Oops, said through many things hitting me today, giving more clarity in created words of book 2. What hit, more source fact.
The title of this post was while hearing the song “And then he kissed me” and writing the words “and then he hit me”. If this isn’t a laughing example where outcome does not equal intent; I don’t know what does make it any more simple.
My big difference and how I decided to write stories from the people to support scholarly history? Is I know the people scholarly writings are portraying moments of the more well known “Rockwell moments”.
To me Rockwell captures that one perfect moment, every feeling not seen without it, not remembered; so it was captured to be remembered.
However, Rockwell paints only a moment in time. Around him are messy things overtaking the many other Rockwell moments in what doesn’t fit on the canvas. Moments happen in messy or they couldn’t be called moments, it would be called life. Rockwell would then paint the messy to remember. This is how I approach history.
Imagine:
Ludwig Bina, on the 14th of August 1924 standing in front of a clerk of circuit court, Antigo, Wisconsin. Having traveled from Deerbrook to fill out his Petition for Naturalization. Tell her when asked where he was born. Ludwig says “Yugoslavia”… A clerk doing their job the best they can, serving Ludwig, wanting to help him become naturalized… Typing on the line “Jugo-Slavia” (sic). I have the document.
Now imagine you are looking for Ludwig, your ancestor and trying to find him. Our current way of scholarly history is places followed by events and then people. I follow people followed by events followed by places.
When I write Lugwig Bina in Deerbrook’s history, I can add he was born in Yugoslavia. But even if I cannot anything more than the name. I know eventually the book will be indexed, the name will be found in my book, the title tells where and now the one looking for Ludwig as a place to start and find more. Quicker and faster than my 27 years researching my family and the history of Deerbrook.
Readers though those I write about can create pictures of what their ancestors lives were. No longer a piece of paper that was hard to find, but a visual of why they started their genealogy in the first place. To know their families.
This is the reason I will not accept a scholarly review. History speaks for itself. History doesn’t want anyone’s judgement or agreement. It wants to live as their stories allowing us to decide if what their intent was what really was achieved. Allowing us to say, maybe we don’t want to go this way. Slowly correcting course because intent does not always equal results.