Family Oral History Research Articles

Marion Evelyn Hong before and after the Curse of the Quon Gwon (1916)

This article is a result of an invitation to share the authors’ knowledge and family stories and offer perspectives about Marion E. Hong (1895–1969, also known as Marion Evelyn Wong). The intent is to provide scholars and researchers with first-hand knowledge about Marion’s life milestones and experiences directly from her family. The main source for the content of this article comes from remembrances of Marion’s descendants and documents as well as photographs in the Kumaradjaja Family History Archive. As Marion’s direct descendants, the authors offer first-hand knowledge about her and insight into possible motivations for making the silent motion picture film The Curse of the Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West (dir. Marion E. Wong, Mandarin Film Company, US, 1916). Lisa Kumaradjaja is Marion’s granddaughter; Lisa’s mother, Arabella Hong Young, is Marion’s daughter who followed in Marion’s footsteps as a singer, performer, and entrepreneur. This article is written by the granddaughter and great-grandson of Marion E. Hong, Lisa Kumaradjaja and Chris Kumaradjaja, who now serve as the family historians. Information for this article has been gathered from the Kumaradjaja Family History Archive, family oral histories, as well as Lisa’s direct recollections of Marion.

Peasants' Fatalistic Thinking in Chinese Communism: an Analysis of a Rural Family's Oral History.

In this paper, I examine a Chinese family's oral history, which revolves around their tumultuous life transformations under the impact of China's communist movement between 1940 and 1977. Using interviews with four siblings who have distinctive personalities and life narratives, I focus on how they apply fatalistic thinking-a phenomenon popular among ordinary Chinese but is rarely analyzed by scholars-to make sense of the vicissitudes of the fates of the family members. I position the Chinese family's oral history in macro and micro contexts. In the macro context, since the land reform in 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had attempted to replace peasants' fatalistic thinking with class analysis to explain the roots of hardships in their lives. As the communist movement and class struggle receded, fatalistic thinking-which has never been eradicated-revived. In the micro context, fatalistic thinking is expressed through distinctive memories and narratives, which are linked to personalities and identities. I argue that fatalistic thinking is a mean of self-construction that people consciously or unconsciously resort to when facing absurdity. By using fatalistic thinking, people develop narratives about the self and create a sense of mental balance.

Ziba Khanum of Yazd: an enslaved African woman in nineteenth-century Iran

ABSTRACT Ziba Khanum (d. 1932) was, an African woman, a slave in the city of Yazd in the second half of the nineteenth century. She bore her master a son who, in accordance with Islamic law, should have inherited part of his father’s wealth but did not. Although she is subaltern, information about her life and the life of her son, Ghulam ‘Ali Siyah, can be recovered from family oral histories. The son, an Afro-Iranian merchant, converted to the Baha’i religion, traveled to Palestine and to India, and became a wealthy and notable person in Yazd. Ziba Khanum lived in her son’s household, with his children and grandchildren until the end of her life. Some of her descendants now live in the United States. This paper will discuss issues of race, gender, slavery, assimilation, sexuality. and religion as experienced by an Afro-Iranian family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Kalderash Gypsies of Russia in Industrial Cooperation of the 1920s–1930s

At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, in line with the state economic policy of the time, which was aimed at industrialisation and cooperativisation, and also as part of the implementation of measures to promote a settled way of life for nomadic Gypsies, the Kalderash Gypsies became actively involved within cooperatives and started establishing artels (Gypsy production cooperatives). This article analyses the issue of Gypsy artels, their manufacturing activities, the reasons why they flourished, their decline and their subsequent repression. The study is based on documents from the central and regional archives of the Russian Federation. The historical experience of that period was especially important for the Kalderash community—the establishing of artels helped them to adapt to the emerging economic reality of Soviet society. Indeed, during the following decades artel cooperative associations remained the main form of production and economic interaction with enterprises and organisations. As such, artels existed until the 1980s and then continued to exist within the new economic conditions of the post-Soviet period. Later on, the state never provided special support towards the creation of the Gypsy production associations and took more severe measures to implement its policy. The experience of these cooperatives has also remained a vibrant part of historic tales and been firmly instilled in family oral histories. The historical experience of that period is therefore important for understanding and building a modern policy towards the Gypsy population and solving their social and economic issues.

Resistance Is not Futile: Badiou, Simulacra and a Story From the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands

This paper engages with Alain Badiou’s understanding of evil as simulacrum in secondary social studies and history classrooms. Through family oral history as a vector for thinking with Badiou’s philosophy this paper explores Badiou’s premise that the Nazis upheld a simulacrum as truth, to the detriment and horror of millions. Anthonius and Johanna’s actions, members of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, provide an example of the complexities of ethics during difficult times that can inform teachers as they explore nuances regarding how ordinary people can act independently from authority, but interconnected with others in troubling times. Personal anecdotes are powerful tools in shaping knowledge and attitudes; thus, stories of resistance in our classrooms are vital as we seek to make emancipatory and egalitarian changes to our world.

