History records

[Thunder]

In these times it is in my view that history should not be censored, forgotten or ignored. We may well not like the history but it is what has happened. As family historians we know that there may be uncomfortable facts and we should not try to cover up, for example slave traders in the family, it does a dis-service to the history being written. Several years ago the catalogue at The National Archives (TNA) had the description of a man whom it said had died in south London after he was ejected from a Liberal Party meeting where he was supporting the suffragettes, in fact he didn't die as the file showed he wasn't even in the UK but in Canada and it was just a bunch of lies which were then repeated by the suffragette newspapers. It is our history, warts and all, Churchill was both good and bad but he did save the country from Hitler and the Nazis at a time when other leaders would have let the Nazis rule over us and many of the views he stated were not only his but others at the time and which we could not defend today. TNA has so many sad, awful, enlightening and funny stories (including the man who tried to resucitate his dead mother with electricity like Frankenstein), it was in the 1950s, so we don't want a selective set of stories but the facts.

[Guy]

People like to whitewash history and tend to forget or bury the unpleasant truths.

The present outcry about slavers is a good example of this; there is a lot of talk about Europeans running slave ships from Africa and the miserable existence of the slaves in America, but no one seems to mention about how that trade started in the first place.
No one mentions that the native kingdoms fought amongst themselves and the wounded and infirm were put to death by young children as a form of blooding. At times the child was too weak to cut their prisoner's head off quickly and took many attempts to severe it.
The fit prisoners were then taken into the victors kingdom and sacrificed to the gods.
It could be argued that the action of the Europeans at that time saved those prisoners and thousands of others from certain death.

That however is a different argument than the one about slavery, but the past must be judged by the standards of behaviour at the time, not the standards of behaviour now.

Cheers
Guy

[Templ4r]

Very true. You can't change the past, but you can ignore it if it doesn't suit your purpose..

[pinefamily]

Thunder, your Frankenstein story reminds me of an ancestor of mine who was an anatomist. He kept an embalmed body of a woman in his bedroom. Perhaps unsurprisingly he had no children, and after his death his long-suffering widow donated the body to the Royal College of Surgeons.