Structural Genealogy: The Occupational History of the Cook-Simms House – Kaari Newman

Structural Genealogy: The Occupational History of the Cook-Simms House – Kaari Newman

Structural Genealogy: The Occupational History of the Cook-Simms House by Kaari Newman

In the pandemic summer of 2020, I spent my time tracing a genealogy–not of a family, but a building. In its centuries-long history, the Cook-Simms House in downtown Wilmington, Delaware has housed several multi-generational family businesses, from a nineteenth-century herbal apothecary to a turn-of-the-century cigar shop to a twentieth-century diner, “home of the Original Hot Texas Weiner.” Until 2020, this eclectic history was obscured from the public eye, and without the digital creativity enforced by the Covid-19 lockdown, it may yet still be unknown. Indeed, of the 211 hours I spent researching the Cook-Simms House, only eight were spent onsite at the Delaware Historical Society’s research library.

Therefore, in addition to narrating the occupational history of the Cook-Simms House, my project enacts a kind of hybridized research strategy that complicates the archival/digital binary. Indeed, it is not so much a question of how to keep archives relevant in the digital age, but of how to use digital technologies effectively in activating archival collections. In tracking down the Cook-Simms House’s history through the various digital repositories available to me during that isolating summer, I discovered more than just names, addresses, and dates. I discovered that the genealogy of this building became a story of genealogy itself, a timeless story of how a material structure passes from parent to child, from family to family, from self-sustaining enterprise to community-supported landmark.