When History Hits Home

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe


In my job as a fellowships advisor I stress to applicants that a strong application demonstrates three things: depth of expertise in a given field; breadth of interests and experiences; and the applicant’s change over time, i.e. history. The third pillar of the triad constitutes the all-important biographical element. Americans' hunger for personal history makes Ancestry.com’s stockholders rich and guarantees the flood of genealogists to the shores of Salt Lake.

The Ball family of Lompoc, California, ca. 1894. 

My sons started high school and middle school at the end of August. As I delivered my nearly­ men to the doors of their new institutions, my desire to make history from memory overwhelmed me. The hundreds of digital images stored on the family computer cried out for a chronology with which to capture the evolution of my chubby-­cheeked chappies into the skinny tweens who seek escape from their mother’s needy embrace.

My compulsion has since produced three photo­books, and I am at work on two more. My mother used to assemble such tomes from the fragile prints of an earlier age. My photo­books exist in a cyber “cloud” as well as on my coffee table. My ability to shape the past into the form I like resembles the easier editing now accessible to authors of all history books. While David Hume wrote by hand and Oscar Handlin clattered at a keyboard, post­modern respondents to Clio’s call can, in a matter of seconds, place images on pages and produce flourishes that only the most able medieval monks could make over many days.