By Andy Horowitz

State Historian Andy Horowitz interviews people who are bringing the past into the present.

Photos courtesy of Sidney Horowitz.

Fiona Vernal is an associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories, an effort she founded in 2015 to encourage collaborations among students, scholars, archivists, and community organizations to document local history. Readers of Connecticut Explored will know her from her contributions to this magazine. Vernal is designing a Caribbean heritage museum at the West Indian Social Club of Hartford and working on Hartford Bound, an online exhibit and book about “how Hartford became an African American and Caribbean city.” Both projects draw on archival research as well as extensive oral history interviews.

This is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation about how an aspiring engineer born in Jamaica and raised in New Jersey became one of the most important historians of Connecticut.

Andy Horowitz: How did you become a historian?

Fiona Vernal: I wanted to be an engineer. My first semester at Princeton, I filled my schedule with an elective course on the history of South Africa. This 6′7″ white professor [Robert Carl-Heinz Shell] walked into class and announced that he was a political exile from South Africa—and that history was his way of contributing to the anti-apartheid cause because the storytelling he was interested in was about writing people back into history. It was the first time anybody in my life had described history that way, and I was hooked.

AH: After college, you got a PhD in history from Yale and wrote a dissertation, which ultimately became a book called The Farmerfield Mission, about Methodist missionaries in South Africa. Where did your focus on Connecticut come from?

FV: I had a Fulbright to conduct oral histories for my dissertation in South Africa, and when I returned to Connecticut in 1998, there was a job advertised at what’s now the Connecticut Museum for Culture and History to interview West Indians. I couldn’t think of a more perfect project because I like talking to people. My family says I have the gift of gab. They say, “Here comes Fiona. Oh God, she’s going to interview us!” But I am really interested in people and their lives. So, I spent almost two years interviewing West Indians in Hartford. Then I got a job in Michigan, discovered lake-effect snow, and came back to Connecticut as soon as possible. At first, I just wanted to pick back up on the West Indian project, but then my vision kept getting bigger.

AH: What does “Connecticut history” mean to you?

FV: I don’t necessarily own the identity of “Connecticut historian” yet, but I’ve been learning by doing. And now that I’ve been doing it for a little while, I realize that we need to recruit an army! Because, like, after the Puritans, there’s so much else that needs to be covered!

AH: How does your experience as an oral historian affect the way you approach an archive?

FV: I always pretend like I’m having conversations with the people I encounter in the archive. Doing so makes me a better historian because it makes me ask more literary and imaginative questions.

AH: How about the other way around: how does your training as an archival historian affect how you approach interviews?

FV: I always do life history interviews. I imagine what a family member or historian would want to know if this interview is the only sliver of information that they are going to have about this person. I try to record a really full story—I ask for details about how somebody felt, what they saw and heard—that way, I don’t have to imagine it. My interviews are long, but I know that I’m creating an archival record.

AH: What do you think it means to people to see themselves represented in an archive or an exhibit?

FV: Most people don’t think that their lives and their everyday experiences really matter. We think big when we think about history—like, “You were at the Battle of the Bulge,” or when something really significant happened, and that’s why you matter. But oral histories offer a moment to pause, for people to remember just how important their own everyday lives are. When people see that on the walls as an exhibition, it’s overwhelming. I think the tears are there because it’s about caring about our lives, just being human.

AH: Is there anything else you want to say to readers of Connecticut Explored?

FV: Talk to your family; let them know who you are and what you’ve been through. I don’t want people to wake up one day and say, “Man, I really didn’t know anything about my grandmother, or I really didn’t ask.” It is not natural for us to see ourselves as historical figures, but we are. Write letters, keep a diary, share it with your kids. And talk to them.