TL;DR – Great Grandpa fought in ww2, wrote diary. Grandmas death revealed she had unknown brother. This make me think I have responsibility for a piece of history. Do I?
This needs some backstory. It might also be too philosophical and too little actual history for this sub but I don’t know where else to post it so please bear with me.
My great grandfather was born in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland and fought in the Winter- and Continuation War during WW2. He wrote a diary during his service which gives a great insight of what ordinary soldiers did during the war. From sitting around waiting for orders on where to march and complaining about the food, to desperately trying to fend off overwhelming Soviet forces pushing through their lines.
Growing up, I have been fascinated with story about him and even did a school project about him in a history class. I’ve tried to dig deeper in this. I’ve found the official war diaries of both the regiment and battalion he served in, I’ve found maps and bought many books on the subject. The plan is loosely to write some kind of report or book detailing his service. Not necessarily to publish, but to give myself a clearer picture of what happened and what he went through. However, it’s an on and off project as I only do this when inspiration strikes me. It is slow work, cross referencing diaries, pouring over maps and to complicate things further a lot of the source material is in Finnish and Russian, which I don’t speak. To me this is obviously a very personal story as my relative did all these amazing things and survived. But in the bigger picture, the “Finland during WW2”, this quickly fades to some marginal anecdotes.
The philosophical side of this began when my grandmother passed away back in January. When we went through her belongings, we found an old photo with the inscription “Mother and me at my brothers grave”. The thing is, as far as everyone in my family knew, my grandmother was an only child. My dad called the church in the town where she was born, and it turns out she had had an older brother who died before she was born. She had never mentioned it to anyone.
What does this side story have to do with the war diary? It made me realize that I am the last person to care about my great grandfather’s war service. My sister and cousins aren’t interested. My dad, while interested and supportive of me digging deeper, will not himself do more than cherish the memories. Looking at that picture I was overwhelmed knowing that I have the power to decide if another person’s legacy will live on or not. Like my grandmother choose not to let the memory of her dead brother live on, I must choose what to do with my great grandfather’s memory, at least the war part. It made me feel responsible in some weird way, as “this story dies with me”.
It feels strange to know that if I do not do something with this material, the memory of his service will be forever lost, aside from the diary no one will read. At the same time, I feel I’ll come across as slightly megalomaniac thinking this highly of an insignificant piece of history. It is not the history itself that bothers me, it’s the fact that I am the last curator of a memory.
Do you think I have a responsibility for keeping this tiny piece of history alive?
Diaries can be very useful historical sources, as they offer insight into everyday activities and ordinary people’s subjective experiences, information that’s often harder to find in official records. As one example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s excellent A Midwife’s Tale is based primarily on the diary of Martha Ballard, a rural New England midwife in the late colonial period. Using the diary entries, she gleans a great deal of information about medical practices, infidelity, debt and debtors, and other aspects of that society. So they can be highly useful tools for the historian.
But you’re asking what your ‘responsibility’ is here. I imagine diaries and memoirs from the war years in Finland are not nearly as rare as 18th century rural American diaries, so you’re likely not in possession of a document of singular importance. That being said, your great-grandfather’s experience of those events is unique to him, so even if the diary doesn’t expand our knowledge of the wars he fought in, it certainly is worth preserving.
I think if you feel compelled to write about his service, and to go through the process of researching the context, that would be a fine way to honor his memory, but by no means the only one. There may be “citizen history”-type projects that could offer you support and guidance; there have been numerous efforts along those lines in the U.S. recently, to record memories of the war generation as they reach the end of their lives, and there may be something similar in Sweden or Finland.
If writing is too onerous of a task, you could also look into donating the diary to an archive or library that handles those types of documents. That way, it would be made available for researchers into the period and possibly make its way into the historical record that way.
But even if you do nothing other than hold onto it, and someday pass it on to a younger family member with some words about what it is and why it’s important, I think that would fulfill your responsibility. For 200 years, Martha Ballard’s descendants kept her diary, perhaps tucked into a bureau or in a chest under some quilts, until the day someone decided to contact a researcher and see if anything could be made of it. As long as your great-grandfather’s diary is kept safe and dry, that would be enough to keep the memory alive.