The Passage of Living Memory

"At most living memory endures for a hundred years or so. Thereafter, even the barest outline of the past is forgotten, unless it is recorded in writing..." So wrote John Morris in Londinium: London in the Roman Empire.

The passage of time diminishes many things. I know this from personal experience. It shows up as I look back over the roster of people I have come into contact with during my ancestral research.

Even though I began almost forty-three years ago, three of my grandparents and another three of my uncles and aunt were already deceased. With that background, I knew I was already starting out behind the eight ball. But, surely I thought, someone would be able to answer my questions and tell me about my ancestors.

I began my search for knowledgeable informants. Over the years I developed a network of distant and near relatives. I had a three-by-five card file that contained names, relationships, addresses and phone numbers.

Whenever I talked with one, I asked if they knew of someone else who might tell me more. Soon I began to see that some people came closer to answering my questions.

At the same time, there were many others who could not. There were no family secrets being hidden. It seemed that they simply did not grow up in an environment where family stories were told and retold.

I remember hearing about one man who might know something about my great-great-grandfather who died in the Civil War. He lived in the county just east of where I was attending college.

One Saturday in 1972, I made time to drive about thirty miles over to his rural home. When I arrived, I learned that he had left about an hour earlier and would not be back soon.

I was crest-fallen. After all, this gentleman was two generations older, being a second cousin to my grandfather.

His wife asked me what business I wanted with her husband. I told her that I had so hoped I might have at last found someone at last who could answer my questions. Then I recounted some of my questions I had prepared to ask her husband.

She then told me that he would not be able to answer my questions. It seems that he was not inclined to tell stories.

You see, the wife's mother-in-law lived with them for twenty-five years before passing away. And the wife said that her mother-in-law did nothing but talk about growing up in Madison County, Arkansas. The husband and son simply tuned his mother out. This wife, on the other hand, told me of hearing the following account.

"My mother-in-law was a little girl during the Civil War. She recalled hearing her tell about the time she saw her 'Aunt Sary' crying over her man," said the wife.

"Aunt Sary" was my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Hankins Waits. "Her man" was William S. Waits. They were outspoken Southern sympathizers during the war. Their oldest son had been captured and died in a Yankee prison in Missouri.

But William was too old to fight. And his large family required that he remain nearby to help with the farming.

Unfortunately for him, Union sympathizers caught him at home one day. He was shot down when he ran out of his cabin in an effort to find concealment in the surrounding forest.

This story, and two variations on the same account, was the best I could learn in over four decades of asking questions.

As I review my notes of these conversations, I see that one hundred to 110 years is about the longest memories last. The 1972 interview occurred about 109 years after the death of my great-great-grandfather.

John Morris was right when he said "At most living memory endures for a hundred years or so."

Muskogee's First Gunsmith

Before a gunsmith resided in Muskogee, smiths outside of Indian Territory repaired guns for local residents. This necessity of sending weapons out of the territory ended shortly before July, 1878. That is when Hermann Ambold arrived.

Ambold was a German who immigrated to the United States through the Port of New York on December 10, 1872. He arrived on the S.S. Weser, a steamship liner operated by the North German Lloyd company.

More is known about the steamship than the next six years in Ambold's life. Unfortunately, there is nothing known about his gunsmith training. Despite this, he would spend the remainder of his life repairing and selling firearms.

Hermann was not yet 23 years old when he set up shop in Muskogee. His youth did not mean that he was inexperienced. Several newspaper reports suggest he was well versed in the different techniques for repairing broken firearms.

John R. Moore brought a rifle to Ambold for repair late in the year. Moore could have sent his weapon to gunsmiths Sheeder and Beebe who were advertising for work in the local newspaper. Their shop was on Main Street in Denison, Texas. Instead, Moore trusted the young foreigner in Muskogee.

Moore's rifle maybe had a split or bent barrel. Whatever the problem, Ambold believed that the gun was repairable.

Hermann first shortened the rifle by cutting off the front end of the barrel. That would have removed any split or bend. Apparently, the rifle was still of little value because the barrel was still warped at this point. This meant that the bullet would likely not hit a target.

The next step in repairing Moore's rifle was restoring its ability to shoot straight. Ambold rebored the barrel to remove any remaining curvature. This insured a straight passage of a bullet down the barrel's length.

After this, there remained one final step. This was the rifling of the gun's bore. Cutting grooves inside the barrel caused the lead bullet to twist as it traveled through the gun. This spinning action caused the bullet to travel in a straighter trajectory after leaving the gun.

After boring and rifling Moore's rifle, Ambold tightened the lock mechanism. The reference to the rifle's "locks" may mean that it was an older flintlock weapon. If so, then the weapon he was repairing was likely older than the mechanic working on it.

Ever since the development of the Kentucky long rifle a century earlier, Americans prided themselves on their shooting proficiency. Many contests across North America settled the question of who was the best shot.

Ambold encouraged this competitive spirit in Muskogee. It was Christmas time when the Indian Journal announced that he was challenging the young men in the area to compete in a contest of shooting at glass balls. He must have imported them especially for the occasion.

Unfortunately, the number of broken weapons in Muskogee must have been too small to support Hermann Ambold's services. After a year and a half, he traded his inventory of unclaimed guns for enough cash to get out of town. He was on the road before the decade of the 1880's began.

