The Memory-Keeping Daughter: Exploring Object Stories and Family Legacies from America’s Modern Wars

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent public history project collecting objects and object stories in the American southwest, it argues that a focus on daughters as caretakers of family military history offers a new way to engage with descendants’ histories by showing how the work of such women can contribute to our understanding of modern war and its legacies.

1. Introduction

“We don’t know what they stand for, because dad was very secretive”. This daughter of a Second World War United States veteran was sharing the scrapbook that she had lovingly crafted to house her father’s wartime photographs. One of the seven children of the man she described further as “very soft spoken. And very easygoing, very hard worker”, she had come to a public event for Bringing War Home: Object Stories, Memory and Modern War [BWH], an ongoing project digitally preserving the objects that surround America’s modern wars and the stories that illuminate them. Thus far, it has documented artifacts carried to and from conflict zones, capturing emotional ties and afterlives. At the small museum that marked the site of the Second World War’s Wendover Air Base, this daughter spoke with the BWH project team about this Utah farm boy who ended up serving five years in the military; left behind from his service were his dog-tags, his medals, and a handful of photographs in an envelope. As his daughter explained after both her parents passed away, “I found everything and so I said, we got to make that a scrapbook”. She took the jumbled chaos of the photographs in the envelope and the silences of a father who “didn’t talk about history” and transformed them into a monument to his service. Her creation of this new commemorative artifact from her father’s objects of war now lives in a family home, preserving the memory of both the beloved relative and the historical moment he embodied.1

One consistent feature of the twelve events (those held during the past two and a half years) where the BWH project has engaged with veterans and family members to help preserve the material legacy and stories is the presence of daughters who kept their father’s wartime material culture. Some daughters shared items of clothing, such as a pair of gloves that an aviator father acquired somewhere in China during the Second World War or a dress made from the silk that a father brought back from Vietnam as a gift. In these cases and others, women held on to the item, helping them keep the sense of family and broader history alive. This was true even when the story was complicated and painful, as discussed more fully below.

That wars leave material traces is evident in a range of places, from battle-torn landscapes to communal ruins and memorials (Auslander and Zahra 2018; Cornish and Saunders 2014; Hass 1998; Shackel 2003; Saunders 2000). Long the province of collectors, wartime objects also saturate official historic sites and museums. In displays therein, such artifacts sometimes contain individual stories (e.g., the uniform of a specific, known participant, including those of women (Barker and McCullough 2021)). Other times, they serve as emblems of a broader historically situated experience (e.g., cabinets holding the varieties of armor or rifles from a particular conflict). Moving beyond the material of war found in public spaces like museums, sites, or archives, this essay engages with how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families; they connect the individual with history, even those who were children during wartime (Moshenska 2019). Such things may allow for the transmittal of senses of national belonging and shared sacrifice, but they can also be resonant with silences and secrets, with the unknown. Specifically, I want here to think about a particular family role, that of daughters who carefully preserve or, in some cases, augment the material legacies of their veteran fathers, exploring what these women have chosen to preserve, their choice to do so, and what such memory keeping means rather than focusing on these wartime items themselves.

Women’s place in the conventional war story remains complicated, less erased than it used to be, thanks to a few generations of scholars, but not always made central to more general histories of conflict (Hagemann et al. 2020). Insights into how war-making decisively shapes gender, whether or not women participate directly in conflict zones, gained new traction with the scholarship of some of the founders of the field of feminist International Relations, such as Cynthia Enloe and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Enloe 1988; Elshtain 1987; Owens et al. 2022; Owens and Rietzler 2021). Works examining the costs of war for women and the contributions of women to war, as well as the struggles of female military participants to receive recognition as veterans, continue to have scholarly and popular resonance (Fell 2018; Myers 2023; Lamb 2020; Rekdal 2021; Turshsen and Twagiramariya 1998). In the context of the United States’ modern wars, scholars of the U.S. Civil War, First World War, Second World War, and Vietnam have all illuminated the range of roles played by women in and out of uniform as just the sampling of essential works in the list of references demonstrates (Anderson 1981; Campbell 1984; Glymph 2020; Jensen 2007; McCurry 2019; Meyer 1996; Myers 2023; Stur 2011; Vuic 2011, 2019). Strikingly missing from historical accounts of women and war is attention to the role of the daughters of veterans, including their place not only as caretakers but even more profoundly as memory keepers of these conflicts.

