Primary source documentation is a fancy technical description for a question you’ve grown up with: “Tell me a story.”
Out of the past can come amazing tales that not only are true but are pertinent to you. If your family remembers them, they probably reverberate with emotion, too.
(And if someone claims to have no memory of their childhood, I let it go. “Tell me a happy story,” I suggest instead).
For example, my grandmother’s aunt died years before Grammy’s 1905 birth. Lettie was two years old when she climbed up to the mantle piece and ate the rat poison. I can’t imagine my great-great-grandmother’s horror watching her toddler’s writhing death with blood pouring . . . well, from everywhere
Which is why the poisons are locked up at my house and the mere mention of “rat poison” makes me shudder.
First hand stories, particularly those written down at the time, can provide an immediacy about current events “unpolluted” by the historical revisions of later writers trying to tell the story. It’s a particular challenge for modern writers to put themselves into the mental mindset of those who lived long ago, without interjecting some of their own attitudes towards race, religion, feminism, militarism, capitalism, and so forth
(Though, it’s a given you can best see God’s hand in your life looking backwards). Click to Tweet
My father, for example, was ten years old at the start of World War II. He described the start of the war to my son for an oral history project.
“We were at the movies in Fresno, California. We came out and boys were selling papers and shouting about the Japs. We didn’t know what it meant and were scared. Would we be bombed in Fresno just like they were in Honolulu?”
He ran to the newspaper office and got papers of his own to sell. They went quickly.
With some of his first earnings, my father purchased an atlas. Using pencil, he plotted the course of the war in Europe.
My brother still has that beaten up green-cloth-covered atlas with dog-eared pages and place names written in cramped print. The European maps slip out easily because my father spent so much studying them. You can see Dad’s pencil lines for, among other things, the Battle of the Bulge.
I think about my father in 1943, a lanky twelve year-old sprawled on the rag rug listening to the radio news and piercing together what was happening with his limited knowledge. He did not know the Allies would win the war. For all he knew, airplanes with the rising sun on their wings could bomb him some day. So, he participated in war drives and watched over his siblings when my grandmother went to work at an aircraft factory. “We didn’t know until the end if we’d be speaking English or German.”
My maternal grandfather lived to be 103. When he was born in a Sicilian fishing village, Queen Victoria sat on the British throne (and would do so for ten more years) while Thomas Edison still tinkered with electricity applications.
Born in 1890, he had witnessed an astonishing period of history. Grandpa lived long enough to converse intelligently with my husband–an officer on a nuclear submarine who could explain how personal computers worked!
I asked when he saw his first airplane.
“In Chicago. It was the Wright brothers‘ plane on display at the museum.”
I didn’t know the plane was exhibited in museums. I’m not even sure I knew it had survived the 1903 take off!
Living history–in my own family.
And first hand at that!
Have you interviewed people about events they witnessed?
If you’re old enough, do you remember when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?
Where were you on September 11, 2001?
Has your story changed since the event? 🙂
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Very interesting. Yes, our own families are living history.