Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

by Joseph A. Amato

Joseph A. Amato follows his own poor, obscure, and truly "mongrel" family through seven generations, revealing their place in the key events of America's past. Using powerful family traditions to clarify his personal connection to the larger stories of our nation, Amato advocates for the power of the history closest at hand in building personal identity and resisting mass culture.

268 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2008

About the author

Joseph A. Amato was an American author and scholar. Amato was a history professor and university dean of local and regional history. He has written extensively on European intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Southwestern Minnesota. Since retiring, he has continued publishing history books, as well as five poetry collections and his first novel.

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

While recognizing that Mr. Amato's writing style is sometimes closer to academic/textbook than the creative nonfiction that I enjoy, as someone who likes genealogy and regional history I really appreciated this book. Placing my genealogy into its broader and more immediate contexts is a goal I'm always pursuing, so it was inspiring to see how he went about it in this book. I thought of this book in the way that its title and preface (which reads like a sometimes-poetic introduction to a research paper, listing out goals and points) position it: as a sort of example/primer for family history done within its more specific historical contexts. I marked so many pages with quotes that I want to remember.

Many parts were also interesting to me in considering how "generalized" family history is used today (i.e., a person or people knowing they have roots from a particular region, people, or conflict, and assuming particular associations based on that, versus knowing more about their ancestors' specific stories). Mr. Amato makes the point that seeking our specific roots is also a way of learning more about history generally, which I've certainly found to be the case for myself.

I guess ultimately I'd recommend this to others who are interested in regional/local history and how it ties into family history, and for people interested in seeing examples of how family history branches out and is made, at least in part, by the contexts in which it was rooted. In the course of placing his family history in time and location, Amato also touches on regional history of parts of Wisconsin, the French Acadian story, and Sicilian history, among other things.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uninteresting. Seemed like a book written for private publishing, but not for a general audience.