This article thus takes as its starting contention that attending to the daughters who painstakingly preserve the material legacies of their veteran fathers enhances our understanding of modern war. It can shed light on the ways in which memory, legacy, and the family interact in the daughterly labor of object conservation, a process worthy of analysis, deepening a few studies that seek to center the daughter’s role in oral history more generally (Koleva 2009). It can also help fruitfully expand ideas of “kin keeping” and “kin work” (the labor of keeping family members in contact with one another across generations) by adding the dimension of how objects might do so, particularly when connecting family stories to larger historical narratives (Brown and DeRycke 2010; Rosenthal 1985; Stack and Burton 1993; Ulrich and Gaskell 2014) What might change when those objects are associated with wartime? What role do daughters play in such efforts at memory and kin keeping via objects? What does it mean to bring their fathers’ wars home? Finally, how might such labor perhaps serve to domesticate the memory of war? Those questions frame the discussion that follows, which will utilize the techniques, tools, and ideas of anthropological studies of material culture alongside insights by historians who take ‘things’ seriously.

2. Methods and Underlying Concepts

Material culture can be representative of a particular society and historical epoch while also being deeply personal. The process of digitally collecting objects, basic data about objects, and oral histories (“object stories”) in the BWH project takes as its starting definition of material culture: “the objects that connect us, the things that define us, the materials we use for everyday life”. While this encapsulates the aim of the project’s outreach to community partners, it draws as well from several anthropological approaches to material culture that shape how this project approaches both artifacts and family memory. These concepts include those of entanglement (among humans and their things), the biographical object, the object as witness, and the object as memory keeper (Grayzel and Cannon 2023).

One key approach from anthropologists such as Ian Hodder is thinking about the “entangled” relationship between humans and their things (Hodder 2012). The emotions and ideas called forth by and entangled in the objects that enable state-sanctioned violence are essential to making war feasible. Such objects can themselves manifest emotions but can only be read historically through the human expressions of feeling that these objects provoke in their afterlives (Grayzel 2020). One of the tasks of such artifacts, whether encountered directly or engaged with virtually, maybe to normalize militarism (Bourke 2014).

What further entanglements might ensue when adding the layer of family memory to these artifacts—to consider what it means for a daughter to view photos of military service or to view other objects as a witness entangled with emotions? Engaging with a three-dimensional physical wartime object itself might lead to one kind of entanglement, while the two-dimensionality of the photograph from a battlefront may elicit something different. Moreover, violence and displacement can reshape the physical structures of wartime objects and their meanings, and thus, the nature of the entanglement for those who inherit them might shift (Auslander and Zahra 2018). In addition, humans also continually remake objects in ways that alter their signification (B. Brown 2010; Brown et al. 2015; Gosden and Marshall 1999). Taking the loose, unlabeled photographs of a veteran father and arranging them in a scrapbook may meaningfully shift the perspective of the viewer.

The scrapbook is a particularly interesting example of an entangled object since, as Ellen Garvey has shown, contemporary scrapbooks function to form curated, largely familial archives (Garvey 2013, pp. 18–21). Recent historical engagement with women’s scrapbooks insists that these reflect their efforts to shape the remnants of their public and private selves and, in particular, those of servicewomen reveal efforts to claim authority for themselves as “repositories of military knowledge” (Watton 2022; Hogenbirk 2021, p. 192). What about civilian women and war? Daughterly creators might be seeking to show their capacity to serve as repositors of this knowledge by connecting the family ephemera in their created memorial objects to a historical moment as noteworthy as war.

