Fact Checking Your Personal History/Memoir

Memories and facts are not the same thing, but both are important in your personal history. 


Facts can be checked and verified in some objective source, such as reference materials or people who were on the scene at the time or know about the places and events. 


Memories, on the other hand, encompass all the shades of meaning, the lens of experience, the emotional connections that color and shape a place and experiences. Your personal history can't be "true" without both facts and memory. Together, facts and memory combine detail, emotion, and meaning into a good story. 

RMS Titantic, courtesy Wikipedia

A good reporter knows this. The RMS Titantic sinks, and you can get "just the facts, ma'am":

• On her maiden voyage, the ship scrapes an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. April 14, 1912;
• Five compartments fill with water in ship built to stay afloat with water in four;
• The ship's 20 lifeboats can accommodate only 1,178 persons; more than 2,200 were on board;
• At 2:20 a.m. April 15, 1912, the Titantic sinks;
• 1,514 people are killed. 

Now that's a tragic and compelling story, but don't we want to know more? Don't we want to know who these people were, the heroes and villians, the compassionate and the self-absorbed? And even when the facts are invented (think Rose and Jack in James Cameron's 1997 movie, Titantic), the story has its own truth.

With personal histories, many facts can be verified and checked to bolster your story and to add details for the reader. The Internet, of course, is a treasure trove of information. (I found a picture of the "Jumbo" that I used in my March 12, 2012 post on the Roanoke, Illinois Web site--thank you, Cheryl Wolfe--as well as a Centennial History of the town that I purchased on E-Bay.) And Google Maps lets you zero right in on streets and buildings in places far away, refreshing your memory in a way that's almost as good as time travel. 

Too, if never hurts to check your memory with family members, friends, colleagues, or others who shared your experiences or lived in the same time and place. Their information may adjust your memory or just add to the story.

On a recent trip to see my folks in Oklahoma, my dad and mom "adjusted" my story about the night when my pals, Jim and Chuck, came calling after dark and got the wrong bedroom window (See "Night Visitors," March 20, 2012, below). 

When she was awakened to a flashlight shining into their bedroom window, Mom said her first thought was "carnies!" The carnival that was in town employed a group of rather seedy looking characters whom she thought might easily be capable of mischief, especially in semi-isolated house outside of town. 

She recollected not only screaming, but calling out, "Get the gun!" a demand meant to scare the culprits, because the only gun my dad owned was a shotgun for hunting birds, which was kept--unloaded, of course--in its case way, way back in his closet behind some heavy garment bags. But just the word "gun" surely lit a fire under Jim and Chuck as they made a hasty retreat through the cornfield. 

Although I thought my dad had figured out who the visitors were on his own, he had a slightly different memory. He told me, "When I went into town the next day, the story was already all over town. Jim and Chuck had been bragging about it. Somebody, I don't remember who, asked me about it. So when I saw Jim, I let him know that I knew what they'd been up to."

A-ha! So it wasn't Jim and Chuck's reputations that gave them away. It was just their big mouths! 

Still, I imagine they would have their very own versions of the truth.

Night Visitors

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

Even at 11 o’clock at night, the August air was as thick and sticky as the cotton candy that my best friend Debbie and I had devoured at Roanoke’s weekend carnival. The community fundraiser was set up on village’s south side, in the American Legion park, past the railroad tracks.

Giddy with excitement—and too many sweets—we lounged on my bed, sweating in the moonlight that streamed through my open bedroom window. Not even the slightest breeze stirred the curtains as we whispered about the evening’s fun and waited for our expected midnight rendezvous.

We had met our school friends, Chuck and Jim, at the carnival that Friday evening, where we were allowed some pre-teen independence in the waning summer days before we would start seventh grade. With our allowances stuffed into our shorts’ pockets, we careened around the midway, throwing down dimes and quarters on games of chance, sideshows, and snacks. And, of course there were the rides.

We screamed on the Wild Mouse, squished unnaturally close together on the Scrambler, and cuddled at the top of the Ferris wheel, with all of Woodford County laid out below us. Or at least Chuck and Debbie cuddled, as Chuck clearly had a gleam in his eye these days when he looked at perky, button-nosed, brown-eyed Debbie.

To me, Jim and Chuck were just friends. We had gone to school and the Methodist Church together since kindergarten, playing softball in the school fields, riding bikes to the creeks, climbing the Jumbo. The two of them were lots of fun and full of mischief, but the familiarity crowded out any notion of romance for me.

That night at the carnival, the four of us quickly discovered an intriguing symmetry—Debbie was spending the night at my house, and the boys were camping out in a tent in Chuck’s backyard.

A plan was hatched.

A little before midnight, when parents would surely be asleep, the boys would sneak due north through the cornfields to my house, which was just a half-mile out of town, and rendezvous with us. We girls agreed to leave a lawn chair under my bedroom window so the boys could recognize where to find us.

As the minutes ticked past midnight and on towards 1 a.m., all was quiet in the house. We had heard my parents go to bed an hour ago in the bedroom next door. We yawned and stretched out, trying to find a cool place on the sheets. Clearly, the boys weren’t coming. Maybe Chuck’s parents had caught them, maybe they’d gotten lost in the corn and turned back, or maybe they’d just changed their minds. We yearned for sleep, which seemed impossible in my stifling bedroom.

Photo by Watt Publishing

Even as a wind was starting to kick up, Debbie and I gathering up our pillows and sheets, and headed for the basement playroom, a comfortably cool retreat on a night like this.

