Stories
What the items allow us to tell, and where the telling stops.
Ninety-four years in the same trade.
The account book opens in 1861 and closes in 1889. A hundred and forty pages: wheels, axles, carriage repairs, and the names of forty-three regular customers. You can read the prices, so the village economy, and the slow months, so the seasons.
In 1921 Édouard changed the sign. The photograph that dates the change shows the workshop with its doors widened. What it does not show is what had to be borrowed to widen them: no item in the collection says.
The workshop was sold in 1954. The deed is here; the reason is not.
Twenty-two letters, two censored.
Rosaire wrote from March 1916 to October 1918. He writes about the weather, about what he eats, about his father. He never writes about the fighting, except twice, and both passages are struck through in black ink by the military censor.
We will not know what they said. But we know they were written, and that someone judged they had to be erased. That is information, and it goes into the file.
The faces no one can name.
Two photographs in the collection arrived with no caption. Thérèse identified one from memory in 2003: the harvest at the neighbours', about 1930. She recognises one figure, not the others.
The other remains anonymous. It is published all the same, marked « unidentified ». An archive that shows only what it knows gives a false picture of what it holds.