Living Witnesses to Social Change and Family Documents as Community Archive

Abstract

This article describes a strategy for studying social change in a community too small and/or remote to generate a substantial corpus of local official records or to receive regular coverage by nearby and regional media. In communities of this size (generally less than 1,000 people), the record of change often resides mostly in the shared memories and family memorabilia of surviving community residents. I outline the kinds of materials and evidence that may be collected and the ways in which such materials can be utilized in the attempt to reconstruct the changes that have occurred in such a locality. My procedure posits that social change can be illuminated through the critical linkage between the experience of participants and temporally ordered community contexts and events. This research made especial use of the experience of a particular core family in the small town I studied. I follow their experience over the period from 1941 through the present. Drawing on photographs and interviews, I seek to connect the biographies of these and other residents to the broader course of community change. The problems and limitations of relying on selected key informants and salvaged materials are discussed. I argue that the accounts provided by community participants and the accumulated family memorabilia may serve as a proxy for more conventional community records in situations where that kind of evidence is sparse or nonexistent.