Other ways in which scholars have considered objects highlight their “biographical” impact. (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hoskins 1998). The field of archaeology provides other important perspectives on what it means for inanimate objects to bear witness (Hauser 2018). The artifacts that the BWH project is collecting are “memory keepers”, concrete witnesses to the complex experiences of both wartime participants with first-hand experiences and their descendants. This makes the BWH project part of an evolving kind of history, one that explicitly acknowledges the importance of the descendants of military participants. It thus contributes to a newly emerging field that brings descendants overtly into the processes of preserving community history (Sutton and Craig 2022; Roper 2023).

“Most descendants grow up with a ‘lived history’ of the war in the family before they possess a ‘learned history’” (Roper 2023, p. 4). This is how Michael Roper takes us into his recent, rich, and multi-faceted history of the First World War. As he elaborates, the transnational efforts of descendants to preserve their ancestors’ experiences receive widespread support from state-sponsored agencies and a larger media culture that wants to put a human, often local, face to distant conflicts. Roper reveals this in his methodological discussion:

When in 2011 I put out an appeal in local newspapers across Britain asking people born in the 1920s and 30s to get in touch, I was deluged by letters, emails, and phone messages. The respondents were not just animated by the sense that their family story might otherwise be lost, but by the belief that it deserved to be heard and would reach a sympathetic public.

(Roper 2023, p. 7)

Those preserving family memories and, by extension, family artifacts desire to engage with the larger context.

In a separate chapter on daughters, Roper explores their caregiving function—a visceral form of kin keeping that enabled veteran fathers, especially those with a disability, and their families to survive—and how such care was “normalised” (Roper 2023, p. 209). By attending to this aspect of the descendants’ history, Roper shows how their fathers’ wars cast shadows on their daughters’ lives (Roper 2023). A promising means to analyze the legacies of war can explicitly incorporate the descendants of those eyewitnesses to military conflict, offering an innovative way to understand how and why new generations reconstruct their ancestors’ wars (Noakes 2018; Summerfield 2013).

While Roper refers to his approach as “descendants’ history”, the BWH project, in its initial grant and in its ongoing outreach, refers to “military families”, in part because this has a particular resonance in the contemporary United States. Usually, it functions to acknowledge both the vital, unpaid labor provided by the family members of those serving in the military and the connected obligation to make sure such families obtain all the support that they need from the national community to do that work. Scholarly approaches also need to acknowledge the tension and complexity inherent in descendants’ relationship to the military. Some descendants, especially those with ongoing ties to the military, may see themselves as “military families”. Other children with parents who served in the conscript armies who fought in America’s twentieth-century conflicts are part of the militarization of families that those wars produced. “Militarized” versus “military” families is something worth exploring further, but lying somewhat beyond the scope of this article.

While this exploration cannot address this fully either, it is mindful that the role of women as memory keepers and amateur historians of family and community has a complex history in the United States, especially when it comes to its military conflicts. In the post-Civil War era, women became part of the historical enterprise and shapers of the politics of memory, including those focused on descendants of “patriots”, leading to the creation of such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution (Des Jardins 2003; Morgan 2021, p. 27). This work further developed in the former Confederacy, where white female descendants of veterans established the United Daughters of the Confederacy and transformed acts of family memory into the whitewashing of the violence of slavery and the war that were instrumental to creating myths of the Lost Cause (Cox 2019; Morgan 2021). Significantly, while the history of family connections to war provided space for women from the nineteenth century onward, scholarly military history largely did not. Yet, women continued to preserve objects of war.

Another vital perspective on material culture and its relationship to new kinds of histories of women and marginalized populations further shape the analysis here. Histories that center the objects of women and their families offer ways to integrate legacies only half told (if that) in archives, the values and specific circumstances of populations made inarticulate in official documents. For example, quilts and the domestic labor and artistry that created them can not only anchor the histories of women but also offer new methodological approaches to the past (Parmal et al. 2021; Ulrich and Gaskell 2014; E. B. Brown 1989). A single, extraordinary fabric bag can illuminate the history of enslaved women, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and the deep afterlife of loss and resilience (Miles 2021). In this way, such objects bear witness in the absence of written records or in the mere fragments that they leave for tracing women’s lives. This resembles other community-centered projects that collect the artifacts and oral histories of marginalized women (Sutton and Craig 2022). One of these core aspects of women’s lives, hiding in plain sight as it were, is the role of daughters as caretakers (Roper 2023). What would expanding interrogations of materiality, memory, and war to include their caretaking of memory add to our history, especially of conflict?

