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.

How Topography Intersects Personal History

A child of the flatlands, I have always loved the wide-open spaces—unrestricted vistas from east to west where it is possible to see the sun appear on the horizon at daybreak, ascend to the zenith, and sink below the edge of the earth in the evening, one day, whole and complete.

I have lived in places with trees or buildings or cliffs, where open sightlines are not possible. Such places wear on me and begin to feel confining. But if I can get out, away, on higher ground and see the arc of the earth against the sky—ah, that’s freedom, and my soul soars.

Topography must influence our personal histories in some way, certainly in the experiences we encounter, and perhaps also in our very outlooks on life. Can a person who born on the savannah see life the same as someone who grew up beside a great river? Wouldn’t folks living at 8,000 feet have different experiences from those on the coasts?

Few places are flatter than central Illinois. The rolling fields, mostly corn or soybeans, go on and on, unbroken until there is a creek or a river. But a “mountain”—the Jumbo—also defined our town, Roanoke, and still does, I suspect.

Roanoke's Jumbo, courtesy Cheryl Wolfe, www.roanokeil.org

Rising from the prairie at the southeastern corner of town, the Jumbo is the tailings of the Roanoke Coal Mine, sunk in 1881, the second shaft in Woodford County. Although only a couple hundred feet high, the Jumbo stands out for miles around, it’s odd gray and red color contrasting with the rich, black top soil. The Jumbo is Roanoke’s distinctive symbol of place.

Against the Jumbo's weathered backbone, the annual Independence Day fireworks show was mounted, as families gathered in the park at its base. At Christmastime, a lighted star was displayed from the Jumbo's summit, and today there waves an American flag. 

For us kids in the 1960s, the Jumbo was a place for adventures. We would pack a lunch, a canteen of water, and ride our bikes to the park below the Jumbo and hike to the top. The old railbed, along which rail cars had hauled and dumped the dirt and slag, provided the easiest climb. But some kids liked to try the steeper side. The mound, an uneven pile full of gullies, steep faces, and coarse soil full of sharp gravel, and bits of coal could be slippery. Fall down, and you were likely to sustain a nasty scraped knee or thigh.

Kids liked to tell tales about the Jumbo:

• a cave-in had trapped miners inside and their bodies were never found; 
• the place was haunted by the ghosts of dead miners; 
• Boy Scouts had seen eerie figures sitting on timbers where the tipple had been;
• some kids knew a secret entrance to the shaft; 
• and the mine had once blown its top off.

Not much of that was completely true, of course. Here’s a few facts from the Roanoke Centennial History:

• The longest shaft ran two miles east and a little north of town, on a downward slope.
• Originally, mules were used to pull the coal cars through the tunnels, and a room was carved out at the bottom of the shaft where the animals were stabled during the mining season, September through April.
• In 1890, the mine produced 42,000 tons of coal, selling at $2 per ton.
•  At its peak, the mine employed 300 men and hoisted 500 tons a day.
• For two weeks in late summer, the mine was opened so that farmers could purchase coal to fuel the thrashing machines that traveled through the countryside during harvest time.
•  Two men were killed in separate cave-ins in the mine in 1905, prompting extensive repairs to improve safety and efficiency.
• Clay brick and tiles were manufactured after the turn of the century adjacent to the mine, utilizing coal-fired kilns.

But the most dramatic events were these:

• On June 29, 1906, quicksand shot into the mine shaft 70 feet below ground, tearing a scaffolding from the walls, and plunging four men 400 feet to their deaths. The Roanoke Call published a special edition the next day, recounting the tragedy. The four victims—Andrew Mitchell, August Mueser, Camille Faucon, and Joseph Dewasme—all under forty, first-generation immigrants from Scotland, German, Belgium, and France, respectively. Each had married Roanoke women less than ten years before their deaths, and each left young children.

• On April 14, 1941, several years after the mine and brick factory had closed, the mine tipple collapsed with a roar into the shaft, creating a crater 60 feet deep and wide, and shaking the earth for miles. The Centennial History reports, “The hole filled the next day with the bluest water anyone in Roanoke had ever seen.” The dramatic event marked the end of the mine. The state ordered the crater filled and sealed. The equipment was sold. Only the Jumbo remains of Roanoke’s mining days.

Topography holds ambience, history of time and place, and particular experiences for those whose lives it intersects. How has topography affected your personal history? 

"There is no one alive who is Youer than You!" -Dr. Seuss

Stories are the stuff of life. And if you think you have none to tell, think again. Every life brims with effervescent joy, gut-wrenching sorrow, poignant moments, fortunate turns of fate, miscalculations, and the details that define a particular time and place. Consider the declaration of Dr. Seuss: "There is no one alive who is Youer than You!" And, let me add, there never will be. What's more, some day those who come after you just may puzzle over your name and wonder … 

Sometime ago, my uncle Charles Johnston produced a comprehensive genealogy of my mother's side of our family, the Johnstons. He uncovered and included details of these people's lives three and four generations removed, but beyond that, the pickings were few. Farther back, there are only names, dates for their lifespans, locations where they were born, married, died. 


Some of the stories are tantalizing:

• William Johnston strung the first barbed wire in the area around Pilot Point, Texas;
• the Younger brothers helped themselves to some fresh horses on the Johnston Texas ranch, but kindly strapped some cash to a post in payment; 
• great-great-great uncle George Haley attempted, unsuccessfully, to get on the Dawes Rolls in 1902, based on his grandmother's claims that she was an Indian from Alabama; 
• the family dogs decided they didn't like the territory when the family headed north across the Red River into Oklahoma, so they high-tailed it back to Texas in just four days, a trek that the wagons had taken twelve days to make. (I'm not so sure about the intelligence of those dogs!)

But as I study my uncle's well-drawn family tree, tracing the names back and back through time and place, I find pretty much everything is left to the imagination: 

Allathy Hale, Thomas Allen, Nancy Toliver, Coonrod Dick. 

Who were these people? How did they make a living? Why did they leave North Carolina and Virginia? What was life like on the Tennessee frontier? What were their aspirations? What were their great joys and sorrows? Genealogy is great, but what are the stories? We will never know. 

A talented storyteller, my aunt Geneva Hudson was determined to leave a legacy rather than speculations about her life. In her memoir about her "growing-up years,"  "Barefoot in an Oklahoma Sticker Patch," she tells about her life in Oklahoma City during the Great Depression, the daughter of proud, hard-working, and independent folks. 

Her stories are a treasure that acquaint me with a grandmother I hardly knew. With her book, Geneva has preserved family memories and given roots to subsequent generations of our family. And others, looking for a charming and poignant account of those years in that place, have enjoyed it, too.

You have stories to tell, and so do I. Big or small, they have value in the telling. In this space, I plan to share some of my stories that I hope will inspire you to write down a few of your own. 


It really doesn't matter whether you want to share your stories with only friends and family or whether you would like to offer them to perfect strangers in a memoir. Writing down your stories fills in the gaps between names and dates on a page. Your stories tack down your life and are a treasure to be shared for those who come after you. They are your personal history of the human being who is you and only you -- your legacy, evermore. 

Let's get started!