrated to Pennsylvania during the colonial (provincial) period. While promoting a concept of a pluralist people, this pluralism at the same time reflected hierarchies based on race, religion, and chronological precedence.;To situate the development of the definitions of "the people" that shaped the practice more broadly, this study also analyzes its development in a transnational context, with a particular focus on the development of relationships between family historians pursuing Pennsylvania German family history in the United States, and promoters of the pursuit in Germany. During National Socialism, German scholars attempted to use genealogy, including Pennsylvania-German genealogy, as an ideological tool in defining and implementing an ideal of the nation and the people that was shaped by volkisch ideology that defined the nation on the basis of purity of descent. After World War II, family historians in Germany and the United States began to co-operate under a regionalist umbrella in the spirit of German-American reconciliation and friendship, while remaining largely silent about the history of genealogy during the Third Reich.;This study ends in the late 1960s, when the concept of "Pennsylvania and its people" was being re-defined, and when the racial foundations of the concept were coming under challenge, changing the ideological context of the practice of family history and paving the way for the genealogy boom of the 1970s.;Thus, this dissertation not only documents the development of the practice of Pennsylvania German family history as a form of history of the everyday lives of ordinary people from 1891-1966, but also how and in what regional, national, and international context these people defined themselves and their family histories. |
