Finding My Long-Lost Grandmother
In 2013, as a new college student, I started exploring genealogy. I learned to use the research skills that I developed from college history class to explore primary sources documents on my own. I reached out to extended family members, made new email contacts, and asked questions. I looked at courthouse records, newspaper clippings, and church records to not only determine where my ancestors are buried, but who their immediate family members are. I decided that I would make a genealogy book for my dad’s Christmas present, and I included him in the process. I loved when I could convince my Daddy to spend his Saturdays walking around cemeteries, locating relatives.
It is this process of researching and investigating that led me to the discovery of my 5 times great-grandmother, Hannah Parker. Hannah was born around 1735. During the late eighteenth century, she left Northern Ireland for America with her husband and children. They eventually settled in what is present-day Grayson County, Virginia. When my 5 times great-grandfather, John, passed away, Hannah moved with her son and her daughter-in-law to Deep Creek in Yadkin County, North Carolina. Hannah died in 1806 and is buried at Deep Creek Friends Meeting.
My father and I walked row by row, looking at heading stones dating back centuries. Then, just like that, we found her. The stone reads, “H.A. Parker.”
Obviously, Hannah Parker lived centuries before I was born, so I never knew her. Yet, suddenly I felt so connected to her because I realized that if she had not left her home and crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship, I would not be here today.
Finding my long-lost grandmother. That’s my humanities moment. Knowing who she was made me want to know more about the circumstances under which she lived, the time of the American Revolution, colonial-era beliefs about women in society and the church, the layout of the surrounding counties, and the people she may have encountered. I began asking hard questions and contextualizing the time in which she lived.
There are gaps in historical documentation, and I am aware that I will never learn everything about Hannah Parker. Even so, it is this desire to learn more about the time in which she lived that led me to my Master’s thesis work on women healers in colonial America. That project then led to the dissertation work on intercultural medical practice in the early American south that I do in my PhD program today.
A lot of people and different experiences influenced the path that led me to become a historian. Yet, this humanities moment of finding Hannah’s grave is different from the rest because for the first time, I realized the fruits of my labor. It took 7 months to finish that genealogy book for my father’s Christmas present. Because of this experience, when I now encounter names in census records, wills, and church records, I see them not as names and dates but as people. I have become invested in revealing the silences of their stories. Such instances make one very aware of one’s place in the world and the importance of uncovering the truth about what happened in the past, revealing people’s struggles, failures, and successes, and even understanding how people and events are influenced centuries later. We are all more connected to the past than we realize.
2013
Jewel Parker, Age 27, Ph.D. candidate in History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
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The “Infinitely Human”: Life Writings, Locks of Hair and Lived History
Like fellow humanists, I struggled to pick a single moment to describe and share with you. However, while delving into my corpus (life writings – mostly diaries, autobiographies and memoirs - from the Franco-German borderland, Alsace-Lorraine, at the turn of the twentieth century), I am reminded of a unique moment I experienced when I discovered these documents in the archives.
In May 2018, the week after finishing my first year of the PhD program in the French and Francophone Studies Department at Penn State, I set out on my first archival trip to Strasbourg, France. Once in the archives, my curiosity and intellect were quickly at odds with my limited resources and time. In most French departmental archives, researchers are allowed to order and go through eight archival boxes per day. They usually contain part of a collection, and can range from several pieces of paper to several hundred documents. Moreover, not all boxes are described in the archive’s “finding aid” or databases. The nature of their contents sometimes requires an educated guess based on the limited information available to you. As such, with only a month in France, my research choices needed to be strategic: I had to single out the boxes I believed would contain the best documents to help in my research. One collection in particular piqued my curiosity as the archivists Virginie Godar-Lejeune and Marie-Ange Glessgen described it as having an “infinitely human quality.” While these writings fell out of my delineated period of study, I nonetheless decided to follow my dissertation committee’s advice to “listen” to the archives, indeed to avail myself of what Alsatian-Lorrainers had deposited at the archives instead of narrowly executing the search for my anticipated corpus: I requested the boxes in question.
