stories

These women ...

Searching for the stories of women in history always adds an element of difficulty – but it’s the kind of difficult we should embrace. Yes – their names change more regularly and there tends to be less documentation of their lives the further back we go – but in the end, where would we be without them?

As a holiday storm bears down on the East Coast I find myself snuggled under a blanket, scouring Ancestry.com for more links to my family history than any sane person might be willing to uncover. I never liked puzzles as a kid – something about all the patience involved with the hours upon hours of staring at seemingly unrelated pieces… just ask my cousin Danielle – she was always the puzzle pro! But there’s something about following the branches of my own family tree that never ceases to engage me in an ever-unfolding story. When I come across a ‘wall’ in the search as I did today when trying to find more details about my great-grandmother Helen – I’m reminded that this is just another opportunity to talk with my own grandmother over Thanksgiving about what she remembers of her mother-in-law and see where that might take us.

While Helen’s story is on-hold until my own grandmother can shine a light into the proverbial darkness, I was able to follow the line of my other great-grandmother, Frances, on my mother’s side of the family back a few more generations to a certain Ellen who in one fell swoop – changed the futures of her family. Born in Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland – Ellen took a chance on a ship bound for the other side of the ocean. Whether on purpose or by chance, she ended up in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada and eventually married a man who hailed from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. How these two met and decided to create a life together is a story I can only hope to uncover at a later date, but what I find equally compelling is that in one generation – Ellen changed the path of her family – a path that through her daughter Barbara, and her daughter Frances, led to my grandmother, mother, and on to me. I won’t romanticize the journey – perhaps it wasn’t a move made by choice at all. But the point here is that five generations of women are linked by Ellen’s journey – and there is something truly special in that – no matter where the story takes us next…
(Originally written on November 27, 2013)

A dose of imagination

As an assignment in grad school back in 2012 I was asked to consider how history might be told creatively. Not that we, as historians, should claim fiction to be truth, but rather that we might explore the silences in what is left behind. What does the document not tell us? Can we imagine how a person might have felt as they sat down to write a letter to a loved one or crafted a public speech? After learning all we can about a person – what more can we do to tell their story in creative ways… this was our task which I took to heart and truly enjoyed as a new and interesting challenge. The result was the following piece centered on my own family history and the imagined conversations left out of the record.

I hope you enjoy the read and that it might serve as a reminder that those who we read about as part of ‘HISTORY’ were individual human beings with all the joys, flaws, creativity, emotion, and yes – even fear – that we experience in our own lives today.

Stories from Home - R. Jeffers