Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping is wrong.  But when you’re the youngest kid in the family and everyone is much older than you, it’s the only way to learn anything.  At least, that is my story and I’m sticking to it.  Although, there’s not really much you can learn while sitting halfway up the steps in the front hall and the people still gathered at the dinner table behind the louvre’d doors are talking….you can catch some words, but not all, unless voices are raised, and when voices are raised you have to be ready to make a quick and silent getaway so you don’t get discovered!

Gossip is bad.  Gossip is the act of transmitting and receiving stories that might be true.  It’s the ‘might’ that makes them exciting.  There is usually at least a grain of truth at the center of a piece of gossip.  Like eavesdropping, it only gives you part of the real story.  Your imagination, along with your knowledge and powers of educated guessing can rush in to fill the gaps. The story you pass along has an added ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, or ‘what if?’, added by you.

While eavesdropping is a method of information-gathering, gossip is a form of sharing information, or more accurately, stories. 

Studying genealogy satisfies both of these illicit urges.  But it’s perfectly okay, right?  Is it eavesdropping if you are reading court documents or letters?  Is it gossip if the subjects have been dead for 50, 100, 300 years??  Is it ‘somebody else’s business….not yours’ when it’s the business of your ancestors?

We can ask people for information, but if we ask, we might not get the truth.  Just as the youngest kid in the family gets a carefully filtered account of family business and events, we will get the version of the story that someone thinks they remember correctly, that might be edited to remove unpleasantness or scandal, that might be full of errors like incorrect names….maybe, the version of the story they heard as a child, while eavesdropping.