Family History is American History:

Mother stormed into the living room. She turned the table over, cards falling everywhere.

“The damn Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”

We gathered around the radio, stayed glued to it. 

This is my ninety-year-old Aunt Vera describing Sunday evening, December 7, 1941. She was at her mother’s house. My grandfather, two of my aunts and their husbands were playing poker when “Mother” — my formidable grandmother — rushed in and sent the cards flying.

Aunt Vera went on to describe the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor:

“We joined all kinds of patriotic organizations to do our part. Hickory [then rural western North Carolina] had regular ‘black out’ drills. As ‘wardens’ in our neighborhood, we would patrol at night to see that everyone had darkened homes. We couldn’t even use a flashlight.”

“We took first aid courses, collected grease for government use, anything we could do to help. There was rationing of gas (three gallons per tank), shoes, sugar, coffee and about ten other items.”

These are excerpts from Aunt Vera’s “Autobiography,” which I helped her to write.

In her World War II chapter, there are glimpses of the South’s intractable racial quandary. My aunt’s husband has shipped off to the Mariana Islands in the Pacific to serve in the Medical Corps:

“Back home, I was keeping house for Papa Shuford and raising a baby son. Days were busy but I had an excellent [black] maid, Margaret, who came in really to do Papa’s house but she also babysat for me when I had something to take care of. She was paid $3.00 per week to clean his house, cook his lunch and do his laundry [six days a week, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.].”

Years later, my uncle is back from the war — but not quite “back”:

“[He had been in the medical corps] on the island of Tinian where B-29’s were based. There he would watch them take off to bomb Japan or Japanese-held islands. He never talked much about this, but he saw some terrible crashes as damaged planes, trying to land back on the base, burst into flames killing most of the crew. For a long time he wouldn’t talk about it at all. Then one day he cut loose . . .”

In truth, the major historical events, though dramatic, are minor players in my aunt’s narrative. The main “characters” are the few deceased relatives she knows a lot about and the very different society in which they lived. For someone who thinks about education, new “reference points” — those earlier schools, families, communities — are especially interesting.

It’s a joy working with Aunt Vera and “getting to know” relatives, long passed away, and how they lived. As for the many kin who — inconsiderately — left few clues about who they were, at least they left tantalizing questions.

Jigsaw Puzzle

For readers who might consider such a project with an older relative, it is likely you assume, as did I, that material to work with is minimal, that there is not all that much to read or see. In that assumption, I was wrong, as I explain in a letter below published in my local paper, excerpted below:

“Restoration of the Edgar Allen Poe home [not that of the famed author] on Main Street and publication of ninety-year-old Ruth Ayers Walsh’s first book . . . inspire this suggestion: There are other historic treasures in Caldwell County in need of preservation. ‘Ninety-year-olds’ are key to saving them. I am thinking of stories/memories of our seniors.

“I have an aunt, also ninety, born in Edgemont in 1914. [Edgemont is a remote, almost inaccessible village in the North Carolina foothills which was a summer resort a century ago.] She remembers her father holding her on the porch of the Edgemont Hotel as she watched a house float past during the 1916 flood.

“Each week on the same day at the same time for several months, she and I have spent a couple hours writing her ‘autobiography.’

“I have the sense of unearthing a lost civilization, so different were her early years from recent times. At eighty-six, at the urging of a son, she developed a chapter-title outline. She then wrote a couple of pages for each of the first seven chapters. Then she put the project aside. When I learned of it, I told her I would be her editor if she would take it up again.

“Scattered pictures, old albums and papers began to turn up from three families. I had seen some pictures long ago when still older relatives were alive. I was not much interested then. I asked few questions.

“Now I have many questions but only my aunt to ask. Even so, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a picture is emerging of what life was like in her youth and early adulthood and of who those people in the old photos were.

“Email, digital photography, picture-perfect photocopies, and Internet genealogical searches help keep far-flung relatives involved. My aunt and I have triple the material we had when we started. Odds and ends turn up.

“Would this autobiographical approach to family history work for others?

“Keys to success:

“1) Develop a chapter-title outline. This is crucial because it breaks up a big project into small tasks. It is a lot easier to work towards finishing a four or five page chapter than to work towards finishing a book.

“2) Schedule a two hour session at the same time each week. That keeps time demands modest. No one burns out.

“3) Create a NOTES section — which will eventually be placed at the end of the ‘book.’ NOTES are for odds and ends that don’t quite fit in the narrative but are too good to lose: rumors/legends, newspapers stories, genealogies.”

* * *

What such a project could mean — fifty years, a hundred years on — to your children, grandchildren, etc. one can only imagine. Unwritten, the stories are certain to be forever lost.

Liberty and Security

There is another reason to pursue what seems, at first, a narrow “family” concern. Family history is a way to preserve American history. Tapping the memories of seniors will give the young alternative way to think about the events, issues and challenges presented in public schools.

For World War II, for example, public school curriculum planners believe that the internment of Japanese American citizens on the West coast should be the focus of instruction. Quoting from “Students Don’t Know Much About WW II Except the Internment Camps,” History News Network , May 28, 2005:

“Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County [Maryland] high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.”

“Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. ‘We talked a lot about those concentration camps,’ she said . . .”

“Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.”

And, by the way, “...there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific.”

Such gross distortions can be corrected by older relatives who lived through World War II.

What’s at stake? Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough:

“Historical memory is as much a necessity to the preservation of liberty and American security as is our own armed forces.”

How well do public school textbooks serve that vital cause? McCullough:

“It is as if they were designed to kill anyone’s interest in history. A child made to read these books would ask, ‘What did I do wrong today that I am being so punished?’” (“Textbooks Flunk Test,” Washington Times, March 28, 2004)

Reflecting on the role of historical memory in preserving American liberty and security puts family history in a different light.

For all its charms — its revelations, mysteries, puzzles solved and unsolved, the fun in doing it — family history is also a partial antidote for the distorted history taught in public schools.

Tom Shuford [email protected] is a retired teacher living in Lenoir, North Carolina.

Published April 12, 2005