The remainder of this article explores the material culture and object stories of male military service preserved by daughters in order to argue that this offers new ways to understand the family legacies and memories of modern conflict, as well as the roles played by daughters in maintaining these. While grounded in examples collected in the BWH project, it aims to place these in a broader framework to point to important connections with interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and war as well as on material culture and memory.

Their fathers’ objects themselves live on in the homes of many of our participants; they keep the memory of the war close at hand. Some things are packed away in drawers or boxes; others are transformed into a kind of domestic memorial—framing medals and flags, reprinting and framing paintings and photographs. Because this project centers the object story, it avoids asking directly about war trauma and finds silences surrounding experiences and emotions. Nonetheless, as the following encounters with wartime objects illustrate, there is rarely anything casual or random about the items preserved by veterans and their daughters. They have something to say.

3. Wartime Objects, Daughters, and Stories from a Public Project

3.1. Uniform Materials and Banners [PID_00010; PID_00074]

A Second World War naval captain came to one of our first events accompanied by his daughter G, a graphic designer who had made four banners featuring photographs of her father during the war that told the story of his service.2 He was over 100 years old when students interviewed him in a local museum, which fell silent as he spoke, listening to him recalling being stationed on a small sub chaser just off the Normandy beaches and watching the invasion of 6 June 1944. He brought along a few artifacts—a thin pennant from his ship once it was decommissioned, his epaulets, and his cap. It was moving for twenty-something students to hear from someone who was roughly their age when he witnessed that devastating moment and “saw a lot of those young men cut down” (PID_00010). For the BWH project, the combination of hearing the story and seeing these items alongside G’s banners raised questions and led to an interview with G herself about the motivation for creating the banners. Her interview reveals the ways in which this task—turning photographs and words into a secondary commemorative object—took on an emotional resonance for her.

When asked about her earliest memory of her father’s service, she explained, “I’m probably six or so whenever I was old enough to understand, hey I have...things around the house, there was a pennant from his ship…I knew about these things. And through the years, we would ask questions, but Dad wouldn’t talk too much about it”. This follows a familiar pattern shared by other descendants (sons and daughters) about the stories not told. Not until G was doing some more caretaking for her father did she revisit his war experience with him: “I was very proud of what he and everyone did…so I wanted to hear more about it, and people were urging me to make sure that I’ve got it down” (PID_00074).

A great nephew involved with a history club invited her father to speak, so G thought, “how about I make some banners to accompany him, so people can see what he looked like in his uniform…showing a picture of the ship”. As she began her work, she noted, “he was so humble, it was great to have a chance to talk” to him about his service and that of his comrades. G described the process of creating banners as something on which they “collaborated”—gathering up all the photos, with G asking questions to clarify dates, places, and faces:

I typed up what I heard…. each of these stories I brought back to him and had him read it. ‘Dad, did I get this accurately? Did I say this correctly?’ Which was fun and wonderful……When we were finished, I felt that I had an absolute truth coming from my fabulous father who was absolutely compos mentis still to this day, his recollection was so sharp.

As she reflected further on this process, about other ways in which she has shared and might share her dad’s stories via the banners, she observed, “my family has never shown particular interest, even though I have a brother and you would think you know, he would be more interested in this” (PID_00074). Even as she undertakes this labor of love and validation for her father, it puzzles her that this is left to her, the daughter.

