Sometimes you have to just give yourself permission to go down the rabbit hole.

Our downtown has had changes in the past couple of years, and a visible number of vacancies are showing up in the downtown district. In an effort to rally the troops, the local Chamber of Commerce and newspaper, The Dalles Chronicle, held a town hall meeting to get feedback and suggestions on how to strengthen the commercial district. I kicked off the Q&A session with a comment about how rich our history is, and what a draw to tourism it is. Immediately following were comments about how  it's more about "lifestyle" than history and that history is "old and tired".

What? Excuse me?

I realized we have a great deal of education to do to our local business community who are so steeped in the history they no longer see it with fresh eyes, nor do they appreciate the economic value it brings to the community.

I have composed a lengthy letter to the editor regarding the economic dollars (ie tourism) that comes into the community because of the history. The Chamber tells me 25% of their visitors ask specifically about it. Literally thousands of people come here each year and visit our local history museums.

And this weekend I finally sat down and did a count of all the buildings and sites that are listed as Primary and Secondary contributing resources to the National Registry of Historic places. If you break out the buildings within the two historic districts, we have a total of 102. That's nothing to sneeze at!

Now I'm trying to compile a list of historic buildings, address, and current tenants. I'm hoping to give the naysayers a bit of history of their own buildings.  I think if people see how the history relates to their friends and neighbors today, they might be more appreciative. History is only irrelevant if you don't see the relevance in your own life experience. When you see how history influenced your family, your business, your "lifestyle", then you begin to see it as a force that shaped who you are today, and will continue to shape future generations.

I admit it. I'm a junkie. If there is local history, it draws me like a siren call. I can't seem to get enough. I confess, I am a HARE - a History And Research Extremist. Today I found myself binging at the local library. They have a collection of rare history books in a magnificent book case, behind glass. Fortunately, they allow patrons to use the magic key that opens the doors to these rare and singular volumes of history. There are a series of black three-ring binders that contain newspaper clippings, with snippets of history that may have been otherwise lost to time.

I was on a mission today; having reluctantly offered to spearhead a newsletter for Wasco County Historical Society. Why not do this issue on the Rorick House, and the owner Zenas Moody, they asked. I HAVE a ton of information on Victor Trevitt already compiled, but pretty much zip on Mr. Moody. So off I went to the library to see what I could pull up.

Oh my. Researching history is my drug of choice. My problem is I can't stay focused. When a HARE like me begins chasing HAREs of bygone days, historians like lovely Lulu Crandall, it's like chasing rabbits down rabbit holes. You start chasing one, then another pops up and you get wildly distracted and begin chasing that one, and then another pops up and you begin chasing that one, and over and over again. Eventually you realize you have wandered far afield from your original mission.

So now I've got a host of new information on Zenas Moody, his son Malcolm, and a range of other topics to keep me busy a long time.

I fantasize that somehow I manage to get myself locked into the library at night, where I can binge on history to my heart's content. Does that sound HARE-brained to you?

Some people can leave well enough alone, but not yours truly. I posted some time ago about finding bad history out here on the internet. Well, the particular example I had cited continued to frustrate me and I finally gave in to my anal-retentive nature and emailed the dear who maintained that particular slice of the internet. Lo and behold, not only was she willing to make corrections to her facts, but she was even gracious about it.

People read their history, and digest it as well as possible. It isn't their fault if their source documentation (we love you, Wm. McNeal) is lacking in accuracy. I, myself, am guilty of taking all I found early on and running with that as if it were gospel. As I learn more, I refine my facts and I'm seeing the value in reviewing my own early work from time to time to make adjustments and corrections. I want the history I pass along to be good.

This business of sifting out opinion from history has me pondering. How much of history did we grow up with, that skewed the conclusions, the point of view with prejudiced opinion? Probably most of it. I am rapidly becoming a fan of First Person accounts of history because of it.

It's particularly easy to see prejudice and personal opinion in reviewing the history, written by white people, about the native american tribes who lived, labored, and loved along the Columbia for thousands of years before the arrival of the white man.

In a short biography entitled "H.K.W. Perkins, Missionary to The Dalles" by Frank L. Green, Green talks of Perkins' arrival to "Wascopam" in 1838, saying:

"The tribe inhabiting this area was in an excellent position to practice extortion upon those passing up and down the river. All routes of travel met at this point three miles below the lower end of the narrow rock-bound channel known to the French fur traders as Les Dalles...Thus it was to a very strategic location, but also to a very sly and devious tribe of savages that Perkins and Lee had been called."

