Searching For the Unknown Unknown
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| Courtesy of PicPick |
Unknown Unknowns
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously said
There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
The three realms of knowledge which Rumsfeld cited are what we can explore by creating research reports for our ancestors and others such as members of the FAN Club, Family, Friends, Associates and Neighbors. Last Monday, MaryLynn illustrated the value of researching more of the FANs of your ancestors, in The Shot Heard Round The World.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote about my plans for 2025 genealogy research, including research reports for my closest 52 ahnentafals, one every week. I'm a bit behind, and many of the "reports" are just placeholders, I've already found so much. I anticipate that the rest of this year will be full of discoveries of previously unknown unknowns. These discoveries can open doors into the lives of ancestors.
It all started with making a timeline of the facts, the known knowns. That might seem boring and pointless; after all, it's just "stuff you already know." But when you create a timeline, you add another dimension beyond the bare facts, that of TIME. All of us travel through time and space, and to find and tell the whole story, we need a map. That is what your research report is: a map of your ancestor's life.
Bonus
Once I finished digging for that story, and wrote it, the telling of it unlocked something inside. Memories long forgotten, keep bubbling up as I fall asleep, and spring to mind as I awake. Honestly, this entire process seems like magic, and I hope you will try it, one ancestor at a time. It is better than any bonus check at the end of the year.
When I was 16, the age of my mother when she re-entered the US and moved to Seattle, I had only lived in one place, which was the house my parents built south of Issaquah, Washington. The world seemed wide open, and I did not have a plan for my life. In contrast, mama had lived in at least a dozen places in the Iowa and Canada. She was rootless. I think her plan was live the rest of her life in that house that they built, and she did that. Having done the research, I now understand.
Now that I'm nearing 72, a year younger than she was at her death, I have a plan. The more stories uncovered and shared, the stronger that plan seems, and the more important. I hope that she now knows the stories of her own life and that of her family that she was unable to uncover during her life. Thank you to my mother and father for giving me roots, and to the South King County Genealogical Society for providing the teaching and resources to equip me to uncover the history, find the stories, and provide a place to share them.
By doing this important work, each of us can discover these ghosts from the past, the untold stories, and share them with our families and beyond.
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* The known unknowns are are the research questions in the research report. The unknown unknowns become the most important stories we can tell, if we have the courage to search them out, and uncover the stories in them.
Courtesy: FreeRangeStock, photographer Stephen Rahn, CC0
Coda
I love how Nobel laureate biochemist Melvin Calvin said it: we
must grapple not only with the known and the 'known unknown', but also with the vastness of the 'unknown unknown.
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| Valorie Zimmerman |
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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org
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