G has found that creating the banners has (for her) a larger end goal: “to get somebody interested in [the] subject and to do research on their own” (PID_00074). This echoes the responses to Roper’s call to descendants, their desire to have the intimate story of the family reach the wider world. G, as a professional designer, also shared thoughts about the creation of the banners as a secondary type of object. When asked about details for selecting the color and font, she explained, “I chose that sandy color [to] reflect the dullness of the day. They had storms you know the day before and it was still a very, very rough sea and very much overcast kind of weather so all of those things are trying to evoke the feeling”. She wanted to convey D-Day for her dad, “verbatim, what’s on those panels are verbatim what my dad said…an absolute direct record, not my interpretation”. But this somewhat removes the ways in which she helped transform the father’s war story into another kind of artifact, this time one of a visually narrated, familial, and historical record (PID_00074).

3.2. Photographs and/in a Scrapbook [PID_00050]

When KH (the daughter mentioned at the outset of this article) spoke with the BWH project team about how her father ended up in the military, she had most of the basic details about his service to share: “Dad started out in ’39, going into the Service under the Farmers Act,…which was if a farmer boy would serve 18 months, they got to go back to the ranch. Okay, but war hit. And that changed everything. So he was in for almost five years” (PID_00050). Of that experience, she noted that what he left behind after his death in 2012 was in the family home; this held his dog-tags, his medals, and some photographs in an envelope. The dog-tags and medals are now enclosed in a frame and under glass, an object that sits “right above the TV and the entertainment center so everybody can see it” (PID_00050). In this way, the framed items provide a domestic monument that lives in the original family domicile, keeping alive the memory of both the beloved family member and the historical moment he embodied.

Yet, as KH explained after both her parents passed away when she found all the photographs, her first impulse was, “we got to make that a scrapbook”. She thus transformed these visual records into another kind of monument to his service, one that is portable and reproducible. While it is evident that her dad took the photographs across France after D-Day, they provide little other information. Above all, there is no way to know what this meant to him or what he felt. What she expressed was pride and a desire to have her entire family share in this act of memory and witnessing: “I did copy, have copies made of all the pictures for my sisters and brothers” and for their descendants. In the scrapbook, she added flags and stars, laying the photos out against a backdrop of red, white, and blue or, in some cases, yellow, red, and blue. The detail of the composition and embellishment that surrounds the wartime images, the care that went into transforming the direct evidence of war into this secondary memorial, is something that seems central to this daughter’s engagement with her father’s service—and is also in keeping with scrapbooking practices over that last twenty years (Garvey 2013). The new artifacts connect her and her family to her father’s military service, but both the portable scrapbooks and the framed emblems of military service also literally bring the evidence of war into a living space generations after.

3.3. Gloves from the Second World War [PID_00060]

At the small museum that sits on the historic site of Wendover Air Field, another daughter spoke about a piece of her father’s wartime clothing already donated to the museum. This object itself came unadorned with the labor that went into creating scrapbooks or banners; the curator removed the item from its glass case so our team could photograph it and ask questions, which KP answered by sharing an object story about her father’s gloves from the Second World War.

As she explained, “These are…leather flying gloves made for gunners during World War Two… [they have] an index finger and then the rest is the middle and the thumb so that they could use their weapons in the airplanes”. As she understood it, her father acquired them, “I think in China he traded for them”. He must have done so, “at the end of the war so 1945 I would imagine they probably did all of their swapping as they were going home”. When asked about their meaning, she elaborated: “It makes me think of my dad. He used them for deer hunting when he came home. And he used to let us play with them, and it must have been an okay memory for him. Because he didn’t really talk about the war until the 50th anniversary of the war ending. He just kept it all in” (PID_00060).

For KP, donating these gloves to the museum was a meaningful way of preserving her father’s history. As the conversation continued, she spoke about the gloves being significant because “he didn’t keep very much. He brought my mother a necklace made of ivory from India. And I’ve never had it out because of the talk about, I read about being prohibited. I don’t know what you do with those kinds of things” (PID_00060). One intriguing aspect of what KP shared is the willingness to talk about the gloves associated with military service and reluctance to share the gift given to her mother, despite preserving both, because of perceived contemporary judgments about the latter’s material. It serves as a reminder that such selective record keeping (and sharing) makes the overtly wartime object (the aviator’s gloves), not the other object carried from the war zone (the ivory necklace), the focal point of historical memory. The gloves are in a public museum; the necklace and its potential story of connecting spaces of overseas deployment and home remains hidden. This erases the mother/wife from the story, and yet the preservation of these gloves is both personal (KP kept them and kept her memories of their transformation into peacetime use) and public (first in the museum, and then in allowing the digitization of the larger story). There are layers to the entanglement of public and private legacies of the war on display.