Excuse me? "Extortion?" Extortion implies a deliberate criminal act. There's an injection of prejudicial opinion in the choice of that word. (We won't go into the use of "sly and devious savages" for the moment.) Would Mr. Green have called it extortion to walk into a store and expect to exchange something of value (money, perhaps) for some material good he wanted (say, food?). Why did he slap that label of "extortion" on the Indians for merely conducting commerce in the manner acceptable in their culture? Perkins certainly never used that word to describe it.

Green talks about Perkins' life here, the stamp of his own ideology clearly written on the page. Thus it is with much of the history I am reading, particularly works written in the late 1800s. He infers that Perkins was disgusted by the Indians, saying, "Perkins knew right away he did not love the hideous savages. They seemed, in fact, to be a blot on the scenery."

Was Perkins apprehensive when he first arrived in Oregon? Undoubtably. But Green never balances that initial statement with something that accurately reflected Perkins' own thoughts and feelings. In fact, Perkins' journal writings indicate he held a deep love and respect for the Indians. Their customs intrigued him for the most part (short of murder and polygamy.) And in Perkins' own words, he said:

"As for myself, I could easily have become an Indian as not. I completely sympathized with them in all their plans & feelings. I could gladly have made the wigwam my home for life if duty had called." — Letter from H.K.W. Perkins to Jane Prentice, sister of Narcissa Whitman, October 19, 1849

It's an important fact to ponder... history written in first person accounts is precious because it cuts past the layers of interpretation of events, to the core of what really happened. 

I think we all have stories from our early years that, as soon as we tell it, a member of the family will pipe up and claim, "That's not how it happened!" (Especially if they were the butt of the story!) The truth of the story depends a lot on who's point of view it's from.

Trying to pinpoint the details of the story is hard enough when the storyteller has first-person knowledge of the event. But when the story is told to someone who wasn't there, who tells it to someone else who tells it to someone else.... you get the drift. You can end up with fanciful nonsense, just like we discovered when we played the old game "Gossip."

Thus we sift through the pages of history, trying to determine what REALLY happened. I have a particular interest in the establishment of the mission in The Dalles because that's the point of the arrow, where white civilization sliced into the Wascopum tribe and stuck. From that point forward, traders, emigrant pioneers and militia trickled into the area, and then the trickle became a flood. It changed everything, for the native population who had lived here 10,000 years and for the future of the Pacific Northwest.

In perusing history, I like getting back into the stuff written before 1900... thinking the older the document the more accurate the remembered details might be. I keep running into the problem that, even back in the 1850s, the people who wrote the history weren't necessarily the people who lived it. And if they didn't live it, they were writing down second or third hand information, at best. Overlaying that was the social norm of the times, which held little regard for the native tribes who lived here and saw their lands invaded, their people lay waste to disease.

Take the case of Dr. Marcus Whitman. Multiple history sources have said that he "bought" the Methodist mission in the Dalles for $600. Did he, now? Do I record that as a "fact" because I've run into multiple sources who have said so? I don't think so. In my foraging for history bits, I ran across a text issued by the United States Supreme Court, with a ruling that would differ. In a case of "Dalles City vs the Methodist Episcopal Mission Society", the details emerge. Whitman PLANNED to buy the mission. In Sept. 1847 he wrote a draft for $600 and some odd change to the Methodist mission, not for the lands, but for the "stuff" they had accumulated, food, tools, etc. The agreement was the use of the land would continue for the education and aid of the Indian population. Whitman intended to move from Walla Walla to the Dalles. But as fate would have it, he and his wife and several others were murdered two months later, in November of 1847 before that could happen. And at that time his Presbyterian backers wanted nothing more to do with the Dalles mission. They tried to give it back to the Methodists. The draft Whitman wrote was never cashed. The Methodists fled the mission following Whitman's murder, and abandoned the site. Eventually, the growing township of the Dalles filed claim for the mission lands, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court's awarding of that land to the city. The Supreme Court declared that neither the Presbyterians OR the Methodists had title rights to the site, having abandoned it and having never filed a claim to it under the Land Donations Claim act.

Documenting history is just as important to back the claims made by persons long ago as it is to back the claims of those of us who are carrying the banner of history forward.

As a child I yearned to have my own library. I envisioned sitting comfortably in my chair, in a cozy room surrounded floor-to-ceiling with books. As an adult I began to collect books, only to learn the realities of space limitation. I began to purge, based on whether I thought I would ever read a book again. My interests evolved. The bodice-ripper romances I favored in my youth were given away. My library began leaning more toward reference material with a strong orientation on spiritual and historical tomes.

