Secrets - 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History, Week 22

The Queen's View

Week after week I have seen the prompts for the "52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History" posted and have thought to myself, "I know what I could write for that prompt. I'll get to it after I {insert teaching related activity here}." Obviously, I never got to it, which is especially distressing because school has been out for two weeks. 

I've realized that if you write on each of the prompts Amy Coffin creates this year you will have created a history of your own life or a living family history, almost without trying. I had never even heard of living family histories until I wrote about them for eHow earlier this year. The article is here (n.b. I don't get anything if you click on the link).

So here goes….

This week's prompt is "Secrets" - something about me that would not be found in a documentary record 100 years from now. It seems to me that if this fact is not documented (e.g. written down) nobody could ever find it out whether they look tomorrow or in 1,000 years.

The first undocumented item that sprang to mind was my favorite colors. When I was little my favorites were blue and green, but since college it has been orange. Not a bright yellow-orange, like the fruit, but a darker, red-orange. On the other hand my favorite color combination can be seen almost any time it rains – green trees against a blue-grey sky. The only way, in my opinion, to improve this combination is when the rain has stopped and the world is touched with the gold of an emerging sun. I have always thought this combination is what I would give to Jane Lockhart of the HGTV series Get Color for my room inspiration. {This is my all-time favorite HGTV program, which also isn't documented}. 

In fact, I love this color combination so much that my niece uses the term "favorite color" as code for my favorite matinee idol. Here is an example of how it works (imagine a sing-song emphasis on the code words): "Aunt Mandy, do you want to watch this movie? It's got your favorite color…" His identity, I think, will remain a secret.

The second item that occurred to me is that anyone looking for me in the future might wonder why that can't find me in the 2000 US Census. They will probably madly look for me in Columbus (where I lived in 1999) going street by street; they will look for my parents and my sister; they will try the entire country with various spellings of "Amanda" and "Epperson;" they will triple check the social security death index to make sure I didn't die in 1999. But the truth is quite simple – I am NOT in the 2000 US Census as I did not live in the United States. I am in the 2001 UK Census as I was a graduate student at the University of Glasgow at the time. If someone knew significant details about my life or had access to other documents, like my diploma, they would be able to figure this out quite easily. But if not, my absence from the 2000 Census would be a great big brick wall. 

If you'd like to know more about secrets, read this story from NPR. It explains (perhaps) why I shared the anecdote about my favorite color.