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.