Friday, September 16, 2016
Once a
little girl, with ears to hear, tugged at a grandmother’s sleeve and asked the
older lady to tell her a story . . .
There
is a good deal to be said for oral history.
It may not take the place of an old document, but it is infinitely more
interesting. The colorful slants on a
situation or thing assumed by the teller paint a picture of an attitude of the
time better than any cold piece of paper can.
The memories passed on are filtered, teller after teller, until only the
main nugget or interest remains. Embroidered
they may be, and each embroidered layer has misled many a descendent, but
somewhere even in the telling of them lies a fact, or the story would not be
worthy of its passage through conversations over the years.
On and
on the stories go, unwinding like a ball of colorful yarn to spill on the lap
of the little girl who would one day set out to see for herself which of those
stories were embroidered, and which held an element of truth. Her dream would be to take all of the
colorful yarn and knit it together into a grand adventure of a coverlet to wrap
securely around a family’s sense of self.
I have yet to prove all of those stories, but all I have found,
contained that ‘nugget of truth’. And
more than a few of those stories have pointed me in the direction of the aged
document called ‘proof’.
The
documents we want, for they prove our names and dates upon the paper. But the oral history is in some way, so much
more precious. How many times, I have
wondered, were the stories my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents told me,
told before? How many ears have heard
them, and how many heard them with ears that were awake?
It has
been well over twenty years since I started this adventure into researching my
ancestry. Now I find it is time I put it
all somewhere safe, somewhere it can be shared, else it die with me when I
pass. So I am putting these stories onto
the cold pieces of paper, along with the documents I found through this
journey.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)