Using Memoirs and Oral Histories in Writing Family History

Remembering Mammaw

While many of us earnestly research and write of ancestors long buried, the family history writer can leave a legacy of stories to future generations through memoirs and oral history woven among the dry facts of name, place and time. Years ago, I began my work as a genealogist. However, it was soon apparent hat I desired more depth of my family’s history from my efforts. So my research evolved into the work of a family historian.

My experience at ancestral family research has been a challenge. My remote ancestors left few records detailing their lives. Only those born in the 20^th century obtained literacy. One of my ancestral lines eschewed the broader community of city or town. They preferred, it seems to remain isolated along the Blue Ridge Mountains of the western Carolinas, where the outside world rarely ventured. I can use generalities from circumstantial evidence and social histories of the region in order to imagine the content of the daily lives of these ancestors, but I cannot know it. Thus, their stories are imbued with uncertainty and disclaimers.

However, from my long interest in oral history and its methodologies, I recognize that I can leave to my descendants a first person account of their ancestors as told in the ancestor’s own voice or the voice of an eyewitness. So over the past several years, I have collected narratives from my living generations. Slowly, I hope to compile these accounts into a family’s journey through generations. I do this because I discovered during the process of family oral history research what it means for me to be the person that I am. I would like to teach my children how to understand themselves through their origins.

Not all such accounts, whether biographies or memoirs, are easy for me to write. Facts are easy enough to collect, but the interpretation that weaves these facts coherently into an
understanding of events are difficult and sometimes painful. The story about my maternal grandmother is one example. So much of her life was so closely connected with the latter part of my mother’s life. It was difficult to write about my mom as a major character in Mammaw’s story. Each time I would write “Mother” or “Mom” in the draft, I could feel grief surface and my objectivity as an historian dissolve into tears. When I began using my mom’s given name, however, the one that my grandmother gave her, I was able to distance myself enough to allow Mammaw’s voice to more clearly come through. It helped enormously to examine that period from someone else’s perspective. It added dimension to my knowledge and understanding of two women who were so prominent in my life.

An earlier version of Mammaw’s story was originally published in The Dallas Journal (2007).

A Milestone in Blogging & Meditations

Once in a cycle the comet
Doubles its lonesome track.
Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,
Aeschylus wanders back.

—John G. Neihardt [1]

When my mother died in 1991, the director at the mortuary asked me how did she like to wear her hair and did she wear lipstick or eye shadow? Her remains were being prepared for burial, but he spoke of her as if she still existed, as if she still lived. In Mexico and among many Native American tribes, there is the belief that you experience death three times. The first death occurs when your spirit departs the body; the second, when your body returns to Mother earth. The final death occurs only when there is no one who still remembers your name. It is only after the third death that are you truly dead. My mother lives still.

Sometimes, in a quiet moment among microfilm and dusty records, I will sense ghostly encounters with ancestors. Something fleeting and formless will flutter from a page. A voice, whose tone and tenor is too effaced to be clearly heard, will echo across time. I wonder what the shamans would say about my endeavors as a family historian. By discovering the name of an unknown parent, can I resurrect those who have experienced that third death? I suspect that the answer is ‘no’ because my efforts are formed from fragments of a life, not memory of it. Still, there is this vague disquiet that comes with the prolonged study of a life long gone from human memory. I have never asked other genealogists if they, too, detect apparitions hovering at the periphery of their research. Perhaps to do so is to seem unscholarly, non-objective in one’s work.

Loren Eisley encountered a similar cadre of apparitions. He often wrote about them. As a paleontologist, he understood that the essence of being human is not contained in a solitary skull vault. He described it as shadows dancing on the walls of a cave, a word uttered by the fire. This essence eludes us and is gone when we come with spades upon the cold ashes of the campfire four hundred thousand years hence. Eisley also believed that it is the creation of the written word, giving birth to history, that has enabled us to survive as a species. Perhaps he is right. Through myth, then through written history, we have extended human memory beyond the individual lifetime. Perhaps, we can hold back that final death with our re-search for forgotten family memories.

Like the comet of Neihardt’s poem, my mother, indeed all my loved ones who have passed, returns periodically in memories of conversations, in photographs, in letters and documents. Each cycle of recalling those past events denotes an opportunity to discover something new. Sometimes about them; sometimes about me. Eisley believed that this was the real process of scientific research, seeing ourselves as part of the scientific question.

I began this blog in July 2007, a mere nine months ago, not sure that anyone would read it. But, apparently, some people have because, as of today, the stats at WordPress, report that people have stopped by more than 5,000 times since last year. Another statistic informs me that some of you have found what is posted here promising enough to add this blog to a reader list or a feed. Other than a few comments left here, none of these numbers tell me if you like what you read. Nor do they tell me who you are, but I thank you for visiting. I hope that you will come by again.

 

1. Neihardt (1881-1973), whose quote appears above, may be unfamiliar to many of you. Although he is better known as a poet, he was, in fact, a historian who wrote about the American Midwest and its native inhabitants. He published his research in a variety of genres, including epic poetry.

New Year; New Responsibilities

Happy New Year, All!

This year is going to be a busy one with new challenges. I have been named editor to a local society’s journal. So I may be posting items on the issues of getting one’s research published on the smaller scale, IOW, not book length. If you visit this blog from time to time, then I can guess that you are interested in writing well and that you wish to someday see your writing in print. So let’s start with some of the practical issues of getting from idea to print (or XML, if you desire electronic publication).

One of the best ways to start writing the family history book that you envision is by writing your family’s story in smaller chunks. Submit articles to a journal or newsletter whose focus is the region or surname that is prominent in your article. While most genealogical journals and society newsletters are not juried the way The American Genealogist, New England Register, and National Genealogical Society Quarterly are, you can still ask the editor if he or she minds giving you feedback on your submission.

The feedback you want will vary somewhat with the type of article that you wrote. But there are certain basics that apply regardless of whether the article is a biography of a “black sheep” ancestor or describing how you finally pieced together the evidence that proved one’s lineage. In this post, I will cover spelling and grammar.

First impressions are lasting—make them positive.

The first thing that you want to do is activate your grammar and spell checker on your wordprocessing software (if not already activated). However, don’t stop there. “There” and “their” are both correctly spelled words but they are often used in the wrong place within a sentence. Editors don’t want to be correcting spelling and grammar. So have someone else proof your near final copy of the article to be sure that you’ve caught those little irritating errors. Hey, even the most experienced writers make such mistakes, so do don’t beat yourself up if you find them in your drafts. [Insert: save that until you find those mistakes in the published copy. <g>]

Another tool that I use is “text to speech” software. Text-to-speech software was developed for the visually impaired and people with dyslexia. But it helps me to find other minor glitches that crept into the text from the dozens of re-writes and edits over the course of the article’s development. Removing text and replacing it with other text is one of the ways many technical errors found in my own writing are introduced. I have Adobe Pro 7.0 which has “text-to-speech” functions within the software. So I cannot recommend any package that is stand-alone. My best advice is to talk to someone at your local public school about what software they use for children with visual impairments or dyslexia. You might also check with your local public library to see what software they may have on their computer systems for people with such needs. Finally, search for internet websites that offer text-to-speech software from free download (basic functions) to modest prices ($39.99) to expensive ($299, plus). If anyone has recommendations, please share them with us here.

By the time I’ve asked a friend to provide that “human factor” in reviewing a piece of my writing, they think that I don’t make those silly composition mistakes that everyone else makes…boy, are they wrong.