Q How far back does the earliest sound-recorded memory go?
Graham Wells, via email
A Many of us have family stories which have been passed down orally through the generations. Alex Haley, the author of Roots, is said to have discovered his own slavery background by talking to griots (family historians) in west Africa, from where his antecedents had originally come. Oral historians try to capture these traditions when they interview people about their lives.
But the oldest actual recorded personal experiences that we have are from the US. Movietone made a series of filmed interviews in 1929 with several older people, including 103-year-old Galusha Cole from Pasadena, born in 1826, talking about his Baptist upbringing. Others remember the US Civil War. Between 1936 and 1938, the New Deal Federal Writers’ ‘Slave Narratives’ project interviewed more than 2,000 former slaves. Most of these accounts were written down and are now in the Library of Congress, but 23 survive as audio recordings. Sarah Gudger from North Carolina was interviewed in 1937, recalling a well-documented meteor shower in 1833.
Closer to home, the British Library holds a recording of nurse Florence Nightingale from 1890, saying: “God bless my dear old comrades of [the 1854 battle of] Balaclava and bring them safe to shore.” And there is a childhood eyewitness account of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, which took place in November 1852, recorded by the BBC in June 1940 with Frederick Mead, a London magistrate.