Being part of the story

Read almost any book which tells the history of a place and you are being told the story of people of some significance.  There is the possibility it might include detail of an individual whose record only appears because of a single event.

That's the problem; a history is not unbiased, it is not fair (as in, "you've only heard his side of the story" – and it usually is 'his', not her).  And it most certainly is not complete.

To try and fully understand the complexity of a recorded history of a person, a place, an event or a time period, we will begin with an individual: you, or me.  We have many opportunities each day to make our mark.  We email or text others, we take photographs, we complete forms (some for ordering products and others for banks and to record official events, such as births).  Our belonging to groups may include records of membership, decisions made or newsletters of our contributions. Who knows how many records are made of our employment, our health, our travel, our pensions.  We may write a letter, and if it is to a newspaper or journal, that and our name may be published and may form part of a dialogue.

Our daily lives are recorded in so many ways, most of them with at least some of our personal details.  Whether it all gets left around to be picked up by historians in five hundred years time will depend on how effective our descendant communities are in sifting and keeping; passing on our records or stories for future generations.  Who knows how permanent our digital records will turn out to be.  And if our photos are so personal to us why are we so casual about storing them, unsorted and unlabelled on our phones?

If we have impressed so many marks on history, just from our everyday lives, what about Thomas Blackmore and Elizabeth Fetty?  For the sake of this article I have to invent their names because they were just two of a small group of people who lived between St Albans and Hatfield in the early 1500s.  There is no record of their lives at all, not even their names.  It might be reasonably argued that therefore they did not exist at all.  But homes do not get built without a need for shelter.  Land is not tilled without a need for  food.  The continuity of a settlement is not sustained without children to form the next generation.

Thomas and Elizabeth, and others like them, were used to moving from one place to another, but we do not know whether they knew each other, married and had children, or whether they lived their lives as strangers.  They represent the wide base of a pyramid of  sixteenth century existence in every part of the country and in those parts of our east end of St Albans at that time occupied.

The point is, Elizabeth and Thomas survived and lived out their lives while others made the history we read about.  They were, of course, part of that history, but it was not recorded, even in the most rudimentary ways.  If only the voice recorder was available to Thomas, just as it is to us, so that he could speak his thoughts at the end of each day, or when some unusual event occurs.  Wouldn't that give us a more complete view of the period in which he lived?  Elizabeth's life was transitory, each day's existence wiped clean by the next.  Without an ability to read and write, or the opportunity to buy a medium on which to record thoughts as words, and a secure place to keep them safe, Elizabeth's life was not even worth to others the equivalent of an inscription on a park bench.

So, who gets to tell the paragraphs, pages and chapters of our collective history?  Power, influence and education have counted for most of the contributions, and our knowledge of the history of these islands have been dependent on the parts of the story they chose to tell us.  Those parts played by all the Elizabeths and Thomases down the ages are largely absent.  If we were aware of their evidences, surely that would provide us with a much more rounded account.  As it is, a democratic process it most definitely is not.