THE NATURE AND USES OF memoir and storytelling
USING MEMOIR AND STORYTELLING
Emma Jolly concludes her family history and wellbeing series with a look at how stor ytelling and memoir can best be used when telling our family stories – and also asks us to consider who has the right to tell an ancestor’s story
Are we doing our ancestors a disservice by recording them largely by occupation?
‘I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.’
Poignantly, David Berger wrote these words in his last letter at Vilnius (now the capital of Lithuania) in 1941. Berger was born in Przemysl, a town in southeast Poland. When the Germans invaded in 1939, he left his hometown. Shortly after writing his last words, he was shot dead in Vilnius. He was just 19 years old.
Since the end of the war, David Berger’s simple statement has been the focus of many Holocaust memorial projects, such as Holocaust Memorial Day. The aim is to remember each individual who died as a result of the Holocaust. The basis of this is that each individual life is of value and that no one should be forgotten. As family historians, regardless of our ancestors’ background or heritage, our research serves to remind everyone that each of our ancestors once lived.
For years I didn’t look like any of my parents or grandparents till a distant relative sent me some pictures. I’m the spit ting image of my great aunt Ber tha (sur vey response)
We would like to hear your views
Through this article we have included information take from survey inot ‘Family history: health & well-being’. If you have not already contributed your views, we warmly invite you to do so. You may find the survey at https://tinyurl.com/mrcy3j8e – thank you.
Thus, we should consider whether the stories of individuals ought only to be told by relatives. During the centenary of the First World War 2014-18, for example, many genealogists were involved in related projects such as producing mini-biographies of all soldiers recorded on a local war memorial. A few individuals mentioned had no surviving family members to commemorate their memory. Many historians are now recording memories of the Second World War. For example, Their Finest Hour https:// theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac. uk/home is a University of Oxford project that aims to collect and digitally archive the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War that have been passed down from generation to generation.