"That Food of the Memory which Gives the Clue to Profitable Research": Oral history as a source for local, regional, and family history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

Numerous local, regional and family historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century collected oral narrations and conducted interviews as a form to document information that otherwise might have never been preserved. Family historians, in particular, not only practiced interviewing relatives for family histories, but also encouraged the practice in how-to-do manuals among their peers. While advocating the practice, family historians also reflected about the value of "traditionary evidence" collected through interviews and other means. These reflections by family historians mirrored the discussions about the value of traditions and memories as historical sources among several professional historians at the time. These reflections were shaped by a modernized understanding of tradition, which combined a reverential approach to the authoritarian element of tradition with a critical approach questioning the validity of tradition. In this context, oral history was both a tool to negotiate the value of tradition and a mirror to the contemporary understanding of tradition. Katharina Hering is a student in the Ph.D. program in history at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. She is working on her dissertation on the history of Pennsylvania German genealogical research from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s. She is also working as a researcher and producer for the Oral History Program at Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries. *I am grateful to my co-panelists Keith Erekson and Bruce Stave, to the chair, Doug Boyd, and to the audience at the OHA meeting in Little Rock, October 2006, for good suggestions and for inspired discussion on the "History of Oral History: Before the Federal Writers' Project." Thanks also to Robert Townsend, Roger Mellen, and Roy Rosenzweig for comments on and suggestions for an earlier version of this essay. The Oral History Review, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp. 27-47, ISSN 0094-1223, electronic ISSN 1533-8592. ? 2007 by the Oral History Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ohr.2007.34.2.27. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.235 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 05:38:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW