The accounts they gave to Ball and other researchers reflect all of this complexity.

They are rich in specific detail — names, places, sequences of events — that reflects genuine memory of real things.

They are also shaped by the community’s own processes of memory and meaning-making, by the ways in which the events had been talked about within the community over the decades, and by the specific questions that the researchers were asking.

Ball was a skilled oral historian who recognized these complexities and tried to account for them in her presentation of the material.

Her acknowledgments of uncertainty and her careful attribution of specific claims to specific sources reflect a serious engagement with the methodological challenges of working with oral history.