Search for accurate history

Not much worth writing about has happened in the last couple of days.  I could complain about work, or the weather but who wants to read about other people's day to day complaints.  I can't think of many who would.  

Then again, the stories I find most interesting about history are always filled with day to day details.  Those details are the things that make the make it interesting and alive and not just a cartoon.  So someone had to have done research and read all of the day to day complaining of someone in some journal or diary to get those details.  I could be helping out some future history graduate student with my whining and moaning about my day to day life.  Just a normal non famous person at the turn of the century.

  

The thing that makes me write tonight though is the question about how accurate a picture do you think anyone can get of a person from others accounts of them and their actions, or even from journals and letters.  I just read a book, Into the Wild.  The book is a retelling of a the life of a young man who gave everything away after graduating college, lived on the road and died in the Alaskan wild.  The author didn't have much information to go on to reconstruct how this young man lived and died.  There were the recollections of his parents and sister.  There were a few postcards to friends, random infrequent records where he had some interaction with the official world (police, government).  He also found books with passages underlined, notes in the margins.  At one point the guy kept a kind of journal, the date and four or five word phrases.  

It was an interesting story but it made me think about what kind of story could be gleaned from the written traces of my life.   I am not trying to hide from the "authorities" like the guy in the book was.  There are plenty of records that could tell part of the story, stuff like bank and tax records, census documents, school documents, driver's license.  I have infrequently kept a written journal, my senior year in high school I wrote at least twice a week.  Other than that I write sporadically at best.  When I was in Spain I wrote rather regularly to one of my friends who was in the Peace Corps at the same time.  There are my emails but they don't last that long.  But even with all of the information that is out in the world about me it is mostly my random impressions of the world.  I mean it is highly colored by my mood.  Most of the time I expect the reader to have more than half of the information that they are going to need to understand what I am talking about already.  I think it would take a whole lot of sleuth work to put together any type of coherent story, and even then I'm not sure they could even get the main gist of my life.  Not that this isn't the biggest exercise in self importance, and delusion.  I mean there is no reason for anyone to  piece together my story so it doesn't matter how accurate a story they could get.

 

But if I don't think "they" (whoever, they, are) could get an accurate picture of my life when there is a good amount of  information out there if someone were to really look for it, how can I expect to really know anything about history.  Not that it isn't a worthy goal, but it is such an incomplete picture.  History is tough, anthropology almost impossible.  So much of it is trying to figure out what picture is on a puzzle when you have less than half of the pieces and the top of the box is missing.