Abstract
Leah Jackson Wolford, an emerging scholar in folklore and English in the early twentieth century, died at the age of twenty-five, six days after delivering her only child. While the only book she published garnered scholarly praise for decades after her death, ensuring her scholarly legacy, her family knew only a few details about her life. With the discovery and preservation of a newly discovered archive, which contains Leah’s personal papers and photographs, her descendants have begun to reframe their images of her as a family figure. Since family members knew very little about Leah prior to 2009, John Wolford and Katherine Finch conducted oral histories with them to determine what they knew or imagined of Leah’s life up to that point. This initial documentation establishes how the family conceived of Leah Jackson Wolford before they were influenced by the information in her archive. Countering the iconic image that the family developed of her over the decades, this archive has begun to enable family members to both humanize and re-make their perceptions of her. This article uses oral history, folklore, narrative theory, and photographic analysis to arrive at an understanding of how the image of a nearly forgotten family member may be reimagined by isolating the oral historical record of what the family thinks it knows of that person, and what the person reveals of herself through her archive.
