Sarah Broom writes about her family and their home in The Yellow House. Many of her comments resonated with me and the work I'm doing with our family's documents and the stories they tell.
"Eldership is a full-time job." JHT - It can be a full-time job for the person who preserves and shares the family legacy and stories. It's a labor of love.
Going through family documents Sarah Broom’s mother saved from Hurricane Katrina – “Mom examines each of these items first, as a docent would, before passing them on to me. I look at them hard, trying to locate the special detail, photographing some of them with my phone. … “Papers tell so many stories,” she [Mom] says, watching me look."
JHT - When I go through family documents, like those above - all related to Ray Pepper's father, William Otterbein Pepper - I try to be still and focused so I can sense the stories that are there.
Sarah Broom is working in Burundi and reacting to the lack of paperwork, “written background to support an idea, it was hard for me to believe in it. This was, I can see now, a facile response to all that had been erased. I was still writing everything down, as I had learned to do during high school in the Yellow House, especially the rote detail, as if by doing so, I was making things real, findable, fighting disappearance.”
JHT – This brings to mind all I’m doing with the family archives – I’m fighting the disappearance of our ancestors. I'm trying to make them real to their posterity. I want the ancestors, their documents and pictures to be findable. I’m using the papers and the photographs to tell their stories. To help people know and remember.
