The issue of written versus oral history has come up before in class. When discussing Sacagawea, for instance, the question of her death depended entirely on whether one chose to regard documents or stories as more reliable. Historians, when fulfilling their role as presenters of truth, should always have documentary evidence to fall back on, but they should also use oral histories when possible to corroborate or explain their findings.
Written histories and oral accounts provide two different services for historians: the first are facts as presented at the time of writing, and the latter are facts as described at the time of the telling. Both are useful, but both have their flaws. A historical document’s strength is its inability to change. A written history from a reliable source, when combined with other reliable sources, can provide definitive facts from a time period like nothing else. However, a lone written source of questionable reliability is not very useful at all. The danger of these sources comes from the tendency of researchers to regard all documents as both accurate and reliable, without subjecting them to the proper scrutiny. If, for instance, a document is nothing more than a transcription of an oral account, then it’s value changes significantly. Oral accounts do not often provide factual information, but they do offer insight about the values and opinions of the people telling them. As such, a transcription of an oral tale provides a snapshot of the time period, and can be instrumental in tracking a myth’s metamorphosis over time. Interestingly, ‘family histories’ from some sources can fall into the same trap as written sources. Researchers will assume that, since the storyteller is related to the subject, the account is accurate. This tends to happen with Harriet Tubman, as her descendants base many of the stories they tell off of the fictionalized accounts that appeared in the intervening years (312). The property that makes them less desirable than written sources, namely their malleability, makes them ideal for anthropologists or other historians looking to learn about the culture and prevalent attitudes of the time.
Sernett agrees with this position, as he states that “oral history or ‘family lore’ is important, but it does not in and of itself offer proof of authenticity” (313). He applauds Larson’s book, which has its foundation in documents, and supports Humez and Larson’s practice of using “family lore” to contextualize their other sources (313). Essentially, oral histories can provide previously unknown lenses to analyze the past through, but as sources of fact, they play second fiddle to written documents. In the event that an unverifiable oral history comes into conflict with sketchy written documents (as in the case of Sacagawea), it is up to the reader to decide what is correct, as it is impossible to create a certain truth out of the situation. Optimally, the two will work in tandem to create a rich, colorful, verifiable picture of the past.