When History Hits Home
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe In my job as a fellowships advisor I stress to applicants that a strong application demonstrates three things: depth of expertise in a given field; breadth of interests and experiences; and the applicant’s change over time, i.e. history. The third pillar of the triad constitutes the all-important biographical element. Americans' hunger for personal history makes Ancestry.com ’s stockholders rich and guarantees the flood of genealogists to the shores of Salt Lake. The Ball family of Lompoc, California, ca. 1894. My sons started high school and middle school at the end of August. As I delivered my nearly men to the doors of their new institutions, my desire to make history from memory overwhelmed me. The hundreds of digital images stored on the family computer cried out for a chronology with which to capture the evolution of my chubby-cheeked chappies into the skinny tweens who seek escape from their mother’s needy embrace. My compulsion has since...