Puzzling over the Past

Currently my kitchen table is covered with puzzle pieces. I am working on a 1000-piece puzzle that is full of many small, brightly-coloured objects. Those are my favourite kind of puzzles to complete.

As I’ve been working on this puzzle, I’ve also been trying to solve another mystery—uncovering the past of a house in London. The assignment was to select a house in the area and explore every aspect of it—original owner, subsequent owners, occupants, architectural design, and its contextual significance within the area. My house quickly turned into a complex historical investigation. The house is relatively significant in the area, contributing to early London community as the meeting place for the first Masonic Lodge in the London District. The house appears in many local history books, and it is also marked by a plaque that highlights its historical significance.

But, when I began looking at the primary records associated with the land, I quickly became confused, as I couldn’t see the original owner—who appeared in many local histories—listed anywhere in land ownership records. It was not until several weeks later that something clicked for me. I was creating a grand summary of my research and trying to get all of my thoughts down in one place, when all of a sudden, it hit me that maybe the man who everyone claimed to be the owner of the house, never actually owned it. As my brain went a million miles a minute trying grasp this, pieces of the puzzle slowly began to fall into place. I realized that information I had uncovered in the previous few weeks now made sense in the context of this new understanding of my research. The more I looked into this theory, the more it became clear that what I had assumed to be correct—because so many different sources agreed—was simply not possible. While I know to be critical of the sources that I use when conducting historical research, this experience really showed me how bias—in this case taking the many secondary sources at face value—can shape a research project. Because I subconsciously made the assumption that something was true, it took weeks to realize that what I thought was correct never actually happened.

The other night, when I was sitting at my kitchen table, trying to match up different pieces, it struck me how much working with the past is like doing a puzzle. We have hundreds of different pieces (if not more) and somehow, they all fit together. But, especially at the beginning, it can be challenging to see the bigger picture.

But I also think it’s a bit different with history.

We can’t know what the historical puzzle will look like in the end. Sure, we can figure out how different pieces connect and try to understand what fits together, but I think we also have to hold everything loosely. We may have forced two pieces together simply because they looked similar. Or maybe we know that we’ve seen a particular piece at some point, but can’t figure out where we put it. Or maybe we’ve completely lost a piece under the table!

In this way, I think that history is like one big, unfinished puzzle—but it’s a puzzle that isn’t static and keeps changing over time with new research. When we take a minute to pause, we can step back and see a fuller picture.