All historians deal with memory. It is unavoidable, all historical evidence is filtered, one way or another, through memory. As a public historian working on modern military topics, memory in the form of witness statements, memoirs, personal accounts, or oral history interviews permeates my work.
I understand how fallible it is, and I recently had an excellent, albeit personal, example of memory's fallibility impressed on me. It's about something with very low stakes, which makes it an excellent test case for memory.
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| A D&D Basic Set advertisement from 1981. |
I try to maintain a chronology of my life, a year by year account of when important, pivotal, or formative events occurred. My wife thinks it is a sign of my ego, but I think it is interesting and useful for various reasons. In maintaining this chronology I have recently had to reevaluate the date of a formative event from my childhood.
One Christmas, after I had already been reading a borrowed copy of the Player's Handbook for months, my parents gave me the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set for Christmas. I created my first character and I Dungeon Mastered my first game that day, with my father and my sister playing. My father played the only D&D game of his life as a fighter named Sir Grumpsalot. 🤣
Those memories are still clear, and they are beloved. It is when I try to assign a year to them that things start to fall apart. I was in middle school that this happened, so either 7th (1980-81) or 8th grade (1981-82).
Long ago, before I sat down and systemically did my personal chronology, I got it in my head that I started playing D&D in 1979. I know now that is false, probably wishful thinking combined with the 1978 copyright date of the Player's Handbook. See, we all have a subconscious urge to edit our memories; in this case to give myself more credit as an 'old school' D&D player.
Decades later, when I sat down to do the chronology, I realized what I had done. At the time, I was convinced that I had started playing D&D in the fall of my 7th grade year. Counting back from my 1986 high school graduation, that was fall 1980. So, I confidently put that in my chronology. I even felt good about "correcting" my record.
Recently, however, I have had to check the publication dates of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set. I had the Moldvay version of the former, the Cook adaption of the latter. And in both cases they were first available not in 1980, but in 1981.
I had retained a basic memory of my middle school years, I knew I broke my leg in 8th grade and was holme for a decent while. I knew I played D&D in the cafeteria in 8th grade, DMing my friends. But other aspects had rearranged themselves in my mind. Unimportant perhaps, but formative events for me.
So, the Christmas gift that I was certain was given to me on the Christmas of 1980 was actually given on the Christmas of 1981. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, one of the formative moments in my life, in the fall of 1981.
This isn't incredibly important, of course, but it provides me with an excellent example of the fallibility of memory. When I interview subjects about past events, I will always keep this in mind, how easy it is for the time and date of occurrences to get muddled in our minds, so that we become firmly convinced of falsehoods. Not lying, but neither is it factual.
Anyway, I found this interesting. And as a historian, publicly recounting that I was mistaken about dates I have often given in the past feels like the right thing to do, even if no one else cares.
If anyone else has examples of how they discovered their own past memories were inaccurate, I'd love to hear them.
