The headline of this recent piece is
kind of scary to read -- Oral family history
can be lost in three generations.
Yet, it does ring quite true as I recently wrote about in Forget What You Know & Challenge
Assumptions -- You Might Just Knock Down that Brick Wall! where I talk about family lore
given to me by my grandmother (2 generations from me talking about her
great-grandparents (3 generations from her)) and the various errors that had
crept in. Now imagine going back a few
more generations and relying on family lore (aka oral history) and one can just
imagine an increased amount of inaccuracy to be found.
Think about it, how
often can a group play telephone and end up with the same message that they
started with?
In the mentioned
article, Aaron Holt, National Archives Fort Worth states ...
“I
tell people all the time that it only takes three generations to lose a piece
of oral family history,” Holt said. “It must be purposely and accurately
repeated over and over again through the generations to be preserved for a
genealogist today.”
This reminds us that
it’s imperative that we collect as much oral history as we can and that we then
seek out documentary evidence to support what we’ve been told. In this manner, future “oral history” will
not perpetuate incorrect or incomplete information as it previously did in the
absence of documentation. Future
generations will be able to “refresh” their memories with the archived and
substantiated oral history legacies that we will now leave.
Here are some
resources on capturing oral history:
Remember though
that we will NOT be able to substantiate and document everything we are told
via an oral history. Remember the expression “the devil is in the detail”? So much of “life” is all the little details
of life which will NEVER be documented except by us collecting oral
history. For example, before a distant
great aunt died, she sent me a collection of her recollections about various
family members, including my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and
others. Most of these are not the type
of stories that will ever be “officially” documented and yet they are priceless
to me. I published these online in A Window of
Memories.
I did this to give a voice to my great aunt’s recollections and to also
remind us all that it’s so many of the “little” things that make our ancestors
more “human” to us. I never think of my
mom now without thinking of the wallpaper incident (page 22) or the caterpillar
(page 21), or of my grandmother and the customs of the day about wedding
blankets (page 19). Every time I read
these stories all of these long-deceased individuals come alive to me and that
truly is “priceless.”
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