3.4. Photographs from the Aftermath of the Second World War [PID_00033]

It is sometimes easy to overlook that American conscription and military activity continued in the late 1940s and 1950s, with ratcheted-up intensity during the Korean War early in that latter decade. When KG came to speak to us, she brought along a set of photographs from her father’s experiences during that time, items whose acquisition she explained as follows: “After he passed away I just, I just got the suitcase with all the photos from his family” (PID_00033). Unlike the photos in KH’s scrapbook, she did not arrange these photos, but they shed light on a war experience that was shared with the family in small ways, unconnected to the material traces of the photographs in a suitcase:

My grandfather served in World War Two and didn’t talk about it. Well, like I said, with my dad… he only had good memories…He got to do something that he enjoyed. He got into deep sea fishing, you know…as a boy from the Midwest…So it was a time of great opportunity for him.

KH echoed an often-shared observation, silence (not talking about it) from a veteran relative, but while her father, in contrast was a “storyteller;” she elaborated that she does not know who is in the photographs because her father’s stories remained separate from the artifacts.

As a result, she explained her memory keeping as twofold, one based on stories and the other on his things, and her combining them:

it was more just kind of finding these [photographs] later and piecing them together with the things [stories] that he had shared…My mom didn’t let any of this stuff really in the house. It was like her domain, if that makes any sense. So a lot of what he shared was just through stories, and then after they passed away, it’s like I found his stuff. So I found his grass skirts that he picked up when he was in the islands. He, he had these beautiful bowls that I don’t know what kind of wood it was…and Sake sets. I mean, he had all this really beautiful stuff that he brought home from the Navy (PID_00033).

This recounting led her to recall another artifact: “Oh, and on our wall. We have, oh, it’s longer than this table. It’s a fishing pole that he would use when he was on the beach so that you could cast a way long line out into the water that he used when he was on the island. So it’s actually on our wall” (PID_00033). Living with these vivid yet largely peaceful items nonetheless allowed her to feel connected to her father’s military service in the South Pacific.

KG spoke of her father having these things as a way of engaging with him and his military service: “His, his past seemed very alive because he would tell a lot of stories” (PID_00033). As was the case with KH, the lack of direct knowledge of who is in the photos (other than her father) seems to matter relatively little. The point is the preservation of them and the other physical objects as a means of seemingly uncomplicated connection—she loved her father, she enjoyed her father’s stories of service, and the legacy of both resides on the walls of her home. She reminded the interviewer several times that as strange as it might sound, her father enjoyed his time in the Navy. Her enthusiasm for the range of items that grace her home shows the value of these artifacts as personal history with the added aura of exoticism from military service overseas, linking her to both.

3.5. Dress from Vietnamese Silk [PID_00041]

It was hard not to want to keep touching the dress belonging to her mother that R brought to an event at a regional campus in southern Utah. Made from silk carried from Vietnam by her military father as a gift for her mother, she was very clear from the outset that “my story is more the aspect of women and war” (PID_00041). The dress was probably made in 1968, “based on when he served”. Elaborating on its meaning, “I just love that it preserves her body and the shape that she was at the time…. I’m not even really sure how I ended up with it. But I’m kind of the history keeper for my family”. She further explained that she never saw her mother wear the dress, adding that her mother “didn’t really talk about it except to say where it came from and that she had it made” (PID_00041). R tried it on once as a teenager, but otherwise, it sat in a drawer first in her mother’s home and then in her own.

