I've never been one to apologize for getting emotional. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable and depends who you ask, but it is what it is. This isn't something I regularly focus on, but 2016 as a year has basically been a dumpster fire that provided me with a free license on unlimited feelings. It is not clear to me when this expires.

There is something to be said for the connection between drawing on emotional connections and the practice of being a historian. It's something I've spent a lot of time considering as I process my dissertation into a book manuscript and try to find the right balance between passionately telling the life-story of the woman I've invested my career to this point researching and letting my own emotions sink too far into purple prose. For me there's always been a deep connection between places and the emotional connections we develop to them and the way I see myself as a historian. For me, that means going to back to where I grew up, which as I've posted about, brings up a lot of conflicting emotions. I don't have any shame about having all the feels about this place.
I somehow knew, even as a child, that more than a small part of how I experienced life was very much shaped by the past. Maybe part of it was because we didn't have TV until I was 16, or the way my grandfather insisted on doing things like it was mostly still 1954. My earliest views on the world were shaped by Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy as much as they were by the fact that it was the 1980s.
I somehow knew, even as a child, that more than a small part of how I experienced life was very much shaped by the past. Maybe part of it was because we didn't have TV until I was 16, or the way my grandfather insisted on doing things like it was mostly still 1954. My earliest views on the world were shaped by Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy as much as they were by the fact that it was the 1980s.
But there was more to it than that. My grandmother, of whom I have very few photographs because she hated having her picture taken, came from a family of 13. Of her brothers and sisters, two never left the home they were born in, and her youngest sister, my great aunt Hazel, died there just before I turned 10. Cleaning out that house was something of an archaeological experiment, given the time the family had lived in it and the reality that they were what can only be described as hoarders - having lived through the Great Depression, they took saving things seriously.
It was in the midst of cleaning out that house that I came across a picture that fundamentally shaped the way I thought about the past, and contributed somewhat directly to my becoming a historian.
It was in the midst of cleaning out that house that I came across a picture that fundamentally shaped the way I thought about the past, and contributed somewhat directly to my becoming a historian.

I found the picture wrapped in tissue paper, stuffed into an old cigar box in Hazel's bedroom. I assumed at first it must have been a brother - my grandmother had several relatives who served in the Navy during World War II, including a brother who died decades before I was born. I took the photograph and several others to my grandmother's house, and recall clearly asking about them. Some others she had explanations for, but this photo met with a somewhat terse response that made it clear our discussion of the subject was over.
"Hazel had several men who wanted to marry her," my grandmother informed me with a sigh. "But she never did, she just waited for that one to come back."
That was the absolute end of our talk about the matter. Several later attempts to pry for information led nowhere, and at the time I was too young to understand most of the implications. All I knew was that my great aunt Hazel died alone in her bed, having waited half a century for a man who never came home. If there was more to the story, my grandmother was careful to never share it, and by the time I was old enough to ask more questions, she was gone.
I started using the photograph in classes a few semesters ago as a way to convey to my students that individual human experiences are always at the heart of history, and that even when we discuss big topics like "World War II" we're really still talking about things that shaped the lives of ordinary people. I tell them what I know - that I have no idea who this guy is. Hazel would have been in her late teens during World War II, and the family lived about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's conceivable she went there for a number of reasons, including volunteering for the Red Cross, which some other old papers in her things suggested she might have done. I don't know how well she knew this unnamed officer, but given the location it's likely he sailed for the Pacific Theater. Beyond that are a sea of possibilities. Maybe he was killed and she couldn't bear it. Maybe he went missing and she spent the next decades of her life hoping for an unlikely return. Maybe he did come back, but not to Hazel.
My students, inevitably, want answers, and realistically I could probably find them if I dug hard enough. But I'm not always sure that I want to. The unknowns in this story fit emotionally with the disconnect I always felt to Hazel, who rarely came to family dinners and who I'm not sure I ever heard speak a complete sentence. The mystery seems appropriate for the blank spaces I can't possibly hope to fill in for her life.
"Hazel had several men who wanted to marry her," my grandmother informed me with a sigh. "But she never did, she just waited for that one to come back."
That was the absolute end of our talk about the matter. Several later attempts to pry for information led nowhere, and at the time I was too young to understand most of the implications. All I knew was that my great aunt Hazel died alone in her bed, having waited half a century for a man who never came home. If there was more to the story, my grandmother was careful to never share it, and by the time I was old enough to ask more questions, she was gone.
I started using the photograph in classes a few semesters ago as a way to convey to my students that individual human experiences are always at the heart of history, and that even when we discuss big topics like "World War II" we're really still talking about things that shaped the lives of ordinary people. I tell them what I know - that I have no idea who this guy is. Hazel would have been in her late teens during World War II, and the family lived about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's conceivable she went there for a number of reasons, including volunteering for the Red Cross, which some other old papers in her things suggested she might have done. I don't know how well she knew this unnamed officer, but given the location it's likely he sailed for the Pacific Theater. Beyond that are a sea of possibilities. Maybe he was killed and she couldn't bear it. Maybe he went missing and she spent the next decades of her life hoping for an unlikely return. Maybe he did come back, but not to Hazel.
My students, inevitably, want answers, and realistically I could probably find them if I dug hard enough. But I'm not always sure that I want to. The unknowns in this story fit emotionally with the disconnect I always felt to Hazel, who rarely came to family dinners and who I'm not sure I ever heard speak a complete sentence. The mystery seems appropriate for the blank spaces I can't possibly hope to fill in for her life.
But back to the feels. Perhaps because I always felt growing up that I would never belong in the place I came from, I often found myself searching for a deeper sense of my own history. In some ways I feel that more acutely now that I've been away from this place for going on two decades and with all the legal wrangling it's tied up in, I really can't go home. There's a certain amount of clarity that comes from knowing that. Uncovering a real-life World War II mystery was one of the things that pushed me to study history as an undergraduate student, and I've carried that sense of searching for connections between place and personal history into my professional work on Montana. Perhaps the reason I connected so strongly to Virginia City in the first place, and to the story of a single woman living there, was because I felt that in telling her story, I might capture that sense of place and how it shaped a life in ways that I know I'll never figure out with my own family. The historian in me wants to know. The rest of me prefers the mystery.