“Why Don't You Speak (Up), Asian/Immigrant/Woman?” Rethinking Silence and Voice through Family Oral History

This essay deploys a disruptive moment of giving up tenure to rethink silence and voice in the context of institutional whiteness from the standpoint of a racialized Asian/immigrant/woman faculty. I narrate moments during my first tenure-track years weathering the quiet and invisible storms of whiteness at a historically white institution in the Midwestern United States. In (re)writing my story, I (re)orient my identity as an immigrant Other in US academia, reclaiming my family's oral history to inform my ways of speaking in/with comforting silence. I conclude with a discussion of racialized acts of speaking (up) as an interactive rather than singular moment.

My Grandfather and Father Salute Mr. Stevens

My Grandfather and Father Salute Mr. Stevens Kerry M. Brennan My grandfather, James F. Brennan, was born in Hartford in 1912 and began his career as an underwriter with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in the early 1930s. According to family oral history, my grandfather likely suffered from what might now be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. In the early 1950s, he was hospitalized at what was then known as the Hartford Retreat during a particularly persistent period of depression. The family story doesn't make clear whether it was the illness itself, or the stigma attached to it, that led my grandfather to lose his position at the insurance company following his hospitalization. My own father, who would have been around ten years old at the time, remembered that his Dad was called to a meeting with an executive upon his release from the hospital, to discuss his future at the company. He would never work as an underwriter again, but he was re-employed by the Hartford in the role of elevator operator at the company headquarters. The story goes that when my grandfather returned to work, he found that most of his colleagues, with whom he had been friendly before his illness, no longer spoke to him or even met his eyes as he ferried them from lobby to office and back again. Among the few exceptions was Wallace Stevens, by then a Vice President at the Hartford, who always greeted my grandfather by name. This small gesture of respect meant a great deal to my grandfather. He was a sensitive man who could be deeply hurt by the judgment of others. He was also thoughtful, intelligent, and a lover of poetry whose admiration for Mr. Stevens had perhaps little to do with his powerful position at the Hartford. James F. Brennan died in 1976. Thirty years later, my father heard of plans to commemorate Wallace Stevens' life in Hartford by the marking of a path along his daily walk to the office. He wrote the following poem to shed some light on the very last part of that famed commute, and to honor a daily act of decency which contrasts with the curmudgeonly reputation of the poet, and which was never forgotten by the elevator operator and his family. [End Page 99] Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Massachusetts quilts: our common wealth

Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009. 336 pages $60.00 (hardcover). LynneBassett, with ten other contributors, offers a fascinating study of Massachusetts quilts in the context of history, genealogy, local industry, and textile production in the handsomely presented Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Including only a small percentage of the nearly 6,000 Massachusetts quilts they (and the many members of the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project) have studied since 1994, a wide range of techniques, fabrics and designs are represented in a thorough and carefully documented historical context. The research findings are divided into three major thematic sections: History, Community, and Memory. Approached much like an exhibition catalogue, introductory essays provide an overview of each of the three divisions and are followed by illustrated examples discussed in detail. Geographical distinctions create the divisions under History and include some of the first extant quilted objects known in Massachusetts: pieced cloth-covered hand screens and petticoats, as well as whole cloth quilts and a quilted palampore dating 1825 to 1850. Quilting gatherings, agricultural fairs, and immigrant and ethnic communities are a few of the themes that organize the section under Community; and Friendship and Signature Quilts provide two of the themes designated Memory. Bassett and her major contributors (each a textile curator, quilt historian, or independent historian) emphasize the historical context for each quilted object (documenting genealogy, researching family stories, referencing dying and textile history, citing relevant economic and industrial circumstances) with their visual description of the textiles, the patchwork or applique pattern and the quilting design of the works. The attentive descriptions of the quilts encourage careful looking on the part of the reader and the contextual history keep these works firmly planted in the history of Massachusetts. The volume's coffee table book format provides room for photographs of the entire quilted object that beautifully illustrate the textural surface of many of the works. Portrait photographs, contemporary images of relevant historic sites, details of some quilts, and line drawings articulating the quilted designs also provide welcome information. However, any non-scholarly connotations associated with the term 'coffee table book' do not apply to Massachusetts Quilts. Family oral histories are challenged and documented as factual or dispelled, references to current quilt history research appears throughout, provenance is carefully documented, collateral objects (e.g. merchants' sample swatch books and family memorabilia) shed greater light on the context of the quilt's creation, and diary entries documenting contemporary quilting activities reveal how quilts and quilting fit into the daily life of eighteenth and nineteenth century women. …

