Week 10: Wrapping up
When I began my summer 2026 internship with Vermont Folklife, I had a very loose grasp on folklore as a whole. I knew that as a history major, I had a definite interest in accessing archival materials, and I was particularly drawn to the stories of my home state of Vermont. I also knew that, to me, history is best when it tells a story rather than just being a series of facts and figures. Outside of this, I had a vague notion of folklore revolving around traditions, how things came to be, and legends, especially those of a supernatural or cryptozoological nature.
Diving into my internship quickly expanded that view. Folklore became something much more vast than I had anticipated. One of my first tasks was to begin working with the Farm Series, an archival collection of oral histories recorded on audio tape in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The interviewees were all Vermont farmers, some who had farmed in the early 20th century before leaving agriculture, and some who were still running their farms as businesses at the time of recording. My job was to keyword and create metadata that could someday make the collection more accessible and searchable. As I listened through the tapes, I identified topics like dairy farming, haying, logging, and other everyday aspects of rural life.
These interviews were immediately interesting to me from a historical perspective, but at first, I didn’t fully understand what made them “folklore.” Sometimes in the tapes there would be long conversations about how a particular farming family did things like haying or logging, details like who drove the tractor and who loaded bales into the wagon. These were the parts of the interviews I struggled to understand as folkloric in nature. Thankfully, over the course of my internship, through many questions, explanations, and paragraphs read and re‑read, I’ve begun to scratch the surface of the large entity that is folklore and how it ties into these seemingly mundane details as well as my general studies.
Three ideas, in particular, have shaped what I’ve learned:
Tradition in everyday tasks is vitally important for understanding change over time. Even the most mundane routines carry meaning. Something doesn't need to seem particularly important to give us valuable insight into the people we seek to understand.
Nostalgia can be a trap. It’s easy to romanticize “the good old days,” but folklore gives us tools to examine that impulse critically. Understanding how people adapt to survive, first and foremost, is essential.
Folk legends, even the supernatural or unbelievable ones, have logical points of origin. They don’t reflect a less educated or primitive group of people; they reflect people and communities making sense of the unexplained.
This internship has reshaped how I think about stories, traditions, and the everyday lives of those in the past. It has shown me that folklore is inherently about people, memory, work, identity, and the ways communities understand themselves across generations. It has pushed me to look beyond the surface of everyday routines and recognize the meaning embedded in them. There are quiet ways in which people pass down knowledge, preserve values, and make sense of change. More than anything, it has helped me see how these narratives, whether spoken, remembered, or lived, form connections that hold communities together and reveal how the “folk” in folklore define who they are and where they come from. Working with VT Folklife has changed the way I’d like to approach my study of history. I have always preferred history to be about people and perspectives and bigger meanings; I think approaching history with a folkloric lens can help me accomplish a more well-rounded understanding of what and who I study.
