Q1.
How did you find details about your family's past? Did you rely on things like photographs, diaries, ID cards or memories from your parents and relatives?
Answer
Almost certainly you used a mixture of both kinds — written and material things on one side, spoken memory on the other. That mixture is the whole point of the question.
| What you used | Which family of historical sources it matches (page 67) |
|---|---|
| Aadhaar cards, ration cards, certificates, land papers, letters, diaries | Literary / written sources — like inscriptions, copper plates and manuscripts |
| Old photographs, an ancestor's portrait, a painted family scene | Artistic sources — like paintings and sculptures |
| Utensils, jewellery, tools, old coins, the old family house | Archaeological sources — like coins, ornaments, tools and structures |
| What your parents, grandparents and neighbours told you | Oral sources — like folklore and genealogies |
Sample answer: “Most of what I found came from my grandmother talking. She gave me all four great-grandparents' names and their village. But she was not sure of years, so I checked my grandfather's pension book for his date of birth and found an old photograph with ‘1971’ written on the back. Where the two disagreed, I wrote both in my table and marked which source each came from.”
Why the disagreement is not a failure: the chapter says that sometimes sources confirm each other and sometimes they contradict each other, and then the historian must decide which source to trust more. A written date on a document usually beats a remembered date — but a photograph can also be mislabelled. Recording the conflict instead of hiding it is what a good historian does.