We know how much Māori cherish family memory, so why do Pākehā tend to neglect this rich and engrossing dimension of their past?
One reason, I think, is the bad rap of memory in popular perception. You know – memory is unreliable, biased, selective. But, in practice, all sources of information about the past require careful analysis for precisely these reasons.
Of course, memory is idiosyncratic and rarely follows the neat parameters of professional or national history. Instead, remembered family stories reveal aspects of the everyday past, including the experiences, emotions, relationships or dispositions of forebears.
Over the past couple of years, four oral historians, including myself, have travelled the length and breadth of the country for a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden-funded research project, recording the memories passed down within 60 multigenerational families descended from 19th-century European immigrants (see www.familymemory.nz).
Many of our participants have done, or have access to, genealogical research. But they also remembered orally transmitted family stories that enrich and deepen our understanding of earlier generations.
Margaret, born in the mid-1940s, recounted the following story that had been passed down from her mother. It concerns Margaret's sociable Irish grandmother, who, in the early 1920s, lived in a remote part of Taranaki where her husband ran a sawmill:
"My mother said, 'My mum used to go off and leave us a lot. And Magdalene, the oldest daughter, used to have to do the cooking and everything. And she ran away … She had to do all the work, when she was only 15, 16 years old.
"She was taking care of the other seven kids, and cooking with a wood fireplace … My poor dad had to come in from the sawmill and there was really nothing to eat … And it was all Magdalene's fault because she ran away, but then she should have run away because she had to work too hard.' So that was one of her stories … Yes, her mother liked to go off and leave them."
For a brief moment, the texture of everyday family life at this time is illuminated, encapsulating multiple insights into the prescribed roles and desperate responses of a mother and daughter to the heavy domestic labour of caring for large families amid the isolation of the back country.
Why are these memories important in the present? For the historian, these stories provide irreplaceable insights into the interior world of the family, in all its sensory, emotional and prescriptive dimensions. But equally, if not more important, family stories live on in present-day autobiographical memory, shaping our conscious and unconscious perceptions of both the private and public worlds around us.
How we think about past, present and future is often filtered through the lens of our family stories, and this in turn influences the ways in which we act as citizens, as well as family members, in the present.
At the end of November, Associate Professor Anna Green will be running an international, multidisciplinary symposium on family memory at Victoria University of Wellington. If you would like to receive more information about it nearer the time, email Anna.Green@vuw.ac.nz.
Read the original article on Stuff.