Most of the stories we hear on this project will be hearsay - they won't have happened to the person we're talking to, but to their grandparents or great-grandparents. How will we work with this, so it's not a bug, but a feature? Here's some of what we said about this in the meeting last Weds.
Memory's a funny thing - sometimes details get mis-remembered, or lost or embellished in the telling - and sometimes, these mistakes or changes tell us far more than the "facts" ever could, about how people feel about it all. A memory isn't a fact, it's not some kind of objective recording of what happened - it's something we create, in our heads, using a bit of fact and a bit of emotion. Our memories have a lot of "us" in them, and remembering is pretty much a creative act.
Some of the stories people tell us on this project might not be verifiable in the first place - there might be no records, other than our interviewees' memories. And some of the things we hear might not fit with the facts in the history books. So the question is - how do we present that to the public, without contradicting our interviewees or saying that we know better? How do we present the deeper, emotional truths that lie under people's uncertain memories and half-recalled family stories? Maybe if we present our material as art rather than fact... or if we present different opinions alongside each other..? It's a bit early in the project yet for us to have an answer to this, but it's food for thought.
NB For those who are interested, the work of oral historians like Alessandro Portelli and Luisa Passerini delve into this fascinating question of how memory works, and what it means for historians when people "make mistakes" in what they remember.