Genetic Genealogy: The Woodson Family's Experience

In 1998, Foster and colleagues published the results of a genetic study intended to test whether Thomas Jefferson could have fathered any of Sally Hemings' children. They found that the Jefferson Y chromosome haplotype matched that of a descendant of Hemings' youngest child, but not that of the descendants of the eldest son, Thomas Woodson. The Woodson descendants were shocked by the study's finding, which disagreed with their family oral history. They were suspicious of the study conclusions because of the methods used in recruiting participants for the study and the manner in which they learned of the results. The Woodsons' experience as participants in one of the first examples of genetic genealogy illustrates several issues that both geneticists and amateur genetic genealogists will face in studies of this kind. Misperceptions about the relationship between biology and race, and group genetics in general, can make the interpretation of genetic data difficult. Continuing collaborations between the media and the scientific community will help the public to better understand the risks as well as the benefits of genetic genealogy. Researchers must decide prior to beginning their research what role the human subjects will play in the study and when they will be notified of the study's conclusions. Amateur genetic genealogists should anticipate unexpected outcomes, such as the identification of nonpaternity, to minimize any harmful effects to study participants. Although modern genetic methods provide a powerful new tool for genealogical study, they cannot resolve all genealogical issues, as this study shows, and can involve unanticipated risks to the participants.

Locating field science: a geographical family expedition to Glen Roy, Scotland

This paper reconstructs the historical geographies of a family holiday and field trip in 1952 to Glen Roy, Scotland, site of the famous Parallel Roads. The puzzle of the Parallel Roads' origin has generated a hefty literature over the years, much of it written by eminent scientists, but is here considered through an episode in the scientific history of Glen Roy that did not make the published record. The primary source is the Murray family's expedition logbook: a private and personal document that records the various aspects of life and work in the field. This is supplemented by the family's oral history. Drawing on concepts from science studies and geography, the paper tries to ‘get behind the science’ itself to explore the underlying motives and actions that make it happen. These are intrinsically geographical, because they shape, and are shaped by, the relationships between people, ideas and places. Two themes are central to the account of these other historical geographies of this trip to Glen Roy. The first of these is the coming together of a distinctly local community of knowledge in the Badenoch Field Club in the early 1950s. The second, revealed by the logbook's emphasis on storytelling, travelling and residing, is the way in which the presence of the family in the field changes the ways in which the site of scientific investigation is experienced and understood.

A Written Response from Canada

Why would someone, a Dakota from Canada, suggest such an honoring of our late Dakota relatives who were force marched 140years ago from the Lower Sioux Agency in Minnesota to a concentration camp in Fort Snelling, Minnesota? The following comments will provide an insight. It may take a bit of time to read it, but we as Dakota people now have to begin telling our side of the story, so that our Dakota children and grandchildren can truly begin to understand our own Dakota history. The information in this article may appear repetitive at times.1 This repetition, however, modeled on the traditional aboriginal style of storytelling with its cyclical learning and communication, is intended to make this more meaningful, understandable, and accessible to the Dakota people.2 In addition, I intend to provide an emic, social scientific perspective, referred to as the "insider's" or "native's" perspective of reality.3 The information to be provided is based on the fundamental principles of social scientific inquiry, which includes both oral Eastern Dakota history, specifically the Dakota bloodlines of M'dewakantonwan, Wahpekute, Wahpetonwan, and Sissitonwan, as well as previous written documentation. Thus the story of the Dakota Commemorative March is provided from a Dakota perspective. First, one needs to know that after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, while many of our Dakota relatives were force marched from the Lower Sioux Agency to a concentration camp in Fort Snelling, there were many of our Dakota people who moved back north of the 49th parallel, to the country now known as Canada. Written documentation and Eastern Dakota tribal history reveal that this land has always been a part of the Indigenous tribal homelands of our Dakota people as members of the Oceti [End Page 283] Sakowin or Seven Council Fires.4 Further, many of our Dakota First Nations in Canada have Pre-Confederation Treaty Medals with the British Crown received in 1763, 1779, and 1812 from King George III.5 Second, through oral history that has been passed down from our Dakota parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and more recently through written documentation found in the National Archives of Canada, as well as in Minnesota, many of our Dakota people of Canada are now just beginning to find our relatives across the border.6 For me, I can truly say that this would not have happened if it were not for my Tahansi (cousin) Chris Mato Nunpa, who along with his daughter, my niece Angela, and their families, made an effort to come from Minnesota to Canada in 1996 looking for their Dakota relatives. To me, this showed courage, for they had done this from their heart. Yes, I can say with pride that Tahansi Chris Mato Nunpa, his children, and their families truly understand and have lived up to the Dakota saying Mitakuye Owasin. 7 I now have come to understand why my late uncle, Deksi Ernest Goodvoice, passed on the Dakota name Wanbditanka8 (Big Eagle) to me. I say pidamayaye do (thank you) to my Tahansi and his family for showing me where one of our Dakota heroes, Wanbditanka, is buried adjacent to the Upper Sioux Reservation in Minnesota. Yes, we as Dakota do have heroes. In my numerous trips to Minnesota since then, I always stop and offer tobacco at the burial site of my namesake, Wanbditanka. Because of my Tahansi Chris Mato Nunpa and his family's encouragement in seeking out surviving Dakota relatives in Canada, and based on family oral history passed down from my late uncles Robert Goodvoice and Archie Waditika and my late mother Mahpeya Ku Winyan (Edith Omani), I was able to locate written documentation about my late great-grandfather, Anpetu Wasicu, also known as John Sioux, in the National Archives of Canada, cited in the 1901 Canadian Census as a U.S. Sioux Indian. Further, I was able to locate written documentation at the Minnesota Historical Society about my late great-grandfather Anpetu...

