We will remember them

My two minutes silence during work on Armistice Day was solitary, but in the evening my daughter went to the drawer where we keep old family photographs, letters, and medals, and we talked about the family members neither of us had ever known but who had died during the 1914-18 war. We reflected on the bitter sadness of bereaved parents opening the envelope and cardboard wrapper of a "King George's Penny" as we ourselves unwrapped it from its original envelope. This one was recompense for a great uncle who had died, not from wounds received on the Western Front, but from infection contracted in central Africa. We have a bundle of his letters home from his last campaign, the overriding impression from reading them being of the plenty of southern Africa compared with the hardships of wartime Britain. But the African campaign, fought around Lake Victoria, was a grim stalemate in which troops were picked off as much by disease as by enemy fire.
Similarly, the strongest impression I got from reading my own grandfather's war diary was of the regular football matches. He was a Lance Corporal in the RAMC and must more often have been risking his life bringing back casualties to field ambulances, but that got little mention. We don't know where that diary is now: lost for good, put somewhere "safe", or given away, perhaps to an archive or museum (I hope).
I recently attempted to trace letters or diaries written by "other ranks" in local regiments about particular battles on the western front in 1915. They are surprisingly scarce.
Should I be surprised? Literacy levels, military censorship, an understandable reluctance to put horrors into words, decisions by family members to either "move on" from the past or to treasure it, accident, and all the social changes of the past 90 years, have all impacted on the written record. Not just about "The War": families have probably in fact kept more wartime than peacetime letters and diaries. Rosemary Sassoon has written about this in her new book Keeping Chronicles: preserving history through written memorabilia (A&C Black, 2010). It is a passionate appeal (born of her own experiences) for families to keep "stuff". But will it be read or implemented by the people who (we might think) need to? Probably not, as we seem to belong to two rival species - hoarders and the shredders. And maybe this is just as well for the planet as well as for historians.

aerem terebrando facilius penetret

"By twisting it should go through the air more easily."  It's a piece of Latin that I have been asked to translate from an eighteenth century applied science textbook, Robin's Tracts of Gunnery, and describes the benefits of a rifled gun barrel. More often I transcribe and translate administrative Latin or legal English, from 1066 onwards. Bubbling away on my hob at the moment are a 700-year run of manorial court rolls, a monastic cartulary, and several wills and other probate documents. But this latest little task is a reminder that Latin was for long the western language of science and technology, as well as of the arts, humanities and administration.
Jones' and Sidwell's Reading Latin course from CUP acknowledged the long time span of European Latin, using mottoes and quotations from mediaeval and later texts as well as the classical staples. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ also provides both mediaeval and later texts for learning and study, but there is more.
Constantly turning a problem to look at it from different angles and using different sources is a good way to progress in research enquiry as well. "Drilling down" has become a hackneyed phrase, but here's a new thought about it: not only do you see so many layers relating to an issue, but the spiral motion of the drillbit suggests scrutiny from or towards all sides, and it is this that propels deeper into the subject.  Looking straight ahead and banging your head against the proverbial brick wall is not the best way to do anything but suffer a bad headache.

Back & Forth

With apologies to Blackadder!  Please don't sue me for intellectual property crime!
As a freelance historical researcher and archivist, I go "back" in time a lot of the time.  "Back and forth"... "hither and yon"... to archives all over England as well as online. Time travelling in my head and through the dates on the document order forms. Sometimes I make a great leap forward and I and my client will be happy. Sometimes all movement is backwards. In a crazy, corkscrewy kind of way, the past is actually unpredictable. You simply don't know what you are going to discover until you begin.
Geoffrey Elton wrote in 1967: "The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation."
This may be the motivation of some historians and "nostalgians", but how bleak it looks in all directions. My professional experience is that both the past and the future are unknown, but not unknowable. The future will come whether you look for it or not; it will affect you. The past has affected and will continue to affect us all. If you try to understand it you might understand the present and future better, deal with them better.
Deciphering the detail can be exciting. It is unpredictable. People enjoy TV programmes about the pursuit of the past. Pursuing the Past is what I do. Without breaking confidences, I plan to share some of the discoveries I make through this blog.
If you have mysteries of history you want to solve, take a look at my website and see if you think I might be able to help you.