“Telling a new history”
A few months ago, my colleague Anna Brady Marcus wrote about becoming an antiracist personal historian. I have also been reflecting on the personal historian’s role as story keeper and story facilitator:
What is our responsibility to tell a narrative through our clients’ biased eyes?
And what is our responsibility as historians to bring in contextual background so as not to uphold systemic racist narratives?
According to the Oral History Association, which is mostly comprised of academics, institutions, and freelance scholars, “The hallmark of an oral history interview is a dynamic, collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the narrator.” The interview, written document, and audio recording that arises from sitting down in one or multiple sessions, is a slice in time—stories that are told to this particular listener are not necessarily the ones that would have been told to another listener. The listener may have asked certain questions, have a specific relationship with the storyteller, held their body in a certain way in response to the story—all of these things affect the story being told at a given moment.
Can we preserve the past faithfully and uplift communities of the future?
People tend to think of history as being an unvarnished truth: If it’s documented, then it must be accurate. Handwritten censuses give researchers a lot to go on, but if you’ve conducted any amount of genealogy research, you’ll run into multiple spellings of a name. When I researched my husband’s family on Ancestry, I found that the same person claimed their homeland as France, Germany, and Alsace in different censuses. Looking at more of the history of Alsace, I discovered that it had shifted allegiance multiple times (or rather, was shifted as France and Germany fought over where to draw the border). My husband’s ancestor would have been aware of this history and changed the story depending on who was asking the question.
I am interested in exploring and helping others explore this space between, the shifting histories, the stories we can tell at different times in our lives. In our profession, “heritage” has been used as a buzzword, an unqualified good. In this past year of racial reckoning, I’ve come to understand that “heritage” is not an unqualified good for the majority of nonwhite people in America. There’s a game that I remember playing in college: If you could go back to any time period, where would you go? This year I was listening to a podcast about Lovecraft Country, a television show that used the Black history experience in the 1950s as a jumping-off point to tell horror stories. On that podcast, the two Black women hosts reference that game—and how, for a Black woman in America, there is no time period that was better for her.
So how do we record and learn from the past, while uplifting communities for the future? I don’t know the definitive answer, but here are some best practices I’ve learned from my own experience, the Oral History Association, and my background in Transformative Language Arts:
Writers: Don’t self-edit during your first draft.
If you’re a memoir writer, write it all down. No one ever has to see it. You may decide later to share it with family or friends, but first get the story down.
Interviewers: Be transparent about your subject’s ownership of their stories.
If you’re a personal historian/oral history interviewer: Give the storyteller autonomy and let them know this upfront. Any story that they reveal during the course of an oral history interview can be taken out at any time. Don’t interrupt them when they’re telling the story, but let them take the story out of the manuscript if they want to.
Storytellers: Take care of yourself.
Writing and talking about difficult stories is draining. I don’t believe that just bringing a story to consciousness, to words, is healing in and of itself. Take it in bites, as my colleague Jill Sarkozi has recommended.
Everyone: Be thoughtful and inclusive in your approach to recording history.
Question the world around you. Who’s being left out of your story? How does your family history overlay with global history?
As a historian and archivist who saves everything, I find great value and comfort in looking back through my writing and photography practices. But what’s the point of preserving history if we can’t learn from it?
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Amanda Lacson, founder of NYC–based FamilyArchive Business, helps people tackle their family archive at any stage, from organizing photos in boxes to creating final products to share with family.