I love to think about my great, great, great grandparents. One of them, Hilda Högfeldt, came from the tiny port town of Trelleborg, Sweden, which is the southernmost town in Sweden. It has quite possibly the most hideous regional accent in all of Sweden. Another, John Collins, came from the town of Newmarket-on-Fergus, in County Clare, Ireland. The only thing I know about that town is that it’s near the west coast of Ireland. My middle name, Niamh, is the name of the daughter of the sea god in Irish mythology, and I like to think this all means I was destined to be a lover of the sea. They both immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th century and were it not for
It was a random Saturday when I walked into Palabras, the bilingual bookstore. I had gotten a Facebook event suggestion for a community archiving workshop, and I thought it might be interesting. I have always been interested in documenting the past, and for a while I had toyed with the idea of documenting my mom’s family history. I didn’t know it then, but I was walking right into my future. My mom was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as was my abuelo. My abuela and my mom’s siblings were born in neighboring San Salvador, El Salvador. After my abuela managed to get a work visa while working as an industrial seamstress in the late 1960s, the rest of the family was transplanted from El Salvador to Los Angeles in 1970. Growing up, I didn’t have the same fascination with my maternal family history that I did with my dad’s. When I think about why that is, I realize it was because my dad’s ancestry was history, long since gone in many ways. None of us have Irish or Swedish citizenship, we don’t speak the language of either of those places. Many of us have never been to either of those countries. That history, that part of my family feels so far away, like some mystery that you want to uncover.
With my mother though, history never felt far from me. It was very much alive and a part of me every day. I had the benefit of growing up with all of my maternal relatives near me and very much in my life. My great-grandma was born in 1916, and she used to babysit my cousins and me for years as kids. She loved to tell dirty jokes. My abuela, sharp as a tack, has shared so many stories with me over the years, and I always felt connected to Central America, and to being Latina, in a much more direct way than I ever did with Sweden or Ireland.That day at Palabras I was introduced to the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) team at Arizona State University (ASU) and their project. I was fascinated, and it occurred to me that while I had long taken an interest in my paternal genealogy, I didn’t have much to document the lives of my abuelos, their families, or their lives before they arrived in California. I knew their stories, but memories fade with time. They just talked about our family, and we were expected to remember.
It was only within the last few years that I have lost some of my oldest family members, and with their passing, the urge to document becoming more pressing to me. Memories eventually begin to cloud and details become hazy with time, and I wanted to be able to have concrete references in the same way that I could look up my paternal great-great-great grandfather’s birth certificate. My family’s story and history were important, if not to anyone else, it was to me. They were here, and they were important. I wanted to know everything about my great-grandparents, where they were from, when they lived and died, and anything else I could get my hands on and piece together. What started out as a personal project soon grew into something much bigger for me. I work for Phoenix Public Library and am pursuing my Masters Library Information Science (MLIS), so when the time came to decide which area to focus on, I didn’t question for a moment that archiving was my path. It’s partially because of my time volunteering with the CDA team at ASU that I was able to come to that realization.
Oftentimes, when I’m doing archival research or taking classes, I think about what it would be like to meet my great great great grandparents. All of them came from poor or humble backgrounds. Would they be surprised to meet this brown woman who speaks a few languages, refuses to have kids, and travels alone? Would the story of our family, and how the lives of their descendants played out, surprise them? We all have families, histories, and so many stories. Stories are what keep all of us connected as humans, as individuals, and they keep those who have passed alive in our lives. Each story is unique. I chose to become an archivist because I want to be a part of helping weave that fabric of storytelling for communities everywhere.