Mysteries of History

One of the reasons I love history is because so often it is full of mystery. As a novelist, I love stepping into that mystery with my imagination, building from what I know of an era to fill in the spaces of people’s stories that history has left blank. But being trained in history, I also love pursuing the mystery, digging and digging until an assumed-to-be lost story suddenly comes to life.

So I was fascinated by a documentary we recently watched on PBS called Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne. (I discovered this program is also streaming on Amazon, free for Prime members!)

While I love history, I rarely pay attention to some of the “bigger” aspects, like names of battles or the timeline of a war, so in case you are like me, let me set the stage.

Bastogne is a town in Belgium. It was part of the Battle of the Bulge and cited as the last German offensive of WWII. The Americans held the town against a great siege and the tide of the war turned. During the siege, which included the bombing of a hospital, many heroes emerged, one of whom was a Belgian nurse often called “the angel of Bastogne.” Her name was Renee LaMaire. But there was another Belgian nurse working in the midst of the chaos. Her name was Augusta Chiwy, and her story had been essentially lost to history.

But one historian changed all that. There are so many twists and turns in this story that I don’t want to give it all away, so if you enjoy history and its mysteries, check out Searching for Augusta on Amazon. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!

Another take on the mystery of history comes in the form of a book I discovered in college. In Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, a bored detective on the mend needs a mystery to occupy his mind. A friend suggests he apply his current police detective methods to a historical question: Did Richard III murder his two nephews? It’s quite a fascinating read.

Sometimes history’s mysteries are less public and hit more closely to home. My father’s paternal grandfather is a mystery in our family. My parents started looking into the real history, wondering if the family lore would measure up. So far, little that they have found matches the passed-down stories. So many trails have led to dead ends. But they haven’t given up. On a recent scavenge into small town archives, they ran across a piece of information in a census record that had never been mentioned before: a marriage previous to my dad’s grandfather’s marriage to his grandmother. And at least a ten year marriage at that! But instead of clearing up our historical mystery, it only added to it! Who was this woman? What happened to her? Where, then, did he meet the woman who would become my great-grandmother, for we thought he had moved to Oklahoma territory to be with her, yet now it appears he was already there!

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

I’m not sure we’ll ever discover the true story behind my great-grandfather, but now that we have another name to connect with him, who knows what we’ll find. Perhaps we’ll discover a new stream of information we didn’t know existed. Or perhaps, once again, we will have only our imaginations of the path of his life over 100 years ago. Either way, I love the searching out of a historical mystery even as I embrace wholeheartedly the joy of filling it in with my own imaginings.

Do you have any historical mysteries in your family tree or elsewhere that you long to find more detail about?