Long-term Community Ethnography in Bradford County, Pennsylvania: Understanding Cultural and Environmental Change Processes from Pre-European Settlement to the Present

This long-term ethnographic project focuses on documenting, describing, and analyzing the relationships between cultural and environmental change processes in Bradford County, Pennsylvania from pre-European settlement (1500's) to today. Understanding the ways in which past changes redistributed material and social power are critical to interpreting the social, economic, political, and land use changes taking place in the 21st Century as a result of Marcellus shale gas developments, or any other large scale economic development activities. Looking at the history of natural resource extraction and land use activities, economic, social, and family conflict, risk tolerance and perceptions, as well as mapping out land and kinship relationships across the County and region (including the Pennsylvania and New York counties that border Bradford County), this project will provide an in-depth social history of a people and a place. This project is using a community-based participatory method to collect ethnographic and historical data directly from individuals and families currently living in Bradford County. The participatory nature of this project means that local participants in this study are also considered co-researchers and the future goals of the project may be modified based on their feedback and interests. Participants are keeping multimedia journals (e.g., writing, photo, artwork, scrap booking, etc.) of their everyday experiences, memories, and expectations. One to two ethnographic and oral history interviews will be conducted each year with participants to gather a deeper understanding of their evolving relationship with changes and conflicts they are currently experiencing, have experienced in the past, and anticipate experiencing in the future. Family genealogies and historical documents such as diaries, farm ledgers, account books, photographs, bibles, newspaper clippings, and other important materials are being digitized and compiled from personal collections. Archival research in county, regional, state, and national repositories is being undertaken to supplement these personal collections. Independent genealogical research is being undertaken on participant families in order to verify relationships with primary source materials. Fieldwork began in July 2013 with 15 participants and families. Recruitment of 5-10 more families is currently underway. Thus far, participants can be associated with eight distinct cultural groupings based on the preliminary genealogical record and/or participant's description of their own identities. These groupings include: Indigenous nations that were in the county prior to and after European settlement; Dutch-Indigenous-African traders, settlers and laborers in the late 17th and 18th Century; French Loyalist settlers in the mid to late 18th Century; New England settlers throughout the 18th and early 19th Centuries; Revolutionary War "Patriots" in the late 18th Century; descendants of the (mostly Irish) canal builders, coal miners, loggers, and railroad workers who arrived in the mid-19th Century; descendants of 1930's Depression-era workers that came with the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal back-to-work and education programs; and the sons and daughters of back-to-land couples and family groups that began arriving in the late 1960's. As this research continues through 2020 and the genealogical data and historical record is verified these cultural groupings will be further delineated. Understanding the relationship between different families and cultural groups and the divergent and convergent ways that specific change events affected each group will be one of the primary avenues of analysis.