After weeks of mechanically opening hundreds of envelopes and finding papers, postcards or greeting cards, I was quite taken aback when my fingers touched locks of hair. In addition to entire life papers (birth, marriage and death certificates, school grade reports, passports, and photographs), the boxes included locks of hair of every family member. Although I was aware of the practice of collecting children’s or spouses’ hair, I had quite a visceral reaction to seeing and touching it firsthand. The Lambs’ family archives almost systematically included such documents and objects for most family members between 1790 and 1936. The breadth of these documents spoke to the Lambs’ commitment to passing on their history: a small family of modest background in the industrial landscape of Strasbourg, France at the turn of the twentieth century. The intimacy of the objects included illustrated the family’s need to preserve their loved one’s memory. I spent the rest of the day reading through the entire family’s collection, learning about the parents’ love for their children, as well as their fear of losing them to wars and subsequent political instability in the region at that time.
As a doctoral candidate, it can prove difficult to project yourself as a researcher who can meaningfully contribute to the world around you. This experience made me realize my role as a historian, specifically, as a link in the chain of “passeuses de memoire,” or living historians. While this collection is not featured in my dissertation, it has instilled in me a sense of responsibility to preserve and make available the life writings of ordinary people, which constitute my corpus. Literally touched by the history of the Lambs family, I felt compelled to pass on their history and memory as a means of understanding larger historical conjunctures. To this end, I assign some of their letters to students in French history courses to teach how individuals lived through the vicissitudes of Alsace-Lorraine’s history.
The picture shows the lock of hair and passport photo of Emilie Lorentz-Lambs (1869-1929). The family’s archives (17J) reside at the Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg, France. The collection is freely communicable and under no copyright laws.
May 2018
Morgane Haesen, 28, PhD candidate (French and Francophone Studies), Penn State University
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The Power of Oral History
I think I’ve always been an oral historian, but I didn’t always know to call myself one. When I was a young kid, I used to spend countless evening hours bombarding my father—always at the end of his long workdays—with questions about his life in India. He was the only person in my family who was born and raised there. He and my American-born mother decided that life would be easier for my siblings and I if we grew up learning and speaking English alone, and as such, our knowledge of Punjabi was reflected through a scattered and very limited vocabulary. There was a clear cultural gap between my father and his children. My ethnic identity was tied to a place that he had called home for the first twenty-six years of his life, the same place in which I had spent perhaps less than twenty-six days up until my twenties. I wanted to know more about my dad, his life before he had kids, and the part of my own history that remained unknown to me. So I asked him questions…ad nauseam.
As a college student I majored in American Ethnic Studies with a history focus, and in the time leading up to my graduation I came across a few books that would change the direction of my young adulthood and the course of my life more broadly. One such text was Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson. Hendrickson is a journalist by training, but this particular text is a history of the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The author tells this story by interviewing some of the major players involved in that tense and violent moment, including James Meredith—the first African American to enroll in the school—as well as a number of sheriffs who coalesced from around the state to prevent Meredith from entering the university. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the text was Hendrickson’s conversations with the children—now in adulthood by the time of the book’s publication—of some of these sheriffs, as he examined how they made sense of their parents’ role in this history and their own relationship to this past. These were questions of political inheritance- questions with which we are all confronted at particular moments in our lives. How do we make sense of our familial legacies- the good and the bad? What do we choose to acknowledge, celebrate, reject, or forget? They are inquiries without simple answers, to be sure. Upon finishing Hendrickson’s text, however, I was left with the urgent feeling that, particularly for historians, it is our responsibility to become aware of the histories we are born into. And in many cases when the archives are silent, we may do well to turn our attention to the very people who helped create the past, even if our inquiries are met only with memories.
Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy
During the end of my time in college, about 13 years ago.
