Unreliable Narrators

Over many decades, I pieced together stories of my grandmother from my own mother, my aunt Iris, and Ancestry.com records. I had to find the “truth” about some of the stories my mother told me. I ended up at Healey Library at UMass Boston overlooking Boston Harbor on a warm, sunny May day in 2023. I was there to review the case records of the Boston Children’s Aid Society, what could have been the original New England Home for Little Wanderers, now known at The Home. The archivist made sure I had all the original case files and index cards of families served from 1923-1928. I was hoping to corroborate the story my mother told me that my father, his sisters Iris and Ruth were in the care of this organization for a few years as small children. After hours of looking, I was disheartened with no records of my Lang family. “I guess my mother made this up,” I said sadly to the archivist. “Oh, no,” he said. “Records get lost all the time.”

I know my grandmother was an unreliable narrator, making up her own birth day and year, had hospitalization for mental illness, and my mother was reporting the stories she heard from my father. I asked my cousins if they ever heard the story of the family in the care of New England Home for Little Wanderers and they said no.

Maybe we are all unreliable narrators of our own and other’s lives. Reliable or unreliable, the village of Ballyshannon, population 2,299 (2016) exists today, and there are Google pictures of my grandmother’s home at 15 West Port. It will be on the first places I visit, to pay my respects when I arrive in about six weeks.