Filling the silences in family stories − how to think like a historian to uncover your family’s narrative

Excerpt from Faith’s diary: “This evening did some ironing and helped G. with her English. I have just about decided to let my hair grow for who can stand $1.25 for a hair cut? I do the girls’ so save some there.” Andrea Kaston Tange by Andrea Kaston Tange, Macalester College Great-grandmothers. We all have them. But most of us will never know them except through glimpses of fading bits of paper: sepia photographs, recipe cards, letters in handwriting traced by a fountain pen dispensing cocoa-colored ink. What does it take to build coherent stories out of such tantalizing fragments of lives? I face this question routinely in my career as a professor of 19th-century literature and culture. Recently, I’ve turned that experience to writing a book about my own family. Faith Avery in her wedding dress, 1911. Andrea Kaston Tange When I inherited my great-grandmother’s diary, a repurposed teacher’s planner in which she chronicled the family’s 1926 move from Michigan to Miami, I found a wedding portrait tucked inside. The angled profile showcases her youthful skin and a dress too elaborate for a Midwestern schoolteacher’s daily wear. It is easy to imagine that she took pleasure in inscribing her...