Ancestry Magazine

Visit a living history museum for a day and get a real sense of what life was like for your nineteenth-century ancestors.

A splash of water has grayed the cement floor under the drinking fountain of the Kline Creek Farm visitors center in Winfield, Illinois. The fountain doesn’t leak; like the rest of the building, it’s only three months old. The day is bright and sunny, without a hint of rain, and the pine-paneled building’s plumbing and air conditioning systems are functioning normally. So where did the water come from?

Facility supervisor Keith McClow knows. The pavement is soaked every time city kids get their first taste of well water, he says. The children take one gulp of mineral-laden groundwater, then turn and spit it out on the floor.

As they visit this historic 1890s farm, set on a forest preserve thirty miles west of Chicago, the youngsters learn firsthand the differences between “urban” and “rural.” They experience a lifestyle that little resembles their own. They even taste it. But their parents also get an education. Together, they discover what daily life was like for 1890s DuPage County farmers, and perhaps even for farmers throughout the Midwest. If they’re mindful, these families also learn something about their ancestors.

Living history museums like Kline Creek Farm are not new to family historians, whose love of things past often leads them to study general history along with their family’s beginning. However, the museums’ research value has traditionally been viewed with skepticism, i.e., researching documents in a state archive is considered a worthy form of family history, while living history museums are not as helpful because they are so general. In truth, such museums will never take the place of primary research. However, if approached with caution, they can be a valuable supplement because they color family history with tastes, smells, sounds, and feelings.

Breathing Life into Names and Dates
Before visiting Kline Creek Farm, I knew relatively little about the Vandre-line ancestors I inherited through marriage. I had a few names and dates and some occupational information, all gleaned from censuses, marriage records and short biographies, but I wanted to know how these people lived. I chose to explore Kline Creek Farm because the records indicated that some of those ancestors (farmers) were transitioning into adulthood in the 1890s, the museum’s time period.

One ancestor was Gustav Adolph Vandre, who was born on 26 January 1862 in Niagara, New York. Gustav’s family moved to Illinois soon after his birth. They are listed in the 1870 and 1880 censuses as farmers living in Mound Township, Effingham County, Illinois, where Gustav married Sophia Regina Voelker of West Township on 25 January 1891. Along with most of his brothers and sisters, Gustav’s life appears to have been spent on the farm.

Armed with this information, I headed off to Kline Creek Farm. Although the farm is in DuPage County, not Effingham County, which is farther south near the state’s center, I hoped to learn some general lifestyle information that might be applicable to farms across Illinois. I also hoped to experience something my ancestors might have found commonplace.

My visit began at the farm’s v isitors center, where a circle of photo displays and artifacts walked me through a farm wife’s weekly work schedule. I thought of Sophia Voelker Vandre. She and I had both married young, and I imagined what it would have been like to live and work in Sophia’s shoes.

Friday would have found me scrubbing floors, beating rugs, and making the house tidy for Sunday. There was no vacuum, and although I still wash my own wood floors once a week, the museum sights told me Sophia’s job would have been more difficult. After all, she wasn’t using a modern squeegee mop with built-in wringer.

Monday and Tuesday would have been devoted to laundry. I would have had to gather and sort the soiled clothes on Sunday night, then spend Monday scrubbing them on a washboard with lye soap. And how do you remove grass stains without Stain Stick or Spray and Wash? One word: scrub. You run the clothing up and down on the board again and again as it rests over a bucket of soapy water. Then you scrub some more, until your fingers are almost raw from the grooves in the washboard.

Once the clothes came clean, they still had to be put through a wringer, hung out to dry, and ironed–a process that filled the second laundry day. In Sophia’s shoes, I would have reheated my iron manually on the stove throughout the process, each time carefully monitoring its temperature so as not to scorch the clothes.

These and other considerations of the farm’s daily activities enthralled me, and they are the real payoff of visiting living history museums. When you want to go beyond names and dates, when you want something more than a lifeless walk-through of a re-created room inside a typical history museum, and when you don’t just want to see an old wood stove but also watch it heat a pot of coffee, you visit a living history museum. There, you can either get involved in the process or watch someone else live it, and then you understand.

