Recovered from the Archives

The initial conversation I have with families is one of my favorite parts of working with individuals; I have the privilege of listening to stories about their loved one. This spring, I sat at a kitchen table while a family told me about the pineapple upside-down cake their grandmother Mabel made for every summer holiday. The smell, the sizzle of the caramelized sugar, the way she insisted on cutting “just one more slice” for whoever was lingering near the table. What they didn’t have anymore was the recipe, which had been passed to a relative and quietly lost.

I filed this information away and went about looking for evidence of Mabel in the archives: census rolls, family photos, and property records. I'm always seeking to build out a full story of who a subject was and the time that they lived in. What was their view when they got off the bus at their elementary school? What song delighted them when it came on the radio? How did they unwind at the end of a long week?

Buried in the stacks of a local library, I was absolutely thrilled to find Mabel’s handwritten recipe tucked into an old church cookbook, her looping cursive preserved between plastic comb binding and coffee stains. It was a wonderful reminder that the records I chase are not abstract. They’re personal. They’re sticky with sugar and pineapple in ways a database can’t capture.