As historians, we seek to be objective in our understanding and representation of the past. But at the same time we strive for this goal, we acknowlege the obstacles in our way. Can the past ever be separated from our present perceptions? Our own life experiences? Does how we represent history tell us more about ourselves than the past we try to capture?

These questions have often been the focal point of class discussions in my Public History program this year, but I have also asked them of myself as I work towards completing a project that is more personal than any essay I have ever completed for school.

This past winter I approached Dr. Jonathan Vance, my Social Memory professor and the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture, about a collection of family letters from the First World War. They were written to my great-grandmother, Kathleen Jones, from her fiancée who was serving overseas. Dr. Vance was kind enough to allow me to compile and edit the letters for my class project, and the product of five long but incredibly rewarding months of transcribing, scanning, researching, and editing will soon culminate in a book that will be published this summer. I have titled it Now Far From Home: the First World War Letters of Captain Gerald Edward Blake.

As it became such a large part of my degree, I thought I would blog about the process as I think it demonstrates the type of issues- as well as joys- that arise in a project of this nature (along with showing you what kind of neat things public history students have the opportunity to do!)

Before I get to some of the problems, however, I'll give a brief background on Gerald to give you an idea of the type of material I have been working with. I also couldn't resist including his own voice in this little introduction- you can find his first letter transcribed at the end of this post.

Gerald Blake was born in 1892 in Toronto, and was the grandson of former premier of Ontario Edward Blake. He was in the midst of a law degree at Osgoode College when he enlisted for the war in June of 1915. Unlike most of his Canadian peers, however, Gerald signed up with the British army. His cousin, Hume Wrong, who would later go on to be a Canadian diplomat involved in the League of Nations and the creation of NATO, was blind in one eye and was thus refused by the Canadian army. So the two set off for a great adventure overseas to seek a commission with the British.

The night before he left for England via New York, Gerald and Kathleen were engaged. She was just my age, twenty-two, when she travelled to London, England to complete her physiotherapy training. She was just my age when she received Hume Wrong's letter telling her that Gerald had fallen at the battle of the Somme on the night of July 23, 1916.

And now ninety-five years later at the same stage in life I have spent months pouring over his words, trying to separate the woven strands of emotional attachment and historical critique.

It took me a while to realize that I was undergoing an adjustment. During the winter break a family friend asked me what I hoped to achieve from this project. After some hesitation I said that in a way I was doing it for him. He wrote in his letters of wanting to be a writer and produce something someday, and I figured that perhaps I was doing him a postmortem service in exposing the craft of his words. I can admit now that my intentions have changed, and as so they should. History should be written for the present, not for the past. My romantic notions had affected the real purpose for compiling these letters.

I like James Loewen's discussion of eastern and central African societies' terms for the deceased, which include the sasha and zamani. According to Loewen, the sasha are the "recently departed", whereas the deceased become zamani with the death of the last individual who knew him or her in life. In Loewen's words, "as generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered." [1]

I think I have been seduced by this very thing. There is truth in his argument that history can be just as accurate when written in the time of the sasha. My great-grandmother wrote my mom a note when she passed on the letters, and told her that if she felt that they were a burden an Archive might be interested in them. She knew their value to history; I think that's why she kept them afterwards, even though she never visited Gerald's grave back in France.

I, however, never knew the protagonists of this story. My mother was pregnant with me when Kathleen died so these figures have more of a distance to me, and perhaps are in danger of being romanticized into characters rather than real people with their warts and all. In her letter to my mother Kathleen wrote, "so many thousands of young men were lost- for what?" Taking into account this was composed in the 1970s, and her feelings might have shifted over time, I still think it speaks true of Loewen's point that history written in the time of its happening can be just as accurate.

So as I continue to work on this book, now in the proofing stage,  I hope that these letters may be used and appreciated for the living, and not simply as a commemoration of the dead.

That being said, I am still human, and remain touched. I still belive that there is an important function to be served by commemoration. In this case, it is an act of remembrance, but it also reminds us that moments in time- relationships, feelings, words and thoughts- moments in past lives that seemed to have lost their future, are still strands in the web of history and glimmer just as bright.