We genealogists often struggle with memory and its problems. So often, I run into fellow researchers who think the long ago memory of someone who was “there” is fully trustworthy. We saw an extreme example of that a few years on a collaborative website. A certain user made the most outlandish claims, each time attributing his information to a a conversation he had with his father. His father was able apparently to remember detailed names, dates, and relationships going back hundreds of years, and this user was able to apparently to remember the whole thing after hearing it only once. 

This was an extreme example, but it was an especially strong reminder that there are limits to memory. Even when you think you remember, you don’t. Not always. I myself am often surprised when I read my old journals, that so many incidental details were very different from the way I remember them.

I often regret I haven’t done a better job of documenting and citing the science on the the fallibility and malleability of memory. In that spirit, I’m taking note of the following piece.

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“In a well-known study conducted to measure memory retention, a group of college students were told a very short thirty-second story. The researchers said, We’re going to tell you this story, and all we want you to do is remember it as accurately as you possibly can. Then we’re going to have you tell it back to us at various intervals.” And so the students would listen to the story, knowing that their only task was to remember it as accurately as possible, and then, one minute later, they would be asked to repeat the story. Five minutes later, they’d be asked to repeat it again; and then a half an hour later, and then an hour later, and then twelve hours later, and then a day later, and then two days later, and then a week later, and then finally, two weeks later.

“What the researchers found was that, in the very first retelling of the story, after only one minute, the students were actually already beginning to distort it, that their memories weren’t as accurate as they imagined. Even though the researchers were telling the story to very intelligent college students, with the relatively easy task of simply remembering the story, what they found was that when the students started to retell the story, within the third or fourth retelling, it became so different that it began to appear almost unrecognizable in relation to the original tale. And that was just within the third or fourth retelling, within an hour or two of having heard it. By a week later and certainly by two weeks later, the story was so distorted that you almost couldn’t imagine that the retelling ever came from the original story. And yet all of the students truly believed that they were remembering the story quite accurately.“

• Adyashanti, Falling into Grace (2011), 35.

“The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.“

• Read More: Sarah Griffiths, “Can you trust your earliest childhood memories?“, BBC (May 19, 2019).

Updated to add links.

When I was in college one of my professors said, “Objectivity correlates to a consensual subjectivity.” That statement has some very powerful implications for how we understand the nature of historical research. In genealogy we often see people captivated by long, mythical lines of descent, which they invariably believe were transmitted underground, undocumented, for centuries and even millennia.

In that context, I like this insightful passage from Morris Berman:

“Thus we come to the central methodological problem of what I have called hidden history, that the techniques of analysis developed by historiography in the last two centuries are designed to verify (or falsify) only a certain type of assumption; and if we insist that there nevertheless is an invisible or somatic layer beneath the drama we are investigating, there seems to be no way in which this can be consensually validated. Heretical and sectarian phenomena are particularly maddening in this regard, because they open up to an instinctual ‘feel’ that seems to strike home and yet slips through the net of any and every traditional mode of analysis. One historian, George Shriver, thus asserts: ‘Grappling with various facets of the Cathar story, one is well aware that much of life escaped the documents, [and] that there must be a place for intuitive perception at times.’ It was in this spirit that Déodat Roché, the greatest spokesman for Catharism in modern times, constructed a history of the Cathar phenomenon based on the esoteric system of Rudolf Steiner, thereby proposing a comparative method that would enable the historian to uncover a deeper history. Yet his major conclusion—that there is a clear unbroken chain of identical esoteric practice from the Manichaeans, and ultimately from the Essenes, right through to the Cathars, remains, as far as I am concerned, an unwarranted assumption. ‘Hidden history’ is plagued by the problem that it is easy to invent a past while claiming, in the name of intuitive perception, to uncover one [emphasis added].

More Information

• Morris Steyer, Coming to Our Senses: Body and spirit in the hidden history of the West (1990), 195-96.