Learning About the Past From Those Who Lived There

The personal side of history

My father visiting Japan in the 1950s

I love good stories. It’s one reason I find history fascinating — historical accounts are based on stories that actually occured. Of course people don’t always remember everything accurately, or they may embellish things. However, first hand accounts of events give an emotional and detailed quality that statistics cannot.

Here are some of my favorite stories that people have shared with me from their own lives:

• An elderly neighbor grew up during the Great Depression in Texas. She told me how, as a little girl, she would get up on a stool to cook meals because her mother had to work. She married young, and when WWII came, she went out to California to work in a munitions factory. “I was like Rosie the Riveter!” she said. During that time, her husband served in the military. She was a widow when we met her.
• Another elderly neighbor I had in Ohio remembers being taken to an orphanage during the Great Depression. She actually wasn’t an orphan, but her parents couldn’t afford to care for her. I asked her what it was like and she said she really enjoyed it. “They took us out on field trips to local museums and they were very kind to us.”
• An old Jewish man I got to talking to showed me where he’d been tattooed by the…