When asked about her feelings about this item as a witness to both the Vietnam War and her parent’s experiences with that conflict, she articulated a range of emotions:

Very mixed, I’m-I’m happy that I have it. But it was a very tumultuous time both with the war and you know, being born at the end of the war and hearing about the war, but then also the story that it represents in the family of what my family was experiencing at the time…I think that’s part of the reason that I chose to never turn it into something else…the fact that it was kind of a snapshot into that period of time before I was born. But it-it has a strong emotional attachment. I don’t think I’ll ever part with it (PID_00041).

Part of that strong emotional attachment and commitment never to alter its original state comes from the story that R expanded upon in her interview.

She wanted to reflect on its complicated legacies: “there were so many negative emotions attached to Vietnam and in our family, it was more the aftermath not so much my father’s experience because he never talked about that. So, it [the dress] was always just mixed in the beauty of it but all of the sadness” (PID_00041). The dress itself stood in for many things for R, and she wanted to share how it connected to the story of women and war. To do so, she began to retrace the circumstances under which the item came into the family:

And in 1967… obviously he’d been home at some point because she [my mom] was pregnant. So, she was pregnant. And um he was in Vietnam…. And she was caring for the four children…. And um, you know, at the time, the antiwar sentiment was very strong. And so, people treated her poorly because her husband was in Vietnam…And she carried the baby full term and then went into labor and uh my brother was stillborn (PID_00041).

R paused and then began to connect this vivid and tragic maternal story to the dress made of silk brought home at this moment: “And…they sent my father home for a week…He got to come home for the funeral and turned around and had to go straight back”. She continued, “I always felt very loved and special because when he got home, she was going through her own post-traumatic stress, having lost a child, and so I was the child that came after” (PID_00041). And as the child that came after, she felt a special bond with her mother, especially after her parents divorced.

Then, the essence of R’s object story shifted:

But then, about four years ago, I took a DNA test…and in the process of that discovered that I have a half-brother, who is Vietnamese…it was quite a surprise. And by then both…parents were already dead. So, there was no way to go back and say did you know? …[B]ut the fascinating part of how it links back to the story is my half-brother…was either born three months after my brother who died or he was born after my father left Vietnam, but the same year that I was born (PID_00041).

R seized the opportunity to meet with him and his mother:

…it was just such a heartfelt experience to meet her and hear her story…Not all of my siblings were completely on board with [the meeting]…who is this person? What do you mean we have a brother? But my oldest sister and I went and um so the two women that it affected…my half-brother’s mother, and then my mother, who at the same time, simultaneously were pregnant and having children and my father, we don’t know if he knew or if he didn’t know…We don’t know their side of the story (PID_00041).

The dress and the story are entangled witnesses to, as R insisted as she concluded her story, “how strong women have to be…especially during war” (PID_00041).

This object and its story raise powerful questions about the role of the daughter in preserving the wartime object and its history. This account shows how a single object can complicate the legacies of war within a family. This daughter’s memory keeping for her mother and her family becomes history keeping of a larger, often silenced aspect of war, one immersed in the interconnections across fronts, across families, and across generations. This intimate domestic object originated in fabric carried by a father from a war zone. And through R’s story, which signified to her the strength of women during war, it also becomes redolent of the profound absence of the voices of women, such as the two who bore her father’s children, from histories of war

4. Conclusions: Connecting Daughters, Family Memory, and the Objects of War

As Jane Dusselier explains in Artifacts of Loss, her exploration of the art created by Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War, it is crucial to “expand artifactual evidence beyond the realm of museums, which often construct unified, national narratives based on consensus” (Dusselier 2008, p. 5). Objects in the emerging BWH archive can be personal, familial, and communal but can also shatter unified narratives about wartime. In the aftermath of conflicts on the scale of America’s modern wars, commemoration took on similar dimensions with physical memorials and monuments, with federal holidays for veterans and the war dead, and with parades and ceremonies.

