A lot of family history is composed of repeated stories—things you feel are worth telling to others in your family. Some are tragic, some funny, and often they have some lesson or example.
As a practicing anthropologist, I listened to and recorded many hours of family history. Usually, this was interesting and fun, and I learned a lot from the experience.
In one family, I frequently sat with a mother and her daughter, and the stories flowed freely between the two. “Mama, tell him about Aunt Sara!” and a story would follow. Often, after many such sessions, a degree of comfort and trust built up; sometimes, more was related than everyone was comfortable with.
At one meeting, the mother turned serious and started relaying a tale of a backroom abortion gone wrong. It happened in the 1950s, and while the young woman did not die, she never had children. The story ended, and the daughter was mad at her, “You never told me that story about Sophie! But you sit here and tell it to Lou!” As the argument developed, I quietly took the tape cassette from the recorder and handed it to the daughter. I apologized to both and left the house.
My deep relationship with both mother and daughter survived this trauma. I learned an important lesson from it, though. Trust develops between people, and an anthropologist needs to develop a sense of responsibility towards the data and those who trust you and share their lives with you. You read and hear about this in grad school, but it’s different when you run face-first into it in the field.
Afterward, I always started taped interviews by reminding the informant that whenever they wanted the machine turned off or for me to stop writing notes, all they had to do was ask. I also started turning the machine off voluntarily when I felt the interview veered into sensitive areas. I’d then ask them quietly, “Is this something you are comfortable having in the archives?”
After all, I was working on specific projects, not a general ethnography of the community. Also, unlike an academic archive, I could not ensure the integrity of materials left in the care of the municipality I worked for after I left their employment. So I took responsibility for pruning the data and eventually restricting it to topics relating to the research focus – topics like the horticultural project The Hidden Countryside, histories of the local ethnic Catholic congregations, saints festivals, cuisine, the medical uses of garden plants and issues relating to specific projects.
When I worked as an applied anthropologist in that small community near Boston, there was a sea of text and visual information available on the city but little about the small community. I had to extract the history one story at a time. One of the stories was of a man’s grandmother. She was left by her husband, who “went west” in the 1880’s. Grandma ran a boarding house for years. Using US Census data, I could combine the oral family history with the census data and create a more complete record of the family, grandma’s entrepreneurial abilities, and how she raised her family.
Despite recorded history, video, and tons of information, most real history is still contained in the oral traditions told around the dining room table, in front of the fireplace, or in other informal settings. Very few people prepare formal memoirs. For most, it’s the informal oral tradition. With all the formatted media ranging from text to video, we forget that much culture is still transmitted face to face, tongue to ear—informal oral transmission within families, between friends, or even on the job. The orally transmitted story is still at the root of many types of learning.
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Gosh, Lou, this sounds like you had integrity in your journalism–something totally unheard of now.
Reading this it sounded like some of the research I’ve done for my historical fiction. Of course, the dead can’t object to icky truths I might uncover or to story lines I invent. I learned to treasure small, local museums.
I had a heated “discussion” with a former colleague about this. He clained it was important ethnographic data. I claimed that on the applied side we often can’t guarantee ongoing confidentiality so I opted for excision. but yeah a generation on it’s grist for the mill. Buried away in my personal archives ( fifty and more years old) is stuff that I am wondering what to do with. SI, AAA (American Anthropological Association), or State Archives.
I don’t know — in my self-opinion it should go somewhere maybe with the names removed. As I did my research, I found that the step-mom of my ancestor died onboard ship coming to America along with her daughter. Smallpox seems very likely. From that little bit of hard information, it wasn’t hard to extrapolate what probably happened when the remaining family landed, father and two teenaged sons. Turned out my guess was pretty close. Who knows but what the people you’ve studied will be someone’s wonderful novel someday?
With my first novel (set in the 13th century) I was wandering around Zürich with a Swiss Medievalist historian. I cared a LOT about historical accuracy. At one point I asked him a question and he said, “I don’t know. No one knows. We don’t know much about the 13th century.” At that moment I saw in my mind’s eye the concretion of structures — physical and social — between me and my protagonist.
Later I wrote a query to an agent and described my protagonist as an ordinary man confronted with an extraordinary challenge. He wrote back, “I’m not interested in ordinary people.” I thought, “Just who is ordinary?”
Now I think that so many fictional characters are famous people because their lives are documented, not because they were especially interesting or the actual pioneers of something. So…all this to say is work like yours is very precious to the future.
I’ll have to decide soon. I’m not a tender sprout any longer. I’m reasonably certain everyone of them is dead, and I have all the release forms, so I should be alright.