Historical Truth

The more I learn about historiography, the more skeptical I get about it.

You've got that one right. I'm a geneologist hobbyist, and the more I dig into my past, the less certain I am about anything factual. All that you can really do is approximate with as much integrity and humility that you can muster what may have been true, and even then you are left with doubt. Consider the principle that if you can reasonably establish that a date is a fact if it is on three primary documents. From Our Story:

"My approach to writing history is to establish the facts. I then try to tie those facts into broad themes or trends, seeking correlations and implications. Finally, I try to bring history alive by using quotes and stories from people who enjoyed or endured those times that discloses the texture of everyday life. The writing of history is a search for truth, an epistemological challenge of the highest order. A fact—an objective snapshot of a chunk of space and time—is often impossible to establish, for we see life through our own glasses darkly. “Memory,” Aunt Viola Bossman notes, “is a slippery thing.” All it takes are two eyewitness accounts of the same traffic accident to make you wonder about history. Artists use this distorting process to create works of enduring creativity. Monet, my favorite painter, looked with fading eyesight at a puddle and saw a shimmer of green and red and purple. (I call the Monets at the Chicago Art Institute “my” Monets.) Beethoven, my favorite musician, with near-deaf ears heard distant cannonades and wrote his transcendent Ninth. I block my ears to hear, I shut my eyes to see.

When we try to discern historical fact, we walk in a wilderness of mirrors. Even primary documents are suspect. In analyzing these early documents, many contradictions have come to light. Some of these are more apparent than real. For example, N.P.’s first son who died at the age of one has a death record that calls him Paulus, and yet the family knew him as Nicholas. A letter from Esther Christiansen, a cousin to Aunt Elvera Anderson, finally reconciled the two names: “Aunt Bertha told me the first Nicholas was called Paul Nicholas,” she wrote in 1988. N.P.’s birth date is listed in numerous HFLs and other primary documents as April 6, 1850. Can we certify this as a fact, since we have found at least three separate documents, each stating that N.P.’s birth date was April 6, 1850? No, for N.P.’s birth document puts his birth date as April 16, 1850. I’m assuming that the birth document is correct and that the other documents are wrong, but I may be mistaken. Even if N.P. was alive today, his recollection may be incorrect. We cannot know for sure. (In the outline of his writing, it’s April 16). Some of these contradictions have their roots in the motivations and skills of those early scribes. It could be that a Lutheran clerk wasn’t inclined to be so scrupulous in recording the vital statistics of a backwoods Baptist. Other contradictions must remain for now shrouded in the mists of time."