The experience is multi-sensor y. You don’t simply look at a tool, you see it in use. You hear the sound it makes, you smell the scent it gives off, and your hands get callused. You feel the pull of the horse against the plow and exert your own sweat in trying to keep the blade straight as it scratches out a furrow. It is you who tiptoes nimbly around the chickens in search of eggs, and you open the granary chute to load the feed box with oats. When the activity is more than you can handle, you watch a trained professional walk you through it. You might see a costumed farm wife handling a wood stove, boiling horehound from the kitchen garden down to its essence, then combining it with sugar to make horehound candy. And when you taste that candy, you understand its bittersweet satisfaction. (Or, as some visitors do, you gag on the horehound aftertaste and spit it out.)

Sometimes, too, you get to experience something entirely new. You might practice sending a telegraph message or write with old-fashioned pen and ink, smearing your fingers as you become accustomed to the pen’s tip. Or you might watch a farmer cut large blocks of ice into smaller chunks that will cool the ice house throughout the summer. Through these activities, you will know the daily demands your ancestors dealt with and which organized their days, weeks, and seasons. You’ll even understand how each person’s role complemented the others, and how the family as a whole benefited from specific activities. And through it all, you will strengthen your own family history through a multi-faceted, multi-leveled method of education and research.

Gauging Accuracy
Museum directors applaud when visitors truly comprehend their featured lifestyles in ways similar to the ones just described. That is the purpose of their sites: to help people appreciate and understand past life through participation. But the museum operators also have a caveat. There is a point at which you can take the information too far, an d that point is when you start making sweeping generalizations. You simply cannot say to yourself, “This is exactly what life was like for my ancestor.” Once you do, an infinite number of variables exist to prove you wrong. With that in mind, a consideration of living history museums’ limitations can be helpful in developing a healthy level of skepticism.

Kline Creek Farm, for example, has had to make a few compromises. Its pasture fences are made of woven wire instead of the barbed wire prevalent in the 1890s because of modern liability issues. Similarly, the museum’s barn was outfitted with twice the number of support beams than its original predecessor so the structure would meet today’s building-code requirements. To care for and cultivate the farm’s two hundred acres would take twelve horses and a full-time equine staff, so Kline Creek Farm maintains only three horses and pays local farmers to cultivate surrounding corn fields with modern equipment. Because of these compromises, visitors should be forewarned that a few of the items they see should be considered only at face value.

Be particularly attune to descriptions of relationships, methods, and interaction. Ask yourself and the museum guides how they know the fact they are presenting, or what facts they are using to draw their conclusions. And even more important, ask yourself whether that conclusion may only be applicable to a particular site instead of a larger area or time.

Also, historical re-creation and research is inherently biased. Even when great care is taken to get an objective view of things, each research and each presenter has a point of view that slips through with the facts. For instance, in his work, Ron Crayton, a seasonal staff member at Kline Creek Farm, admits that he sometimes becomes “quasi-political.” He grew up on a dairy farm in Battavia, Illinois and has been saddened by modern uses of rich, agrarian land. He often weaves environmental reminders int o his discussions with museum visitors.

Perhaps unwisely, though, museum visitors often trust site interpretation almost without question. In fact, Steve Miller, director of the Landis Valley Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, says these museums are trusted even more than teachers, textbooks, and documentaries. Perhaps that’s because they dedicate more time than other sources to very detailed aspects of historical life.

However, “Living history sites have one thing that no one else can deliver: authenticity,” says Miller.

Edward Baker, assistant director of interpretation at Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea (Mystic, Connecticut), explains. “The authentic experience might include smelling the smoke of a black-powder rifle, even though the rifle was a reproduction rather than an original from the past,” he says. The accuracy lies in the presentation, according to Baker. “Is the rifle appropriate to the time period, for the location? Was it fired and used in a manner in which it might have been used in the past?”

“The goal of living history museums,” Baker continues, “is not to create the past, but to use historical objects and accurate programming to engage the public in their past, so new understandings of themselves and the present can be made.”

You can therefore enhance your experience by focusing on activity and engaging yourself in that past, both through your participation and through your questions.

Getting the Most from a Living History Museum
Maintaining an inquisitive mind is a good starting point for distilling genealogical information from any museum visit. But there are other specific actions you can take to better prepare for your visit and to interpret it accurately.

