Life narratives create a view into a person’s life, which could breed understanding and empathy. Archival work might be an effective resource when growing the public knowledge of a certain person or group. The Slate has an article that shows this powerful work archives can do, and how that work can be used to add to the story of people who have been killed or who died naturally. This is important because it allows people who have died to have their stories told—and to challenge any pre-existing thoughts or ideas told. In Missing Sarah, a similar method is used—a method to look at diary entries and letters to change how the media depicts Sarah. De Vries uses Sarah’s writing to reclaim her life and make sense of her disappearance. This allows for Sarah to have a certain indirect voice and power over how she is remembered. Through De Vries’s writing and her collection of Sarah’s personal writing, De Vries is able to reclaim Sarah’s past and change her disappearance from something that was a consequence of her actions, thus not important, into a disappearance that was wrong and important to address—her life was valuable and should be treated as such.
Similarly in the Slate, Rebecca Onion writes about CSI:Dixie—a collection of information about the deaths of people in South Carolina during the 19th century. Onion mentions the story of Sylvia, a woman who was a slave that was killed by her “master”, Gabriel Coates. The transcript provided by the CSI:Dixie describes Sylvia’s encounter with Coates, Sylvia was hit for ignoring Coates’s orders and Coates was deemed not responsible for her death—in other words, Sylvia was murdered for defending her son. By knowing her story, and by the archival work that allowed her story to be told and share, Sylvia’s story is reclaimed. The archival work becomes redemptive in that it allows the public to see the truth of her death. Through Sylvia’s story, the lack of conviction of her murderer and her death change from being forgotten—and can be a story the public can access and read.
Through Sarah and Sylvia it becomes evident that archives can be used rewrite and reclaim a person’s story; they can make a forgotten and ignored story into something accessible and public. Sarah and Sylvia represent a larger group of people, people who have been “misremembered” or written off. Life narratives and archives explain a person’s story, they make a person more than just a name mentioned in passing. Without this archive of cases in South Carolina during the 19th century, Coates would have remained guiltless and Sylvia would have remained a disobedient servant. It is doubtless that there are other stories in which people are originally misrepresented and then through information stored in archives are reimagined (i.e. the idea that “the truth will come out”). Altogether, it seems apparent that archives hold information that can be critical in adapting the way a person has been or is viewed by the public—or whether that person is seen at all.
