[T]he past is beautiful because one never realizes an
emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we
don't have complete emotions about the present, only
about the past.
-- Virginia Woolf
As Molly and I were driving to an appointment early this morning, I mentioned that today was 56 years since President John Kennedy was assassinated. I remembered it well because I was in elementary school in Concord, NH at the time. The Principal (Miss Dearborn) cut in on the speaker system at about 2:30 PM and her shaky voice announced that school was closing early so everyone could go home. Our eyes and ears were concentrated on the brown speaker box up in the front right corner of the room. Every classroom in Kimball school had one. And then she said that the President had been shot in Texas. Each of us was to get our coats off the coat hooks in the central hallway, gather our book bags and return to class until we were dismissed class-by-class in an orderly manner. Each of us was to go right home since it was close to the end of school anyway.
We were watching a news program during our appointment and there was a video clip of LBJ addressing Congress five days after the assassination. I noted that the speaker of the house behind the new President was Speaker of the House John McCormick, a Congressman from Massachusetts (who himself died on November 22, 1980 one month shy of age 89 -- it was the 17th anniversary of the JFK assassination).
Big events (whether on the world, national, or personal stage) tend to embed themselves in our memories!
And as we drove home from our appointment in Philadelphia we were listening to a local NPR station when a piece by Innovation Hub out of WGBH radio and PRI (Public Radio International) came on. The piece was about memory research by Cesar Hidalgo, the director of MIT's Collective Learning Group. His research is fascinating and focuses on how society experiences "generational forgetting." IMHO ("In My Humble Opinion"), genealogists -- professional and hobbyist alike -- should listen to this program "From Famous to Forgotten." The entire 21.5 minutes is well worth listening to, but there are three basic takeaways as summarized at the above link and presented below:
1. There is a timeline for how long it takes something famous to become forgotten and it
follows a curve. For example, a popular song has up to 5 years of lasting in what is
called the "communicative memory." This means that people are still are still talking
about the song in day-to-day conversation. But after 5 years, a popular song enters
what is called our "cultural memory" and this is the stage where it lives not in
day-to-day pop culture, rather it lives only in materials like recordings, books and
other media.
2. There is no singular theory as to why something once famous loses its popularity.
One explanation is that new content arrives to displace old content. Another
explanation is that when people of an older generation begin to age and die, many
of their cultural touchstones also begin to diminish in importance.
3. Hidalgo believes that the determination of which content and people deserve to be
remembered throughout history is a question of morals too and not just about matters
of memory and forgetting. And since morals change over time and are culturally
learned, Hidalgo believes it does not make sense to use current values to judge
people at other points in time.
As I listened to the program "From Famous to Forgotten," it stuck me how similar Hidalgo's research results are to the vocation or hobby of genealogy!
In genealogy there is a timeline with respect to communicative memory family history. How many people have had day-to-day interactions and firsthand memories beyond their parents, grandparents, and perhaps rarely their great grandparents? The "timeline" for the overwhelming number of families with respect to the "fame"/familiarity of their older family members (meaning the kind of real-life contact that is the basis for actual memory of the people) is generational and rarely extends much past grandparents. After grandparents -- and perhaps, at most, great grandparents -- the knowledge of older ancestors/relatives passes into the realm of family "cultural memory/history" and can exist only in photos, stories, and information collected and saved by earlier generations. The "communicative memory" for most of us rarely extends beyond our grandparents or great grandparents.
For example, our two sons knew all four of their grandparents into their 20s and one grandmother is still with us while our sons are now in their 30s. Our older son was the only one of our sons to have actual contact with one of his eight great grandparents, but that great grandmother died when he was just five months old, so he has no "communicative memory" of her. For our sons, their great grandparents are only known in the family "cultural memory" if you will. They exist for them not through any real day-to-day interactions that became part of their personal memories; they exist only through photographs and oral stories shared by their parents or grandparents.
Collected and preserved information about ancestors and relatives beyond grandparents and great grandparents (photographs, records, etc) is the essence of genealogy -- the study and recording of the record of a family. It is a way of preserving the "fame" of those who came before us and thus account in some way for our very being. The better we are at collecting, preserving, and passing on the evidence of who our ancestors are and how they lived (good and bad), the more we extend their "being," their "fame" from the finite realm of communicative memory -- the day-to-day contact that results in personal memories across maybe three or four generations at most -- into the realm of family "cultural memory" that can extend as far back as the evidence, photographs, artifacts, stories, and records we can locate, verify, and preserve into a collected genealogy.
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The three takeaways from the research of Cesar Hidalgo are borrowed from the Innovation Hub piece originally published on May 17, 2019.
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Copyright 2019, John D. Tew
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