Linda S. Goldberg has published a four-volume oral history of her neighbors in Marshfield, Plainfield, East Calais, Cabot and East Montpelier.
The books, titled “To My Rememberin’: Conversations with Vermont Neighbors” are available at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier and through Amazon.
Goldberg, formerly of central Vermont but now living in California, said she hopes to get them into area libraries.
Goldberg conducted the taped interviews from 2003 to 2013. The books are a follow-up of oral histories she did with neighbors on Hollister Hill in Marshfield from 1973 to 1975 that were published in “Here on the Hill” by the Vermont Folk Center in 1991.
“The purpose of the project was to learn about the area where I lived and to see what had changed; what had stayed the same; what life was like after 30 years. I’m a curious person. My immediate world always interests me. I can’t say I can understand the larger world but, over time, I think about what happens in my immediate area and the people who live there,” she said.
Some of the same people interviewed for “Here on the Hill” are again featured in “To My Rememberin’.” Several relatives from those first interviewed are also included in the recent publication.
“If I interviewed someone’s grandparent the first time, what did the grandchild have to say now? What influence does the past have on our present, then on our future? What kinds of work did people do compared to previously? What were the technological changes? What were families like? What happened to the land? Were the values the same?” she said.
The opening question in each interview was: “What can you tell me about your family background?”
“From there, I listened to the person’s life story over time. At the conclusion, which could have been after many interviews, the four questions were the same: If you could go back to a time in your life that you remember with pleasure, what would it be? Was there any time that was so terrible that you’d never want to go back to it? If you could be a child when your great-grandparents, your grandparents, your parents, you, your children, or your grandchildren were or are children, which time would you choose to be a child in, and why? How do you want to be remembered after you’re gone?” she said.
The four volumes, which include more than 200 interviews, spans nearly 2,450 pages. They are divided by the years of the birth of the person interviewed: Volume One, 1910-1939; Volume 2, 1940-1949; Volume 3, 1950-1959; and Volume 4, 1960-2009.
Many of the people interviewed still live in central Vermont.
Concerning how she selected individuals to be interviewed, she said: “I just roamed around and knocked on people’s doors. If an interviewee talked about family members or old friends or coworkers, I knocked on their doors.”
Goldberg was born in Los Angeles in 1941. She moved to Hollister Hill in 1973. She worked as the elementary school librarian for Barre City Schools for 10 years, and was the K-4 librarian at Barre City Elementary and Middle School from 1995 to 2000. After retiring in 2015, she left Vermont to be near her sons and their families in the Bay Area of California.
In addition to learning about her neighbors, Goldberg said she found unexpected joy by sharing their lives.
“After interviewing a man and his son, I went ice fishing with them on Caspian Lake. I’d never been on ice, especially not driving over it in a truck. I was so anxious, I called my sons to possibly say goodbye. They told me not to worry, of course,” she said.
The first interview in Volume One is with Marion Burnham, who died at age 90 in 2007. Burnham grew up on a central Vermont farm. She said she could trace her family back to the Domesday Book in England.
“They were living there before the Norman Invasion,” Burnham said. The Domesday Book was a record of the extent, value, ownership and liabilities of land in England, made in 1086 by order of King William I.
Burnham’s father, Earl Dwinell, was “optimistic about everything except the money he could make farming, which was nothing.”
The last interview in Volume 4 is with Theo LaBrusciano-Carris, a fifth-grader at the time of the interview, who said that at his mother’s house on the weekends he could use his computer one hour a day, but his father let him use it two hours a day. On school nights at both houses, the computer was off-limits, he explained.
LaBrusciano-Carris said his worries (at that time) were “global warming and pollution” and that he thought as an adult he “probably” would be designing computer games.
Despite similar questions asked of each participant, the 208 interviews are considerably different in context and tone, reflecting both the inevitable changes over time, as well as the differences in the ages of the people interviewed.
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