1. Know some specifics about the museum you’re visiting. Since each farm or museum offers different activities and varying levels of realism, be prepared for what you’ll witness. Most museums also have Web sites or are discussed in guidebooks. Search the descriptions to determine whether your destination museum is geared toward visitor participation or whether you will be a spectator. Sometimes that will depend on when you visit and what the museum has planned for the day, so check the event schedule.

Determine whether the interpretation will be given in first-person or in third-person. If you’re visiting a first-person interpretation site, at which costumed employees speak and act as if they actually lived during the time, you may want to prep your children on the answers museum workers might give them so they won’t be confused, for example, when an employee pretends not to know what a car is. Third-person interpretation has less opportunity for such confusion because the costumed employees act as modern-day guides playing a temporary role.

2. Plan your level of involvement. If the museum offers “authentic” activities, such as helping with chores, plowing a field, or tapping maple trees, plan your participation ahead of time. Schedule your visit for a day when such an activity will take place, preferably the activity in which you are most interested. The museum will likely offer a variety of options that are linked to the date and season. On Kline Creek Farm, for instance, visitors can help with plowing and planting in the spring; game days, evening picnics, and preparing animals for the fair in summer; sheep shearing, harvesting, and cooking demonstrations in the fall; and ice cutting and maple-tree tapping in winter. Holidays are excellent times to visit because most museums offer special programs that coincide with them, especially for Independence Day and Christmas.

3. Familiarize yourself a little with the time period and its lifestyles. Find out what major events were making headlines during the decade you’re visiting. What was happening locally? What were some common work trends, and what were people thinking and talking about? These simple facts, gleaned from summaries and short books, can give you a basis from which to start interpreting.

4. Dress appropriately. Depending on the museum’s level of interaction, you may need to carefully select your attire. If you’re going to participate heavily at a farm museum, make sure you wear work clothes and come prepared with gloves. McClow recommends that his museum’s participants wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts, and hats to protect themselves from thorns and the sun. He also says sandals should be avoided. Basically, just be prepared to encounter manure, open holes, and weeds.

5. Keep yourself and your children safe. Safety on the farm means paying attention to possible scenarios. For example, you should avoid sitting on fences or allowing your children to do so because you never know how old the fence might be or how close the animals might get. “Those are 2,000-pound horses. Their heads are extraordinarily hard, and there are flies all over them,” McClow explains. “If they swing their heads unexpectedly, they will knock out and throw you down.”

Also, if you don’t know how to operate a tool, don’t play with it. That goes double for tools you don’t recognize. The Kline Creek Farm places locks and covers on some of its equipment to prevent accidents. Take the grain grinder, for instance. “Even people in the 1890s who knew what they were doing would injure themselves,” McClow says.

6. Spend time orienting yourself to the farm. Museum directors agree that the orientation phase of living history museums are critical to helping visitors get more out of their experience. But too often, people skip over the introductions. Don’t waste your time figuring out what everything is on your own. Learn quickly in the museum’s visitors center or during its tour, and then you’ll be equipped to explore and ask informed questions.

7. Ask for specifics. In order to determine whether the situations and lifestyles you see are applicable to your family, you must ask detailed questions. When you hear about a trend, ask whether the trend was common for your ancestors’ place of residence. Find out which items were used regionally and which had national acceptance. And ask which items are artifacts and which are reproductions.

8. Find out if the museum has a library or archive. Research libraries are common among living history museums. A smaller percentage are open to the public, but if your destination has one, determine its holdings. Mystic Seaport, for example, has an extensive collection of maritime records that are available to the public. This collection includes more than 1.5 million photographs, many of specific ships. To further prepare for your visit, learn the library’s hours and identify the research librarian. Determine whether he or she must be present when you visit, and whether the library will be open to you. Talk to the librarian about your specific research objectives.

By following these steps and the care outlined above, living history can be an engaging complement to your research. You can walk away with insights like the ones I gained, and more. And once you do, you’ll discover a whole new aspect of your family history.

“For some people, it’s enough to complete the family tree–the piece of paper,” Miller reminds family historians. “But living history museums enhance that.”

Megan Vandre is a former contributing editor of Ancestry Magazine. She is pursuing her master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.