Family history passed through women’s storytelling sessions in an armchair

Evidence

The book includes the details, also learned from my mother, that Shonrael’s great-grandmother Ophelia Murdock Thompson was of Cherokee heritage and made medicine from roots. These were all stories she had heard sitting on my mother’s lap. She also shared my mother’s journey—from her sharecropper childhood in Mount Meigs to entering Alabama State College in 1942 all the way to her moving to Connecticut and giving birth to me. She added that she, Shonrael, was Mattye’s first grandchild, who got her middle name, Pearl, from Mattye’s mother, my grandmother, her great-grandmother. Mattye’s middle name was Pearl as well. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 62

Categorization

• XREF: The matrilineal oral transmission of family history echoes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale approach to reconstructing women’s lives from fragmentary evidence.