Hermann Ambold settled in Waco, Texas only a few months after leaving Muskogee. He remained there for the next quarter of a century. Though he married in 1900, the marriage seems to have been brief. No children were born from this union.

While in Waco, Ambold joined with others in establishing the Game and Bird Protective Association in 1881. He was its first treasurer.

This association predates most organized efforts seeking to save wildlife. Only a couple of years earlier, he was shooting the fattest and youngest prairie chickens and wild ducks found at Vann's Lake. This lake is located about eight miles north of Muskogee in what is now Wagoner County.

Hermann E. Ambold passed away October 5, 1905 in Waco. He was two months short of his fiftieth birthday.

Genealogy Before Computers

I began adding people to my FaceBook sixteen years before Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born. This was in 1968. I added people's names, addresses and many other relevant facts to each page.

Eventually I had thousands of friends listed on different pages in my FaceBook. I usually organized my pages by families. This made it easier for me to figure out how we were "friends."

Unfortunately, many of the people I added to my pages could not send me messages. Not only were they computer illiterate, they could not speak because they were dead.

For many years, I used the internet already widely available. Using those connections, I asked knowledgeable people what they knew.

These people were often friends of "friends." And, many times, my searches turned out to be dead ends.

I quickly found that voice mail had many limitations. First of all, most people were not logged on all the time. And when they were, I could not get through to them at all. Their line was busy.

The biggest handicap in using voice mail was the cost. I had to pay for each connection with someone even if the person on the other end of the line was not who I wanted to speak with.

Then there was limited access to the Uniform Resource Locators of that day. It seemed that every town in the country had their own URL. They came in two colors: white and yellow. The white listings were more complete despite the fact that one could opt out if they wanted to. The yellow listings were solely for businesses.

There were different forms of interconnecting besides just using voice mail. I logged onto this email system with a postage stamp.

Transmissions were pretty straight forward. I put a message out in the open mailbox for someone to pick up. Each time I posted my messages, however, I found that it went into a system for delivery, rain or shine they said.

And again, I faced a cost factor that was based upon usage. I learned to weigh each message I sent because there were increased costs for longer messages.

I generally used a single stylus for rough drafts. Afterwards I wrote a message on my machine. But it was not a wired machine. Of course, that device was a manual Royal typewriter I had purchased for $35 from a fellow student.

Fortunately, I did not have to worry about spam messages very often. I received one occasionally , but there were no references to Viagra pills. Those would only become available three decades in the future.

No, the unwanted messages I received were for misrepresented products. A woman announced the publication my family history. She knew I would be interested in the generic book because I had the same last name. One might say that the sender was "hacking" into my wallet.

When I got messages in return, it was like AOL saying "You've Got Mail." Unfortunately, delivery was only once a day and never on Sundays.

Today, I still eagerly look forward to the old fashioned delivery of messages and the use of the ancient voice mail system.

However, nothing beats today's communication via a computer network!

Interviewing Questions

In my previous article, I encouraged readers to conduct interviews. Here are some thoughts on conducting one.

No matter how you record the interview, be sure to first have the interviewee state their name, address and telephone number so that this information is part of the recording. Then ask them to give the day's date.

Lastly, and importantly, be sure to get permission from the interviewee for a copyright release. If you do not get the copyright to the recording, the interviewee retains control over the recording. Be sure to record this permission as well.

At the start of the interview, ask questions that identify the person being interviewed. By this, I mean you want to ask for the person's background. This provides their credentials for why or how they are knowledgeable about the interview's general theme.

For example, I am motivated to preserve local history. Early in my interviewing, I ask leading questions of how and when the speaker arrived in the area. If they were born in the area, I might follow up with questions about the arrival of their ancestors.

Generally, questions are best asked in an "open ended" fashion. If you ask the interviewee to tell you about going to town, for example, you leave it to the speaker to tell you what is important.

Direct questions, as opposed to open-ended ones, should be left to clarifying something already said. These questions provide short responses that are usually less informative.

Here is an example of the different approaches between using "open-ended" or direct questions in interviewing. During the 1930's, the WPA conducted surveys of elderly residents in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Arkansas used a standardized questionnaire with direct questions. Many times, an interviewee simply answered "yes" or "no."

In Oklahoma, interviewers asked speakers to tell about their recollections. The resulting compilation of responses to open-ended questions continues to provide researchers with historical insight to an earlier time.

Sometimes, open-ended questions prompt unexpected responses. If an interviewee veers off track topically, let them finish. Some of the best stories have come from these moments when the interviewee's mind makes connections with unanticipated topics. Then construct a new open-ended question that refocuses the discussion back onto the desired topic.

Here are websites with helpful interviewing tips:

About Dot Com has a good explanation of why interviewing someone is important. The following link takes you to their webpage. Click HERE.

This is a wonderful collection of basic questions a person might ask when interviewing someone. The link is: Click HERE.

The next webpage has some time-specific questions for the 1930's to the 1960's. However, I find it is now getting harder to find someone with personal recollections of the early 1930's. Scroll down half way to the section entitled "Connect to Larger History." This is the site for decade-based questions: Click HERE.

I am looking for additional questions to use in interviewing area residents. If you have ideas and suggestions, I would appreciate your input. I would especially like questions related to specific decades. Thank you!