First Hand Research and Oswald Chambers

I’ve spent time in Wheaton College’s Special Collections library looking through first hand research in the Oswald Chambers collection.

As I read through the papers, housed in archival boxes, the archivist asked me what, specifically, I sought.

“I don’t know. Just color details.”

I found plenty of remarks, tossed aside comments, diary scribblings (though not in Biddy’s Bible–she wrote her notes in shorthand!), and newspaper clippings.

They  served me well as I wrote, but they did not come easily. I had to review plenty of material to find nuggets of golden insight.

Research is like that, particularly primary source research.

Back in the dark ages when I attended school, my eight grade history teacher, Mrs. Klocki, stood on her spike heels and animated her painted face. “I don’t know why you read fantasy,” she trilled, “when history is much more fantastic and true!”

She emphasized the importance of first hand information–what did the people who experienced the event think about it at the time? What did they observe?

How did they see things without the hindsight we have today?

First hand research and immediacy

Reading through letters, written in the often hard-to-decipher hand of the person I’m studying, gives poignancy and character to the words.

I’ve written before about the voyeuristic feelings I’ve had reviewing the private thoughts of a subject:  here.

But when you can see the suggestion of tears, note how the handwriting appears–the lines thick and dark, pale and wispy–the letters have a poignancy you can’t pick up from reading the words in a book.

During my genealogy research, I learned to read far afield–to not limit myself only to the person I studied.

I read material collected by relatives. Stories written by friends in diaries about events they participated in, enable me to glean further details.

I learned pet names for family members and lip-curling disdain for the hated northerners in a Civil War project.

Such material takes me out of my 21st century point of view. While I knew it was dangerous to move onto land belonging to native Americans, reading an account of one woman’s horror in Harriet Arnow’s Seedtime on the Cumberland brought the danger home to me.

“A woman sent her twelve-year-old out to milk the cow in eastern Tennessee (prior to 1800). The next time she saw him, his head was on a stake being shaken at her as the Indians rode their ponies around the clearing, shrieking.”

See what I mean? I could tell you how frightening it was, but two sentences of a first hand account, shakes you emotionally.

Where can you find first hand research information?

The United States has many special collections libraries, and even has presidential libraries when you can explore history through first hand accounts.

Like Wheaton, some libraries have “ephemera,” odds and ends loosely linked to the subject of the library that are not necessarily papers.

At Wheaton, I handled Bibles owned by Biddy and Oswald Chambers, as well as one donated by a friend.

I touched Biddy’s typewriter and I even rifled through her old purse.

I’m not interested in fetishes, but items that belonged to the people I’m studying give me a sense of who they were–a leather bag in the hand, a high-keyed typewriter, onion-skin pages.

A dress resurrected from a relative’s attic and displayed will soon tell me how tall my heroine is. Her ring, chipped from a rock in prison, shows me how much she was loved.

A newspaper clipping detailing her trousseau tells me what’s important to a woman in love during the Civil War.

These are the types of items you can see and sometimes touch, in a special collection, a library or a museum.

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