The deeper I've delved into history, the more I've realized there are books I want to own, that are currently too rare or massive for my collection. I've also learned there are books I want to own that I don't know exist... that is, there are many books that were published about The Dalles or Oregon or regional history that I've never heard of.

To the rescue - Google Books! I've been learning the trick of amassing my reference library electronically. By searching on key words, like "The Dalles" within Google Books, I've hit on many books that have been scanned and are now available in PDF form to be downloaded into my electronic library. Now my virtual bookshelf includes: Centennial History of Oregon, 1850 History of Oregon Missions, Illustrated History of Central Oregon, David Thompson's Narrative, the Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft...  there's enough history to keep me busy for years. Among the Google Books, you will find more than literature...I've stumbled across Congressional Reports, Military Reports, and my latest find was the US Supreme Court ruling on the lawsuit Dalles City brought against the Methodist Episcopal Mission Society for title to the abandoned mission lands.

If the copyright has expired, the full PDF is available. And fortunately, the books I am most interested in are those published closest to when history happened. The advantage of electronic tomes is you can search them for key words and phrases. The disadvantage is that you can't copy and paste the words, so if you want the text you have to transcribe it the old-fashioned way... word by word. That isn't a bad thing. There's something about typing a transcription that makes you pause to really reflect on the words you read, to be present with the information you seek.

As a sometime writer, I see the validity in the outcry of modern authors, against Google Books, to protect their copyrights. I've watched the evolution of Google Books, to reduce access to copyrighted works to mere snippets of information. Yet as a historian, I am deeply grateful for this new resource, that has opened the libraries of Stanford University, Harvard, and many other repositories of rare, old manuscripts, to make these long forgotten books of history accessible to everyone instead of sitting on a bookshelf, forgotten.

Come enjoy a historic Christmas open house Sat. Dec. 3 from noon to 3 p.m. at the Rorick House, 300 W. 13th St., The Dalles. Santa and Mrs. Claus will be there to hear your Christmas wishes, so bring the kids, grandkids, and a camera. Cookies, hot cider and coffee and you will be able to buy stocking stuffer and Christma gifts. Free event. Hosted by Wasco Co. Historical Society, Fort Dalles Museum, and the Original Wasco County Courthouse.

Have you ever found an obituary of a family member and thought, "Now why did that newspaper say that? Are they idiots?" Hopefully you've learned that any printed information about an ancestor should be taken with a grain of salt, no matter where it was published.

From a historian/researcher stand point, I thought you would be interested in knowing all the places information can go awry in regards to obituaries. I have worked for a newspaper and seen many an obituary cross my desk. Here's what I've learned about the process of receiving, and publishing obituaries:
  
First, we start with the family - like as not, emotionally distraught and in many cases, unprepared for the death (regardless of how ill the departed has been. No one seems to truly be capable of fully comprehending how hard the death of a close family member will hit you).
 
The death happens, and then immediately the family members have to begin making snap decisions: "Where's the funeral going to be? What day and time? can the minister make it? Is the church/chapel available? Did anyone call Aunt Bessie and tell her? Oh my gosh, who else have we forgot to tell?....."  In the midst of all of this confusion, they are sat down and told to cough up information for the obituary.

The family member who lives the closest, often becomes the "point person" by default of proximity. Unless the most geographically local family member is also the most informed, the details in an obituary can be very sketchy... family members oftentimes guess about correct dates and names. (As an example, I have to work really hard at it to remember my uncle Hank's proper given name was really Walter. I never ever heard ANYone call him Walter. He was "Hank" to us all.) Sometimes the details of the deceased's life are simply left out because the family members have no real clue.

Sometimes the obit is written up by someone who is NOT a family member. I was asked once, last minute, to write an obit for a good friend, but not a close friend. I had heard her tell life stories, but hadn't really retained a lot of the details about her adventures. My thought was, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know I needed to be taking notes about her life!"
 
Then the funeral home takes the information and types it up from a very inadequately-sized form, or from a hand-scribbled note given to them by the family.

With the introduction of email, generally the notice doesn't have to go through the typing/transcribing process again once it hits the newspaper, reducing yet another place where typos can be introduced into the process, but that is only a recent bonus not enjoyed by type setters in the days of yore.
 
The newspaper WILL edit for style. In the case of our local newspaper's style, we edit out the family's warm and fuzzy expressions, like "He went into the arms of Jesus," simply because it is opinion/hope, not fact, and unless a witness actually saw Jesus and the recently departed embracing (in which case I should hope to shout they captured the image on their cell phone), it remains an opinion. Newspapers deal with facts... who, what, where, when, why, not ummeasurables such as: "how much were they loved or liked by all." If the family wants the warm fuzzy obit, they have to purchase a paid advertisement, and the design staff would have to design the ad in such a way that it does not resemble editorial content, so as not to confuse the two.

