In this post place we'll look at some tellings of history commonly called "literature."
"One of the Missing" By Ambrose Bierce click to enlarge image
[re-insert print outs]
Very often in American popular history after times of great turmoil there comes a rush of voices to magazines. Similar to the beginnings of industrial booms a signpost on the trails gets reached by one or a few and then the people flood to that spot to say and hear. It becomes a kind of revival in print matter and media and this gets turned around into a "package" made public by the magazine that goes out to anywhere and everywhere in the world. Responses are evoked from different time frames and at different paces but the conversations keep going.
Seems like in here we can also post a nice example of the mix between oral history and printed matter.
Consider
Judge McGibboney....
To the north and west of Mt. Morris is Knox County, Ohio where I've recently learned of a man named Judge McGibboney in the HISTORY OF LINN COUNTY (IOWA) of 1911. A man named John B. Scott eventually moved to Iowa but he had spent part of his youth in Knox County, Ohio where his parents had come to settle a tract of land.
Allen Scott (born 1780) and his wife Jane Newell came from Pennsylvania on horseback and cleared the land for several farms in Knox County. Allen Scott was also one of the first people to successfully grow fruit in the area and he made a point of donating this fruit to people who didn't have any fruit. Allen had been a soldier in the war of 1812 and was "a stalwart advocate of the abolition cause" (22 HISTORY OF LINN). He'd been a Presbyterian "but on account of the slavery question the elders of the church to which he belonged formed a free church, which was later merged with the Congregational Church and became a leading religious organization of Mount Vernon, Ohio" (22). Before becoming a brickmaker (a mason) John B. Scott boarded for a time with his uncle Judge McGibboney, who... "…conducted a station on the famous underground railroad" (25 HISTORY OF LINN).
John B. Scott recalled an episode during which his uncle "for nine days had nine negroes concealed under the hay in his barn."
"To these John B. carried food and he described them as among the finest type of men physically that he had ever seen. They were almost white, having very little African blood in their veins, but their mother was a slave and consequently they were held in bondage. They had escaped from their master in Virginia and were on their way to Canada when cared for by Judge McGibboney" (25 HISTORY OF LINN).
In this image we can see how somebody imagined a slave in an iconic pose and rendered the idea--drew it, so it could be cut into wood or otherwise readied to be an engraving.
We can also imagine our own relatives in history and tell stories about them. If we want to write historical non-fiction, then the storytelling needs to be factual. When we do genealogy studies it's important to declare the truth from imaginative tellings. Sometimes there's no way to know, like when we get passed tidbits of information from people who couldn't or didn't know how to verify information. We usually call these types of narratives LEGENDS. History hunters aren't afraid of legends going around because it's mostly great fun to dig through the stories and find the facts.
Here we tried to imagine Grandmother Matilda having been propelled across the countryside from Kentucky and seen a lot of turmoil on account of religion and color.
Matilda was more than peeved. Never before in her life had she needed to consider Negroes as anything more important than hired help. Now she caught herself looking at her son and uncertain of his future because of...the dark people. "They ain't even people," she'd heard some men arguing. But an uneasiness tightened her chest when she repeated the reasoning in her mind as she milked a cow. They ain't cows either, she secretly thought.
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In some other family tree stuff we were working on we learned about the Reverend George Candee. A finer example of a man pulled towards traditional religion but also open to an equality amongst people cannot be found in our family tree. We're working on a website for the Reverend too! We wanted to do some preliminary research before we saved up the money to travel to colleges where some of his work is stored.
Lot's of people--famous and not-so-famous are very interested in genealogy (family tree stuff). Do you know which movie this author went on to envision????
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