Destroying the past goes deeper than “cemetery vandals”

THE HEADING “RCMP looking for cemetery vandals” caught my eye, reminding me of the sinking feeling I felt when I saw my grandfather’s damaged headstone in a Halifax cemetery. We were more fortunate than some. Hooligans had toppled over many neighbouring stones, but satisfied themselves with knocking just the cross off the top of our stone.

Whenever I hear of the desecration of a burial place, I pity the youth who resorts to such a thing to prove his status as a Big Man. Similar episodes have disgraced one community or another several times that I can recall. When details emerge, the common factor seems to be blind ignorance.

The wanton destruction of the past is not confined to cemeteries and headstones, however.

Years ago a genealogist in Ireland was researching old parish registers for me. A letter arrived and my hope soared that she had resolved one of my many questions. When I read her comments, she probably felt my frustration across the Atlantic. She wrote, “Years ago the parson had a housekeeper who used to tear a page out of an old register to do up her hair curls at night. In that way she created a gap in the baptism records from 1773 to 1804.”

Present is the child of our past

In our Maritime region the quantity of historically significant resources that go missing each year is the source of dismay to historians, genealogists and those for whom heritage is important. Our present is the child of our past, both as communities and as families.

What can we do to prevent the loss or destruction of these records? Firstly, we can have documents, pictures, and artifacts examined by people who know whether they are important or merely old. Age is no guarantee of monetary value, but the items may possess interpretive value in explaining facets of our collective history.

A musty business ledger from a store that closed more than a century ago may tell us much about what people wore or ate, what supplies they required, and what the state of the local economy was at the time. Even if mildew and dust have damaged a document, the information can be retrieved and conserved for posterity, if caught in time. Simply throwing something historic away suggests indifference, and may even be tantamount to vandalism.

Another suggestion for anyone wondering whether to toss something out is to offer the book or document to a local heritage society, or a library. Sometimes provincial archives or a museum might turn out to be the proper home for an item.

Passing on our stories

The future of the past will rest largely with our young people. As a father I found that small children naturally enjoy stories. I once gathered chestnuts in an urban graveyard with my younger daughter. Looking at a stone she asked if the man had been a pirate. I asked her why she thought that and she pointed to the skull and bones on the marker. On the way home we talked for a minute about pirates and whether there had been any in Halifax. Instant history lesson, you could say.

As a history teacher I realized that wrapping a lesson in a good anecdote made the topic more accessible and more likely to be remembered, even by teenagers. When teaching British history, we were discussing Charles II and I told the class the story of the Quaker, William Penn, refusing to doff his hat in the presence of the “Merry Monarch,” as Charles was nicknamed. Years later I met one of those students and he still remembered my story of what Charles had done. The king had removed his own hat and said to Penn, “Friend Penn, ‘tis the custom here for only one gentleman to wear a hat.” Truth or fiction, that man remembered the whole lesson because it was built around that tale.

We do not do a good job of passing on our history as communities or as a nation to our youth. They can leave high school, university even, without being exposed to any real knowledge of how we got here. A lack of knowledge is one definition of ignorance. Failure to pass on our heritage leaves a generation rootless and without respect for our patrimony. Does that perhaps make us the real vandals?

Dr. Terrence M. Punch is a Member of the Order of Canada. His latest book, Montbéliard Immigration to Nova Scotia, 1749-1752, will appear in a revised edition in 2015 and be available from genealogical.com.