History
Familial culture is developed, in part, through the oral history comprised and shared by its membership. The intertwining experiences of our living relatives and ancestors develop into a woven fabric composed of threads of narratives, myths, tales, and mysteries. Sometimes contradictory, the threads may unravel or get knotted. As time goes on, memory is shaped by our own experiences, and our narratives may change – not because we are dishonest, but because history is contoured by the present moment. As time passes, our recollections are sometimes softened, or made more intense. Casting the past in a new light may also benefit the tellers.
Memories may also be warped in scale by age – my mother famously remembers enormous cookies eaten with two hands when she was a small girl. She made them for my sister and I as kids, and they were large enough to hold with two adult hands. My dad lightly chided her that she was remembering ‘regular’ sized cookies when she was a small girl.
I come from a family with lots of stories and strong memories. We sometimes fight over a Truth – what actually happened versus how someone is retelling the story. If someone misremembers our version of the “truth”, there is a risk of upsetting the history of us. What is our relationship to the “truth”? Who codifies it as such in the family annals?
Genealogical work, as opposed to oral histories, can offer a set of fixed facts – birthdates, baptismal records, deeds of ownership, wills, death notices, gravestones. The work on these pages, created with The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding or TNG, attempts to focus on researched facts, along with the stories accompanying the people presented.
Contradictions and gaps will inevitably arise, casting a pnembra on our histories. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes about the blindspots in historiography in Selected Subaltern Studies that “having a close look at the constituting elements and examine those cuts, seams and stitches -those cobbling marks…tell us about the materials it is made of and the manner of is absorption into the fabric of writing.” By researching the surrounding elements of a particular time and place, along with the people telling the story, we may be able to exhume pieces of the buried past, or at least understand the marks of erasure.
Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Page 47.
