Filling the silences in family stories − how to think like a historian to uncover your family’s narrative

You can uncover the depths and hidden details of your own family’s unspoken narratives by thinking like an archival researcher writing an ‘investigative memoir.’

By: Andrea Kaston Tange, Macalester College, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: January 25, 2026

Words: 1,153

Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago

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By Andrea Kaston Tange, Macalester College

Great-grandmothers. We all have them. But most of us will never know them except through glimpses of fading bits of paper: sepia photographs, recipe cards, letters in handwriting traced by a fountain pen dispensing cocoa-colored ink.

What does it take to build coherent stories out of such tantalizing fragments of lives? I face this question routinely in my career as a professor of 19th-century literature and culture. Recently, I’ve …

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