Unearthing the Stories History Left Out

This morning, we have been thinking about stories. Who tells them? How do we listen to them? How do they shape our understanding of one another and our community?

I want to consider an additional question.

What happens when someone’s story was never written down?

History is not a complete record of everyone who lived. It is a collection of what survived. Letters survive. Diaries survive. Official documents survive. Some people had the education, time, and influence to record their experiences. Others appear only briefly, if they appear at all.

When that happens, we have to look elsewhere.

The story I want to tell you this morning begins not at a famous historical site, but here at Brimmer, beneath the ground some of you crossed on your way into this building.

A few years ago, I taught an archaeology elective at Brimmer. My class excavated several test pits in the front yard of the Lower School building across the street. As we removed the layers of soil, we uncovered evidence of lives that had unfolded there more than a century earlier. Long before the property became a school, it was a private home. We found shards of window glass, fragments of metal objects, and pieces of blue-and-white porcelain, like this one.

These things had been broken, discarded, and forgotten. But archaeologists love what other people throw away. People do not think about their garbage with history in mind. They do not edit their trash to look more successful or important. These everyday discarded objects can reveal stories that we might otherwise miss.

When we researched the Lower School property, we learned that in the late 1890s it had been the home of Juliet and Albert Munsell and their four children. Albert Munsell was a Boston artist and teacher who developed the Munsell Color System, a scientific method for describing color. It is still used today in design, manufacturing, environmental science, and, of all places, archaeology. Archaeologists all over the world carry Munsell charts to record soil color, just like this one. So my students were using Munsell's own system to document the soil covering artifacts in his front yard.

Albert Munsell's story is not difficult to find. His books, diaries, and paintings survive. Laboratories and organizations bear his name. Look him up on Wikipedia.

But the Munsells were not the only people living in the house across the street.

The 1900 census records four young women who also lived and worked there.

Ellen Regan was their cook.

Mary Ann Maguire was their waitress.

Mary Lennon was their nursery maid.

Gretchen Blum was the children's caregiver.

All four women were in their twenties. All four helped sustain that household’s daily life. Yet we know almost nothing about them beyond their names, ages, occupations, and where they were born.

We do not know what they hoped to do with their lives. We do not know what they worried about, or what made them laugh. Perhaps someday a diary or a letter from one of them will surface, but for now their lives are recorded in four lines of a census, while Albert Munsell's story fills books.

So we look for these women in what they left behind. A piece of porcelain cannot tell us who used it. We cannot know whether this dish was carried by Mary Ann Maguire, washed in the kitchen where Ellen Regan worked, or used in a room where Mary Lennon or Gretchen Blum cared for the Munsell children.

But this broken dish reminds us that they were there. They handled the ordinary objects of daily life. Their experiences were part of the history of this property, even though almost none of their voices were preserved.

The archaeologist James Deetz described this kind of history with the phrase "in small things forgotten." Ordinary objects can help recover the experiences of people whom traditional histories overlooked. Their absence from the history books does not mean they were absent from history.

Those of you who have visited George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, during the Grade 7 Exploration Week trip experienced this firsthand. Washington is one of the most thoroughly documented people in U.S. history. His letters, journals, and official papers fill entire collections, and he played a pivotal role in the events that led to our nation's independence 250 years ago.

But hundreds of enslaved people also lived and worked at Mount Vernon, most of them forbidden by law from learning to read or write. On the same property, one man's thoughts were preserved in extraordinary detail while hundreds of people were denied the chance to leave behind a single written word.

So archaeologists at Mount Vernon do what my students did across the street. They study the buildings, tools, ceramics, and personal possessions left behind by enslaved families, and from those objects they recover glimpses of the lives of the families who lived there.

Some of you have already stood at the edge of those excavations at Mount Vernon. Seventh graders, you will stand there this spring. When you do, watch that work closely. Those archaeologists are unearthing stories that no one ever wrote down.

This imbalance in whose story we get to hear is not unique to Mount Vernon. It runs through all 250 years of our country’s history. Some voices were preserved and amplified. Others were overlooked, excluded, or deliberately silenced.

Our theme this year is "250 Years: Many Voices, Building Community." Building a community of many voices is not only about giving everyone a chance to speak. It also means paying attention to who has not been heard.

So this year, when you hear a story about our country’s history or our School community, pause and ask what might be missing. Sometimes an ordinary object, a passing reference, or a few lines in an old census can give us a glimpse of a story that would otherwise be lost. You do not need an archaeologist’s trowel to do that work. Sometime this week, ask one person in this community something you have never thought to ask them. Then listen to the answer. 

Remember that the loudest voices are not the only ones that matter. 

Some of the most important stories are found in small things forgotten.