historian woes

[dragonlady7]

people, support your local historians

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Had dinner with mom the other day. She was recounting a little story about her job.

See, since 1986, she’s held a position in the town government. It’s an appointed position and you’re paid something under a thousand dollars a year, but she gets to have an office in the town hall, and a computer, and then strangers call your house all the time. She’s the town historian, and most of what she does is answer people’s questions about their geneaology.

But sometimes she does get other questions. So, the other day, the town clerk came to her and said, “I have this woman who is trying to ask me about a car accident involving a town justice in 1918.”

“That’s definitely a me thing not a you thing,” Mom said, and so the clerk gave the caller Mom’s number. Meanwhile Mom had a peek at the records. Uh, there are no formal records of car accidents that far back, and the town didn’t have its own justices yet in 1918, so that’s not a hopeful start.

Anyway the caller was a woman who was writing an article for some newspaper in Saratoga, about early car culture in the United States. She’d read somewhere, and did not explain where, that there’d been some kind of accident at the bridge across the Hoosic in the town of Schaghticoke, and some major events had happened because of it. Mom was like well, did you look up the newspaper records of the time, because there’s a public database– no, the woman had never heard of this. Well, Mom said, it’s a great way to get a feeling for the zeitgeist of a time, and usually something like an automobile accident would be covered. I mean, there are articles about people repainting their houses, for heaven’s sake– a car accident is definitely going to be in the paper. Then the woman tried to ask her if you’d have been able to see out of the side of the approach of the bridge from this angle or that angle– Mom was like, well, they tore it down in 1940 and i wasn’t born yet, all I’ve got is the same picture I just told you how to find, you’d have to try to surmise the details yourself and good luck with that.

Well, the woman went on to detail how the farmers of the era had been hostile to the adoption of the automobile, what with all the noise and pollution and disruption of their rural lifestyles– some of them had gone so far as to sabotage the roads, setting traps with barbed wire, and –

Now hang on, Mom said. That’s darned odd, and I’d really like to see some primary sources on that, because as far as I can tell most of the farmers around here bought cars just as soon as they could, because it made their lives easier. In addition, surely cars would not be significantly more disruptive than the railroad that had run straight through here since 1850?

The woman seemed not to realize that, and Mom was like you know New York City has been a daytrip since that railroad went in. There were ten trains a day that came through that line, at least. You’d be in Troy in fifteen minutes, faster than you can get there now by car. You could get basically anywhere you wanted. The automobile just meant you could go on your own schedule and carry your own cargo, so farmers were eager to adopt it. I mean, it’s possible a farmer may have disliked cars on his own lane? I would love to see that article, because nothing I’ve seen has had anything like it– but I’m not saying it never happened, it just would have had to be an isolated case I’m dying to know more about.

The woman got a bit flustered and was like well you don’t know! you just haven’t read that much about this, and Mom was like

listen first off you’re calling me at my house and I’m trying to make dinner and this call has gone on for forty-five minutes? second off this has been my job since 1986 so you had better believe I’ve read a few articles about my own town, all right– things may have been different in other towns but I’m pretty familiar with this region? and third off I just finished writing a book detailing the life stories of every man from this town who served in World War I so I happen to have literally just combed through all the town records from 1918 trying to find context for all of it, so I can actually tell you pretty much anything you want to know specifically about that year in this town. If there had been an epidemic of farmers murdering motorists there is literally no way I would not know about it. And fourthly I can literally write you a list of all the farmers who bought cars in 1918 because that kind of crap made the papers back then, I promise you, if anybody had set a trap with barbed wire I would know about it.

The woman changed tacks. So, she said, you’d say the elite farmers had cars?

That’s you putting words in my mouth, Mom said, so don’t quote me on what you said. There were some wealthy farmers in the area, sure– some of them wintered in Florida as early as 1910!– but automobile use wasn’t reserved for some mythic upperclass, it was a pragmatic choice that various people made as it suited their business lives.

The woman stayed on the line for over an hour without ever once acknowledging that maybe Mom knew anything about anything, and Mom has decided she definitely isn’t interested in reading whatever article she comes up with about all of this, as she pretty clearly went into this with her own fictional thesis and is just trying to find something to base it on and probably won’t mind if she can’t actually find anything at all. She never did explain what was supposed to have happened in this supposed car accident, about which she could not actually remember the year or the names of any of the participants, only the location.

Comments

[heartofoshun]

Wow! Your mother has more patience than I do!

"went into this with her own fictional thesis and is just trying to find something to base it on"

Actually sounds like a novels I've read and movies I've seen. People like her should stick to sci-fantasy and not mess with historical fiction (even worse when they call it journalism or history).