Kiran Garcha; 35 years old; PhD candidate in the Department of History at University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Things Usually Turn Out Alright
<p>Esther Mackintosh explains how a single letter from her father offered solace during an especially trying period of her life.</p>
<p>As a graduate student facing an uncertain future, Mackintosh took refuge in her father’s written words, which described his own challenges as a newly married farmer during the Great Depression. His letter concluded with a question posed to his daughter: “Would it help you to know that things usually turn out alright?” Thanks to her father’s words, Mackintosh, herself a scholar of stories, could contextualize her own unfolding narrative in light of her family history.</p>
Esther Mackintosh, President of the Federation of State Humanities Councils
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Origin Stories: Or, Making Sense of Surprises in the Family Tree
My Humanities Moment happened when my husband and I received the results of the genetic testing kits we’d ordered. The stories that my husband’s DNA told matched up pretty closely with his family’s history, but mine delivered some surprises. In addition to indicating a lot of northwestern European and Central European ancestors, which I expected, my report pointed to Scandinavian, West African, and North African ancestors! This all came as news to my whole family. We wondered: how did these encounters happen? What were the circumstances under which these distant and diverse relatives met? The map that accompanied my DNA results was particularly striking to me. I was amazed to see how my ancestors emerged over the course of the last several centuries from that violent, complex, and fascinating region of interaction that stretched up from the west coast of Africa, across the Strait of Gibraltar, through Iberia into northern, central, and eastern Europe. My humanities moment came when I realized that although I may never know the details of my ancestors’ travels, I can indeed explain a lot of the context behind that map of my family’s origins. The migrations, the wars, the famine and curiosity and opportunities that pushed people out of one territory and into the next: I know those stories, because I am a historian! Trained in the history of the Atlantic world and now a university professor of world history, I rely on the humanities to help my students and myself interpret the past. Science can tell us a lot, but so can history. Data means little if we don’t know the context—the stories and histories—behind it. Humanities and the sciences can and should work hand in hand in our efforts to understand and explain the world we live in and our shared past.
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Molly A. Warsh</a>, Assistant Professor of World History, University of Pittsburgh
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A Timeless Description
As humans, we naturally feel connected to those with the same blood and Burl and Phyllis were even closer than “regular” aunts and uncles. Burl was my grandfather’s brother and Phyllis my grandmother’s sister. When they both developed Alzheimer’s and eventually passed away it was of course upsetting, but in addition to the loss of family I lost the opportunity to understand their history. I was just in high school developing my love of the humanities, and I had so many questions about Burl's experiences in WWII. Then my mother handed me his scrapbooks. Humans often look for a connection to not only their families history, but how their families connected to the history of the world. This was that moment for me.
I feel robbed that I did not get the opportunity to ask my Great Uncle Burl what it was like to train in North Africa or share stories of being at the Duomo in Florence. I was a young teen when he passed, and he did not share the horrors he saw as part of the 316th Medical Battalion in the liberation of Italy. Then as an adult, I received the precious gift of his scrapbooks, which have given me a little insight. One particular annotation on the back of a photo caught my eye. Among images of young men in uniform going from the desert to mountains and snow, there was one of a destroyed building. On the back Uncle Burl wrote, “This was someone’s home at one time, I hope this never happens in the states.” I feel this description is timeless. No matter what is going on in the world humans make decisions on whether to take action or not, but we always hope the bad does not find its way to our homes and family. Burl was lucky and made it back to marry his love Phyllis, and be a second grandfather to me.
As humans, we naturally feel connected to those with the same blood and Burl and Phyllis were even closer than “regular” aunts and uncles. Burl was my grandfather’s brother and Phyllis my grandmother’s sister. When they both developed Alzheimer’s and eventually passed away it was of course upsetting, but in addition to the loss of family I lost the opportunity to understand their history. I was just in high school developing my love of the humanities, and I had so many questions about Burl's experiences in WWII. Then my mother handed me his scrapbooks. Humans often look for a connection to not only their families history, but how their families connected to the history of the world. This was that moment for me.
A family scrapbook
2015
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Elizabeth Mulcahy</a>
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