By Teresa A. Martin
I love history and history’s stories and all the threads of the past, and that’s why I so enjoyed being Out & About in virtual time travel this week.
One of the great benefits of our online world is the resurrection of musty old documents. Not only have vast volumes of original records been digitalized, but they have also been made accessible with a few clicks of the mouse. And I’m not just talking about Documents of Historical Importance. No, the much more interesting documents are the millions of mundane records that we compile about ourselves.
Earlier this week, I paid a memorial visit to the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. Strolling down the rows and gazing at the names of eastern European origin and the mid 1800s birthdates I began to imagine I was hearing the voices, the accents, even the scents of church halls of a community, a time, and a place long gone.
With this imagery floating through my brain, it comes as no surprise that I promptly dove into the virtual history world. I picked up a trial to ancestory.com, one of sites of the Generation Network, a company based in the epicenter of genealogical research, Provo Utah.
This network of sites provides a portal to mountains of documents, things like ship passenger lists, census records, social security death indices, marriage records from the 1600s ... nothing of Historical Importance, per se, just the record of a million million lives.
I tried to find the Ellis Island manifest with my grandfather’s name, but had no luck. I did find another person with same approximate name, same country of origin, and I opened up the .jpg file. As I looked at the scanned page from the registry through squinted eyes I could hear the din of the receiving center.
I was excited for a moment, because I know how names and dates can change in documentation. I followed this individual to Newport, found him in 1920 living in a boarding house with thirty-odd others. I wondered, for moment, if this was one and same. Except of course, I have a hard printed copy of 1919 wedding photo, so that nixed the discovery.
Using a ‘sounds like’ search, I did find a 1930 census record in Central Falls, which was then home to my grandparents and their first child. The last name was spelled with ‘i’ in 1930. It would eventually be spelled with an ‘e’ but there was no doubt this was a very real peek into the past.
On the digitized census page were the names of the neighbors. I went to Google Earth and looked up the address. As I zoomed in, the people from the census tract of 1930 settled into their homes and listened readio news about president Hoover and the dust bowl and read in the newspaper about the building of the Washington Bridge over the Seekonk River. It was eerie. Just seeing the record made it real.
I jumped to the National Archives, one of our truly great national treasures. Yes, it holds Important Moments, but it also holds nuts and bolts of individual lives. For example, a friend’s father had been long rumored to have been a WW2 casualty, but no one really seemed to know for sure. There, in the national archive, were original scanned documents, printed shortly after the war’s end, listing every casualty, cause, and military ID number. When I saw George’s name, I literally got a shiver down my spine. Rumor was true. Death was true. History jumped several decades into the present. I stared at line of text for a while.
Because the nature of the World Wide Web mirrors the notion of web-based brain function in which information is non-linear yet linked in multiple directions, it was easy to follow a thread that led me to a collection of selective service cards.
I saw my grandfather’s card. Another scanned document, with a real person’s handwriting speaking across time. I saw George’s card and shivered realizing that a year later he would be nothing more than line in a list of casualties ... but on that day he drove a truck for living.
The number of people whose connection with the past has been forever altered because of online tools is huge. Ancestry.com alone has 750,000 subscribers. And, by the way, $140 million in revenue. Whoever said history doesn’t pay? The company says 70 percent of Americans are seeking their personal history.
Too often history is made up only of facts, figures, memorized dates, and some sanitized moments. But that’s not what history is. History is OUR story, told through a million million voices, some louder, some more remembered, some longer than others – but all important in the tapestry of time.
Finding a scrap of someone’s handwriting on a 1910 document, seeing a 1685 marriage record, mapping a neighborhood of yesterday over real visual data of today is powerful. Maybe it isn’t literally time travel, but with a little bit imagination the online world has become a place where time can bend, even if just for a moment.
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