A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson

Byron W. Woodson Sr. traces his descent from Thomas Woodson, who, according to Wood-son family oral history, was the first child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. For years, white historians scoffed at this story, so the Woodson family happily cooperated when Dr. Eugene Foster proposed DNA tests that might clarify whether the Woodsons and others who claim descent from Hemings and Jefferson bore Jefferson's genetic markers. As Woodson's mother used to say, “Let's prove the oral history to be correct or prove it wrong.” Unfortunately for the Woodsons, the DNA tests came up with the wrong answer for them. While establishing a genetic link between Jefferson (or, to be precise, Jefferson's uncle) and the descendants of Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston, they could not establish any link to the Woodsons. Those of us with some personal distance from this story may rack it up as one of life's ironies. The Woodson clan, after all, had worked tirelessly to convince white Americans that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children; it simply turned out that their ancestor evidently was not one of them.

Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi

Multiple quarrels within and between families in rural southern Malawi mediate an invisible, subterranean process of social differentiation and class formation - a 'hidden history'. The paper argues that conflict over land underlies most of the disputes, is central to the division of matrilineal families and, in turn, to the process of social differentiation and class formation. The disputes have the effect of turning family members into 'strangers', or those who do not belong on the family land. Family oral histories suggest that the matrilineal groups split up ('break' in local metaphor) not only along the cleavages between sisters' daughters (that is, in the second generation of matrilineal segments) but between sisters. A final rupture of a matrilineal family occurs through increasingly bitter quarrels, often including accusations of witchcraft, and the move of a group of sisters to a different area, thereby ceding the matri-family's land to those who remain. The paper concentrates on this 'hidden' process, although it also provides a sketch of some of the key past and present patterns of differentiation in Malawi. The problem in discerning social differentiation and class formation as these take place (rather than post hoc from a long historical viewpoint) is precisely that one is observing things as they happen, the gradual'coming about' of restructured groups. The article argues that property in land is central to long-term processes of agrarian transformation and class formation; briefly outlines significant historical precedents to the contemporary situation in Malawi; and presents detailed family histories to support the argument.

Family Oral Histories for Multicultural Curriculum Perspectives

Teachers who want to include multicultural perspectives in their curriculum can explore the funds of knowledge of the parents of their students by using oral history projects in their classrooms. This article describes a rationale and an approach for helping teachers use the life histories of parents and members of the community as scaffolds to teach social studies and history concepts. The article illustrates the approach with examples from a case study of an extended Puerto Rican family and abstracts of teacher reflections on the process.

John Hubert Craigie, 8 December 1887 - 26 February 1989

John Hubert Craigie was descended from Scottish crofters. His grandfather, William Craigie, the son of Hugh Craigie of Rousay, was born on Rousay, Orkneys, in 1810, and died in Canada in 1901. Life was difficult in Scotland early in the 19th century. Like many of his fellow Orkneymen, William Craigie emigrated to Canada as an indentured employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, probably in the 1830s. In the course of his duties he crossed Canada two or three times, travelling out of York Factory on Hudson Bay. The family oral history is that William could not abide the way the Company treated native peoples; factors were expected to ply the natives with liquor and then ‘purchase’ furs for a pittance. As an ‘indentured servant’ he would be in mortal danger from the colonial authorities if he tried to leave, but he took an opportunity to escape via the USA and returned home to the Orkneys. There he married Jean Mainland. Because they could not get permission to marry on Rousay, they eloped by rowboat to be married in another village. William and Jean later emigrated to Canada, reaching the port of Pictou, Nova Scotia, in June 1842 after sailing on the barque Superior for 51 days from Thurso, Caithness.