Another feature of editorial style has been to remove the state from local obits. I've been lobbying my local newspaper to change that style, because the ONE bit of paper out of that day's newspaper that will get saved into scrapbooks will be the obituaries. Once they get passed down to future generations, all reference to date/year and state will be lost if it's not worked into the obituary copy.
 
The sad fact is that the proliferation of computers have done a horrible job of degrading the quality of photos that accompany obituaries. Family members will print ghastly copies of the dearly beloved off on their home printers, or worse yet grab an image off Facebook or the internet, and submit that to the funeral home, who dutifully scans it and turns around and gives it to the newspaper. Newsprint requires high resolution - 300 dpi, or "dots per inch". (The term should really be "ppi", or "pixels per inch," if you are a purist for accuracy.) Internet images are low resolution - 72 dpi. The photos pixelate (meaning they get that "jagged edges" fuzzy, blurry look, but because the newspaper usually doesn't deal directly with the family members, it's all they have to work with.
 
And the choice of photos! Oh my stars...they forget the newspaper often crops the image tight, close to the face. All of the "story" in the rest of the photo gets chopped off. The loveable granddaughter, the faithful dog, or the relaxing landscape... gone. All that goes with the printed obituary is the face, and the look on it. People send us pictures of people in dark sunglasses, wearing baseball caps, where you can't see the face. One poor fellow... I'll never forget his obit. He loved fishing, it was his life. So the family sends us a picture of him holding a fish in his hands. He's standing in the bright sunlight, with a scowl on his face cause he's squinting into the bright sunshine, his uncombed wind-blown hair is sticking out all wildly all over his head. Does the fish get left in the picture? Does the river or the forest? No. Just a wild-haired man with a mean looking scowl. One poor granny dear, the family sent us a photo of her: heavy-set, wheel-chair bound, wispy hair almost all fallen out, hooked up to an oxygen tank. Did they need to send a recent photo with all those oxygen tubes? REALLY? Surely one from a few years back at a time when she was on her feet, in the prime of life, and active in the community would have been better. It would have been the way SHE wanted to be remembered.
 
The lesson I've learned is: write your OWN obit, now, and make sure the people who will be giving it to the newspaper know where to find it. Pick your own photo to go with it NOW, and don't leave it to someone else to grab the "only photo they can find." Think to yourself... If this is ALL the documentation I leave behind, is this what I want future generations to know about me?
 
I actually wrote my mother's obit, over the course of about 6 months, during the year before she died. I would visit with her, engage her in casual conversation: "So, after you and dad were married, where did you live?" She had a stroke a few years prior, and was not so good on details anymore, but as long as you didn't pin her down with a direct question, if you could work the topic into a free-flowing stream of conversation, she could generally come up with the details. I came home and wrote the details up and saved the file. Then, once mom finally passed away, we didn't have to panic, and throw something together at the last minute.
 
There. That's my rant on obits.
Feel free to share the information with other historians and genealogists!
Write your own obit now!

It's been a year of ups and downs in my family this year. We lost three family members, and gained one with the birth of my newest granddaughter, with another grandson anticipated early next year.

When you lose people who are near and dear, you tend to rummage through old photos, letters and memories. In doing so, I am reminded how genealogy can make history come alive for people. You begin to realize that your family didn't simply live during the same time as historic events, they were a PART of history, shaping it, and actively being a participant.

Teaching children about their family history is a sure way to interest them in the broader scope of history. To trace the trails our ancestors traveled is to trace their journey through historic events. Once you understand the times they lived in, you begin to understand their choices, many of which shaped the culture, beliefs, and attitudes we grew up with.

Genealogy is a fun detective game as well. Tracking down family members, connecting with lost branches of the family, filling in the blanks... all are part of the thrill of the chase, the elation of the discovery.

Do your children, and grandchildren a favor. Draw them a family tree so they can see how they are connected to everyone else. That's what my family did - quite literally. They drew a family tree out on a windowshade, that goes back to my great-great grandparents. Suddenly it becomes clear how cousins several times removed are related. The maternal side of my family meets for a family picnic each summer, and we haul out the family tree for updates, to add and subtract the comings and goings of our relatives, making notes of dates of births, deaths, and marriages. What an invaluable tool the Family Tree can be for tracing genealogy.

But if you do decide to draw a family tree, get a really BIG windowshade.