Arnie Pritchard © 2018

Last Veterans’ Day our church’s congregation was invited to bring in mementos of our own or family members‘ military service to display during coffee hour.   I brought in several items, including the telegram which my father’s parents received when he was wounded in 1944.

I was chatting with a fellow parishioner when our friend Helen approached, looking distressed.  Helen is kind, caring, a wonderful mother to two young daughters, and a quiet part of the salt of the earth.

“Is that really how your grandparents found out?”  She asked.  I allowed that it was.

“That’s awful! Helen exclaimed.  “”Seriously wounded!”  They didn’t say what happened!”

I knew what she meant.  The telegram indeed told my grandparents that their son had been “seriously wounded”, and immediately went on to his hospital address.  Helen and I talked a bit – imagining the confusion of parents receiving such a message, and noting the problems of large organizations producing masses of standardized documents which cannot take much account of the feelings of those who receive them.

Helen is not a history buff, but this telegram grabbed her.  A close look at a tiny incident in one of history’s enormous disasters enabled her to imagine what it must have been like – and it became a human story rather than a textbook abstraction.

That is what primary sources do.   They help us reconstruct what it might be like to be someone else, in different circumstances and with different perspectives.  Reading a textbook is like flying over a landscape at thirty thousand feet – you can see a lot of things, but none very closely.  A primary source can bring you into the streets, the homes, the woods, and the people who inhabit them.  And once you get to know those people a bit, you may begin to see what’s so interesting in the landscape around them.  We will explore this at Sharing the Fire 2019, in a workshop entitled “Can These Bones Live?: Creating Stories from History’s Primary Sources.”  Hope to see some of you there.

Want to learn more about using primary sources to create stories? Take Arnie Pritchard’s workshop.  

(Saturday, March 30  from 10:30 – noon) – part of Sharing the Fire 2019.  Visit the STF Conference Details page to register for the conference.  Want to share your own experiences on this topic?  Leave a comment.

About Arnie:  Arnie Pritchard was trained as a historian, and discovered storytelling as an avocation.  History and storytelling united when he inherited his father’s letters from WWII; a story based on those letters is his main storytelling project.  He also coordinates an active storytelling program at the Institute Library in New Haven.    www.thisbusinessoffighting.com