Some of what happened next is still in dispute as everyone had a little bit of the story. But this much is pretty clear:

Sometime after 1 a.m., two figures, flashlights in hand, emerged from the cornfield on the south side of our lawn. The house windows were all dark.

Suddenly, my mom awoke to a light panning across her bed. Seeing a face at the open window, she uttered a dry-mouthed scream, and my dad leaped from bed toward the window.

“Hey! hey!” he yelled, spying two figures scrambling off, lickety-split, into the corn.

“Who was it?!” my mother asked, her heart still racing.

“Just kids,” Dad said. “I think I can guess who.”

At the breakfast table the next morning, my mom casually asked, “Did you two have a plan for Chuck and Jim to come by the house in the middle of the night?”

Debbie and I passed surprised glances, and then, feigned our most innocent expressions as Mom told us about the fright she’d received. As quickly as possible, and saying little, we high-tailed it to the bedroom to giggle about the boys’ mistake:

• "Can you believe they got your parents' bedroom?"
• "Why would they DO that when we told them that the window was the closest to the porch, and that's where the chair was?"
• "I can just seem them running off into the field! Probably tromped down a couple rows!"
• "It's a good thing Dad doesn't keep a gun!"

Later that afternoon, my dad stopped by Jim’s house to return a cake pan to Jim’s mother that she had left at the Boy Scouts’ bake sale at the carnival. As he was leaving, he spotted Jim in the yard, and remarked with a chuckle:

“I see you made it out of the cornfield last night, Jim. I figure Chuck did, too.”

Never ones to believe their reputations might precede them, Jim and Chuck were  convinced that we had ratted them out—an argument that raged for years, and chances are, could still be resurrected with renewed vigor.

for those who stand and wait ...

That day’s blizzard was not the first snowfall of the winter of ’62–’63, but it came with a singular speedy intensity. By afternoon, the decision was made to close school an hour or so early and send everyone home before the roads got any worse. The drifts on the country roads were already too much for the school buses, and parents were phoned to make other arrangements to get their children home.

Microsoft File Art

Schoolchildren in Roanoke, Illinois, population 1,800, belonged to one of two groups—the town kids or the country kids. Town kids walked to school (rarely did anyone’s parents drive children to school); country kids rode the school buses. Inclement weather sometimes kept the school buses from running, giving the country kids a day off until the plows could clear the roads. I started kindergarten as a town kid, and I often envied the country kids’ extra “snow days.”

But this winter, my fifth-grade year, was the first my family spent in our newly built house located just a quarter mile north of town on a corner plot my dad bought from a farmer. A country kid now, I rode the school bus to town, and extra snow days were a distinct possibility. But I hadn’t figured on getting stranded at school.

When we students learned school was letting out early, some parents—country and town alike—were already waiting outside in cars. Townies who lived near by bundled up and headed out to walk home.

My teacher, Mr. Castro, passed the message from my mom: “Stay at school and wait for your dad. He’s out on a call, but will come and get you when he’s done.”

My heart sunk. My dad was a veterinarian, and his “calls” could take him to far-flung farms across the Illinois River valley, and the duration of his visits were unpredictable.

Happy to get home early, all my friends skedaddled out of class in a blur, leaving me—the last kid. As the minutes ticked by, the custodian seemed to be the only soul in the building as I waited and waited at the school door, a lump growing in my throat. Did Dad get detained? Had he slid into a snowy ditch? There was no way to know and nothing to do but wait.

Unless . . .

Microsoft File Art

The school was on the northern edge of town, its athletic fields backing up to a cornfield. And beyond that field, at the intersection of the section line road and the gravel extension of Main Street, was our house. In the summertime, I often took my bike down the gravel road into town. Or, to avoid the dusty road, we kids would simply take off through the cornfield, following the straight rows until they ended at “civilization.”

Now, with the field empty save for the snow, I could easily see the gravel road from the school, and I knew that at the field’s highest place, I would be able to see the roof of our house. There was no way to get lost.

And so, taking charge of my own fate, I headed out the door. Rounding the school building, I slammed into an icy wind blowing with ferocity off the flat, expansive prairie. I caught my breath, and for an instant, hesitated. Then, pumping up stubborn determination, I thought, “I can do this. It’s not far.”

On I trudged, into the field, snow swirling and blowing around me, heading due north to home.

The going was easier at first, snow just to my boot tops. But the farther I went, the deeper the snow became. Soon I was up to my knees, and it was a slow slog. Clearly, the trek was going to take longer than I figured, so I determined to angle off toward the road, hop the fence, and take the road home.

Reaching the rise, the older snow was packed hard from the dry wind. I could walk on top of it as I turned toward the road.

Then, whoosh! The snow bank gave way and I went down into a gully. I was over my head in snow. Flat on my back, staring up at the steely sky, I was spent. This was a dumb idea, and I was going to have to eat crow, if I was ever again warm enough to chew. No matter—dry clothes and a warm house was all I wanted.

As I struggled to get free, the snow felt like quicksand around me. Recalling the extraction technique demonstrated in some old movie, I rolled over and over on my belly until I was back up on hard snow.

Straight ahead of me, not a hundred yards away, stood the last house on Main Street where my friend Beverly and her family lived. They would take me in! I lumbered forward, snow packed in my sleeves, my boots, my cap, and falling down my back.

I must have looked quite a sight when Bev’s mother opened the back door to my knock.

Microsoft File Art

“What in the world...”

“Mrs. France, can I stay here until my dad comes to pick me up?” I asked.

“What happened to you?”

The Frances graciously took me in, warmed me up, gave me dry clothes, and fed me the most delicious potato soup I’ve ever had.