Doug,

Thank you so very much for that link! I loaded it onto my history index 
immediately, and will pull up the resources on it and put them on the 
appropriate pages as I have time. What a great collections of web resources 
for History!!!!!

As to Oral History, I like your explanation of how it is interwoven with the 
rest of the historical resources.

I keep thinking of the story of the gold buttons told on this list recently 
and thinking how silly it was to dismiss the story because no evidence of 
the gold buttons still exists. It seems likely that after the country 
stabilized, the man may have converted the button back into money, or may 
have had the buttons made into jewelry for wife, daughters and 
grand-daughters, and male family members as well.

I'm inclined to think that throwing out oral histories because they can't be 
verified in modern times, is like throwing out the baby with the bath water. 
So much enriching texture of history is lost by decisions that oral history 
is not true because it cannot be proven four generations later. Lots could 
have happened in that time that was not preserved in the oral history for 
whatever reason.

When my mother had to go into a nursing home, some of my sisters went to 
help her move, and packed up the items that she wanted each of her six 
daughters to have. When I opened my box, I found some jewelry in a little 
glass creamer. I enjoy collecting glass items, and this was a rather 
undistinguished addition to my collection - or so I thought at first. One of 
my younger sister was there when Mom made the decision that the creamer was 
to go to her oldest daughter since it had come from Germany with a 
great-great (#?) grandmother who came from Germany in the early 1700's, and 
this was the one piece she brought with her that survived. Now there is a 
conflict. It was on my mother's mother's side that there is supposedly the 
Lenne Lenape woman who was a midwife. If this piece of glassware descended 
from mother to daughter all the way down, how did it pass through the Lenne 
Lenape woman? Perhaps at some point it was given to the daughter-in-law? 
Don't know that I will ever know -- but it is interesting to contemplate. I 
would never decide one or the other story was bogus and throw it away.

Anne

Anne Pemberton
[log in to unmask]
http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org 

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