The Fatherland Museum

Abstract

How do we make sense out of the lives of our fathers? Do we rely on a well-worn family narrative that omits complications or unresolved tensions or deeper mysteries, or do we question what we claim to know and dig deeper for details? If we choose to reenter the past with new questions, what might we find there? What artifacts, stories, secrets, and memories do we bring into the revised narrative? And what might be the longer term effects of revising that narrative on how we understand our own lives as well as the lives and understandings of those family members who come after us? This narrative essay explores those issues in relation to the life of my father, Harold Lloyd Goodall, Sr.