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She wasn’t trying to write history the way it had been accepted. She was trying to ask, ‘what if the version we’ve been handed is wrong?’ @KnitWithDeborah talking about Barbara G. Walker‘s work Barbara Walker’s ideas were about history with a capital H. But this can easily be applied to individual histories and it is now…
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A simple list of names: seven men; one woman. The first two names on the list were a married couple, I know a little bit about them, not enough. I know nothing about the other six men on the list. They are all, however, joined in eternity. A married couple and six other humans they…
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They will look at your last name, check the family history, and you won’t get the job. When my aunt applied for a position at an agricultural extension office in the early 1970s, my grandfather warned her: “They will look at your last name, check the family history, and you won’t get the job.” His words were…
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Grief, I have come to believe, is one of the trickiest terrains most of us will eventually have to negotiate. Like most painful experiences, we do our best to avoid mourning our losses. We try to define grief, to mold it into our human illusions of an orderly and comprehensible world. We come up with…
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This is just a partial explanation of the information above. It identifies my uncle Galo, where he is from, his date of birth and age, marital status, religion, his physical description, his occupation; the typical information you might find in any military document. I have highlighted a few areas of interest. What was unusual about…
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Something that continues to be true about the work that I do is that piecing together the forgotten or lost history within our families is a powerful aspect of healing our wounds. We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders in this life. We feel responsible for things that do not belong to us,…
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“My dear friend, I keep your brother’s sad letters like they are relics. I say sad because he always sent me such sentimental letters that sometimes, when I read them, I burst out in tears. I tried to cheer him up, but he was such a sensitive soul that nothing could comfort him.” Letter from…
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My grandmother was born in Havana, Cuba. If official records of her death are correct, in the year 1892, just 3 years before Cuba’s second war for independence and 6 from the better known Spanish-American War.
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I have found that in my work with many clients over the last 10 years, everyone’s story matters. There is the history we know, and then there is the truth. The truth is that so many people out there are afraid to share where they have come from and what they have been through. My…
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I was born in 1977, just as democracy was beginning to take root in Spain. My family carried the weight of history—my father and grandfather lived through Franco’s dictatorship, proud of their roots but never knowing the full story of what happened to some of our relatives. Their dignity and quiet strength shaped me deeply.…