Yesterday I went to visit a family to discuss funeral arrangements for their elderly, widowed, aunt, who had vague connections with our church. Trying to piece together her life story was far from easy as they really didn't know much at all about her - indeed they'd only discovered where she was born after her death. They were pretty confident, however, that she'd been a land girl in the Second World War and thought, but were not sure, that she'd married in our church. Returning home I hunted through our marriage records and found hers - and that she was a munitions worker; further her husband held a far lower naval rank than family lore dictates.
So much for theories that eyewitnesses unto the third generation are dependable; here we haven't even managed one with any degree of accuracy. Of course, in the funeral I will not be debunking family myth, though may use some careful words to avoid belying the recorded facts.
A question that seems to arise from this is about the accuracy of any secondary sources, oral or written. It is not that they are inauthentic or untrustworthy (in the sense of deliberately misleading) but that they perpetuate and almost undoubtedly extend inaccuracies. I don't for one moment imagine that this family set out to deceive in the way they told and developed their family history, though as 'fishermen's tales' show us, the temptation to a little 'embroidery' is great. (Did you ever see a carp with lazy daisy along its side? I mix my metaphors as ever).
If, even with careful and engaged transmission, facts - or at least details - become distorted and meaning infused, how much more so when there is greater distance and less immediacy or commitment?
I will tell "Aunty's" story with a clear aim - to affirm and celebrate a life lived quietly in a semi-rural backwater. It won't be an accurate account of events in her life, for few were recalled, but it will hopefully demonstrate that it had meaning, both for those who knew and loved her, and within the whole, holy, story of God's creation.
Comments
We're always telling somebody else's story of 'Auntie Ethel'. Sometimes that gets a bit hairy when there are contested versions of family history and more than mere accuracy is at stake.
Family history throws up some of the same issues. The elderly relative is often a good first source of family tradition, etc. But not always a reliable one. My wife's great aunt was a rich source of oral traditions, but couldn't as it turned out be relied on as a primary source. Her childhood recollections of being given oranges and sugar from a marmalade factory at the entrance to an elderly relative's London courtyard home were priceless - social history at its most personal and affective. But over 80 years she theorised, extemporised, narrativised, sanitised and in one celebrated case even demoted a slightly scruffy uncle to the status of a latter-day foster child. He'd actually been born before his parents could afford to keep him, been farmed out to relatives in the east End of London (may even have spent some time in the work house - though I could be starting my own nasty rumour there) and grew up not matching the artisan and professional aspirations of the younger end of the family.
Stuff that we find interesting and illuminating often affects those closer to the person concerned very differently.
God knows and loves. The rest of us remember what we can cope with at the time.