Maine History Online

The historical record is always incomplete and because of this historians must take the evidence at hand and ask questions of it. This is the conversation between historians and the historical record: Who created this document? For what purpose? Who was the intended audience? What is the author's point of view? Is the information verifiable? What is this document evidence of? Why has this document survived?

And because the historical record is incomplete it is just as important to consider what has not survived. Why has it not survived and how might the answer be found elsewhere?

The conversation between evidence and historian yields answers, but inevitably raises additional questions. As a case in point, let's examine this image from 1903. If we were to construct a history of a Maine town we might start with a photograph of its leaders and prominent citizens, such as this image of Remarkable Old Men of Alfred.

What brought them together and, critically, why were these particular men photographed? By whom? For what purpose? Following a lead from its title (provided in the 21st century), we might ask, what makes these men "remarkable"?

We would see men noted for their achievements in the public arenas of politics, medicine, the law, and town government. While several of these men reached not only local prominence, but also state and even national recognition, the photograph illustrates an important historical question: what of the other people of Alfred -- those who led less public lives?

Men who wrote laws, ran businesses, and prescribed medical treatments left numerous documents behind enabling us to remark upon them in later generations. Surviving records, and photographs, let us know about the experiences of these particular men.

But to understand Maine in 1903 more completely we need to ask who is missing in this conversation and how do we bring their voices into history?

Adding other voices enriches and deepens our understanding of the past but to do so, historians must look harder for the evidence of those lives.

Historians pay attention to questions of gender, class, race and ethnicity – personal markers that are often the basis for divisions in society and history. Examining our photograph of remarkable "men" we might ask what opportunities these men – white, elite –– had that women, and men of color, did not, opportunities such as access to higher education and to professions from which the illiterate, the lower classes, the non-white, and women were excluded.

The search for evidence from lives lived privately has led historians to challenging, but illuminating, historical sources. Unlike the documents of public life such as treaties, court judgments, and political speeches – records that tend to be disseminated widely and saved in multiple copies – the evidence of private lives is more idiosyncratic.

We might, for example, examine women's domestic lives by examining their recipe books, which were filled not only with instructions for food preparation, but also included home remedies and household hints.

An 18th-century medicinal recipe, for example, is a rich source of information on locally available plants and gives us insight into home health care. Passed down mother to daughter, these handwritten records capture for posterity the daily tasks and challenges in women's lives.

Material culture such as samplers and mourning jewelry provide another window into the work of women. Young girls practiced their alphabet and their sewing skills in crafting samplers at young ages, honing important skills needed in their lives as wives and mothers. Samplers also reveal key characteristics of women's lives such as piety and the centrality of family.

Eight-year old Zilpah Wadsworth, the future mother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, stitched a pious reminder to "Remember now thy Creator/in the days of thy youth." Eleanor Bailey Cooper in 1832 embroidered her family genealogy, providing a record of her ancestors and a message to her descendants to remember her when her "bones are rotten."

A nine-year old's recollection of General Lafayette's 1825 visit to Maine is found on Sarah Minott's Portland sampler, a carefully wrought poem that provides a unique voice among the more public celebrations of this hero's journey.

Memorial samplers, often painted or embroidered by school girls, and mourning jewelry, worn more typically by the upper classes, reflect the ever-present specter of death in earlier centuries and women's roles in preparing for, enduring, and recording this inevitable family disruption. These artifacts raise questions about the etiquette and expectation of mourning, both public and private.

To include more voices in the historical conversation historians need to look harder –– listen more carefully — to the past. For instance, the lives of farmers and the working class may be recorded in daily journals. Sparse and lean of comment, their very focus on the ordinary – weather, daily tasks accomplished – gives us an opportunity to chart the day to day, month to month pattern of lives that reflect, perhaps, the majority of Mainers through time.

To get at workers' lives, we might examine business pay records or store ledgers that capture what workers, women, and farmers bought, sold, or traded.

Particularly challenging is recovering the experiences of those who left few or no written records – those who lived in an oral culture, who were illiterate, or those had no access to pen and paper, or had no inclination – or time – to write.

Examining the farmers, workers, immigrants, and women who shared communities with "remarkable" men, deepens our understanding of the past. Searching for primary sources, evidence, that will reveal events big and small, lives public and private, is part of the challenge – and intrigue – of history.