The electronic rewriting of history, email by email, page by page

Earlier this summer I visited my hometown of Moravian Falls, N.C., and discovered it has become a point of pilgrimage—some newcomer ministers are proclaiming its falls is a portal to heaven.

The obvious image here is of people eager to slide down the falls to their deaths, but what they are saying is that you can talk to angels if you hang around there.

Yes, the falls where teenagers once swam in the muddy lake it fed, the falls where my great-grandfather ran a grain mill, is now suddenly an angelic chat room. The idea is being promoted via  web sites and YouTube videos as well as some local pulpits.

OK, whatever, maybe this will bring some much-needed tourist dollars to the area. But the same fellow who told me the falls is a heavenly portal also told me that there is a prayer rock in the nearby Brushy Mountains where the Moravians who founded the town prayed 24-hours-a-day for 100 years.

I'd never heard this before even though some part of my family has lived in the area since at least the late 1800s. I'd always heard that the Moravians were there only a few years before giving up and moving to what is now Winston-Salem. So, when I got home, I googled "Moravians and prayer rock" and found new web pages mentioning this as fact—a history quickly being rewritten. Only when I went into Google Books and looked at pages in an actual history book (the only one I could access online) did I see references to the Moravians' short stay in the town.

The book was the authoritative source—well researched, edited, verified. But I had to dig to find it and if I wanted more on the topic, I would have had to make a trip to a North Carolina history collection. When it comes to research these days, how many people would make the trip, or any kind of effort to consult a book? Most would just go to Wikipedia, or use whatever first pops up in a Google search.

There is a danger that whatever is most accessible will become the truth, repeated and repeated until it becomes a fact, or even part of the historic record. Crazy email rumors can be checked on snopes.com (although, obviously, a lot of people don't bother to verify them, given the multiple layers of email addresses in some of the emails I've received lately). Put something on a web page and it seems even more valid or authoritative, perhaps because it is more static, more "there."

My son told me a while ago that it's a game among quiz bowlers to go into Wikipedia and create false citations, sometimes even false histories, to see if anyone notices. So far, almost no one has.

(The photo above is of a painting, done by my great aunt Maxie Pardue many years ago, of the Moravian falls, where her family lived when she was young. Any appearance of angelic halo or aura is caused by my camera's flash.)

Sundays in the South

A realtor was quoted recently in the Washington Post Real Estate section saying, “Most buyers have no use for a living room.... It’s functionally obsolete...” Instead, people are converting those spaces to home offices, where they can work more quietly, and alone. The realtor then goes on to explain why: “Everyone here (in the D.C. area) is so uptight. We are so hustle and bustle. Everything is work mode.”

Perhaps this explains why I rarely go to people’s houses around here and sit in their living rooms and talk. Rarer, still, for my entire family to go to someone’s house for the sole purpose of sitting and talking together, as we did when I was growing up in the South. Now we are usually too busy on weekends. And even when we're not busy, we don't know that many other people who aren't busy or whose sudden lack-of-busyness coincides with ours. (I know, also, that some people never have us over because they are too busy to keep their houses clean).

When I was young, Sundays would find us sitting in our grandmother’s living room, joking and sharing with other family members. My Uncle Raymond and his wife and kids would come up every other week from Salisbury, 70 miles away, but most of the rest of us simply walked down the street to be there. We visited her during the week, as well, but those less formal visits were confined to her den or kitchen. On Sundays in the summer, we'd walk across the street to Aunt Maxie and Lola Belle's and sit on their front porch, amid large pots of Christmas stocking ferns, watching cars drive by while we rocked ourselves on their porch swing.

(When I returned to my grandmother’s house after going away to California for a few years, I was surprised at how small it was. The elegant couch and ashtrays with tiny pink china roses seemed almost ordinary, the room and house itself smaller than I remembered.)

I would get bored sitting there with my elderly aunts, my fidgeting cousins and smoking male relatives. Sometimes moments would pass with no one saying anything. Often the topic of conversation was who was sick in the neighborhood or who was having troubles in their lives, things I didn’t care to know as a child. In the winter, in the overheated house, I longed for fresh air and spring warmth.

But still I learned about my family, I learned the history of each of my relatives, and how we were akin to each other. I learned about how sweet my great-grandmother had been, how good with his hands my grandfather had been. We were surrounded by history. Maxie and Lola Belle lived in their parents' house; their brother and other sisters married and moved out, but they stayed on, adding a chandelier in the dining room, plush carpet in the living room, other parts of the house entirely unchanged, their father's furniture still in most of the rooms.

Now my own children hear about their great-grandmother intermittently, with no tangible thing to attach to the recollection, most of the people in my stories long gone. My grandmother's house was sold years ago and I don't know who lives there. There is never anyone outside it. No one is sitting on any of the porches in the neighborhood when I drive by. Perhaps they are inside, watching television together—or they are sitting alone in front of their computers, in their home offices, writing about the past.

(Pictured: My grandparents, in their living room, in an undated photo. He died when I was six.)