What lurks in a community’s homes that preserves this history? The BWH project has consistently revealed that objects in the home can serve as a kind of domestic memorial, preserving family and individual memories. In some cases, this is a deliberate construction—the framing of the medals, the placing of wartime photographs in a scrapbook. What does it mean that this is done by daughters? I would argue that it helps “domesticate” these wars; it tidies up the objects brought home from war and fits into the ongoing emotional labor of daughters that a descendant-centered history has started to uncover (Roper 2023). In the examples discussed above, the daughters do not themselves have a military career. The objects thus give the daughters a new way both to engage with wartime and to display their engagement.

Yet, the BWH project shares the limitations that almost all the daughters discussed here acknowledge: what they do not know because their veteran fathers never spoke to them fully (or at all) about what they experienced. Similarly, because the objects that the project is collecting are co-curated with our communities, this limits what can be learned based on what individuals are willing to share. The family members for whom the creation of some of these homemade, domestic memorials is the primary audience may be initially suspicious of academics, researchers, and students, because they are entrusting us with their intimate object stories of war. There are hidden histories that some, like R, are willing to share, but more that others presumably are not or do not know.

The journey of discovery undertaken by G was possible because she collaborated with the living when transforming wartime photographs into a modern-day memorial. It is worth noting how exceptional this is; almost all the other daughters who preserved and shared items did so when it was too late to ask something as simple about their father’s photographs as “who is this?” The maintenance of the objects of their veteran fathers and subsequent sharing of them with the BWH project suggests the daughters’ desire to honor them, even while their ability to understand fully what their fathers did in the war is confined because of paternal secrecy and silence. Silences about war and its meanings live on in families alongside the enduring artifacts of war.

This impetus to understand what lies behind these silences undergirds the memoirs of the few daughters of men who served in the U.S. military who have publicly gone in search of their father’s wars. Two of the most notable of these attempts—Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart and Danielle Trussoni’s Falling Through the Earth—have done so in order to excavate their fathers’ trauma and its legacies for the families to which they returned. That this operates differently for daughters of the Second World War’s veterans than for those of the Vietnam War seems consistent with the findings of the BWH project. The graphic memoir by Tyler, Soldier’s Heart, begins by introducing us to the “scrapbook album of army pictures…with no dates or information” from her Second World War veteran father (Tyler 2015, p. 18). This piques a curiosity that she does not address until a phone call years later, where he begins to share the details of his war. The book’s origins stem from her effort to record her father in 2002, a process that slowly and painfully opens up the story that his daughter intersperses with her own, noting from the start the “tremendous responsibility” to do justice to its layers that this imposes on her (Tyler 2015, p. 35). Trussoni undertook a voyage back to Vietnam in an effort to find the sources of her father’s violence, believing that his role as a “tunnel rat” in that conflict led him to carry the war home in ways that overtly harmed his family (Trussoni 2006). In this moving account, Trussoni reveals the intergenerational damage of the war. In both memoirs, the daughters explore what it means for them as inheritors of this legacy rather than simply memorializing their service. It makes sense that daughters choosing to share objects and homemade memorials in our public project would reveal relatively little of such trauma.

Yet the memoirs and the object stories collected by BWH point to an understudied way in which war shapes women. By preserving their fathers’ wartime objects as domestic memorials—arguably including all the objects discussed here—daughters expand their caretaking roles to the guardianship of memory. Their fathers and their objects were eyewitnesses to war; the daughters are witnesses to the legacy of that service, making it possible to tell that war story as a family story, one rife with emotions.

While anthropologists and material-centered historians have spoken profoundly about the political and social lives of objects, this project centers the object’s emotional life (Appadurai 1986; Winner 1989). By asking directly if participants have an emotional attachment to what they bring in and then exploring this a bit more fully, the BWH project attempts to allow space for the feelings of those preserving the objects of war. In this way, it adds to the emotional history of war (Langhamer et al. 2020). Objects collected thus far have diverse emotional lives—belonging to the veteran who held the object and to female descendants with differing feelings. Keeping these wartime objects in the home also domesticates them; they retain meaning, but not the painful range of emotions that many veterans themselves express or cannot bring themselves to do. Through the act of keeping, and in some cases curating, the things their fathers carried, daughters choose to insert themselves into telling the war story and to assert their place in this complicated history.