Point of View

I struggled with writing the post about the brotherhood meeting.  My goal in my genealogical writing has been to write from a sympathetic point of view.  It has been said that the easiest era with which to find fault is the one immediately preceding our own, and the era whose faults to which we are most blind is our own.  So we should not judge our ancestors by the standards of our time but rather understand how they thought and why.

But I also do not want to view them with rose-colored glasses.  They had faults just as we do.  In addition to sharing their triumphs, I want to be open about their weaknesses (as long as it does not affect living people).  But I also want us to see that in their weaknesses they really were little different from ourselves.

Regarding the brotherhood meeting, I wanted to explain how they felt about the role of women in the church and about church discipline so that a modern reader would understand how Cornelius Siemens viewed these things.  But I finally gave up since each one would require an essay and I was falling further behind in my posting schedule.