It’s been said that history is to a people what memory is to an individual.Just as when a person suffers amnesia, a community that doesn’t know where it has been, will have no clue where it is, let alone where it is going. It will become disoriented, perplexed and helpless.Losing its past will hopelessly confuse the present, and likely rob it of a secure future.Folklore, tradition, customs are all key aspects of our collective history, our shared memory if you will. They all inform the Bermudian identity, shape the Bermudian character.Our island, a solitary and isolated one, far out to sea, invariably evolved a uniquely Bermudian culture.While Bermuda certainly reflects aspects of other societies, it has never been a mid-Atlantic microcosm of any other, larger community.Successive influxes of new arrivals from the Caribbean, Europe, North America and elsewhere over the past 400 years have ensured the Bermudian character and culture have remained works in continuous progress; changes in the population always result in some changes to the national identity.But what Americans call the Melting Pot effect — and what some Bermudians jocularly refer to as the Chowder Kettle syndrome — has always come into play whenever a fresh element has been introduced into our community.As a result, the island has never been overwhelmed by newcomers or new influences; instead it has absorbed and assimilated them, transforming all manner of seemingly incongruous and incompatible ingredients into something distinctly Bermudian.The Chowder Kettle metaphor has its limitations, of course. Bermuda has yet to forge a single people from component parts which represent a remarkable diversity of races, ethnicities and cultures. Our history is marked by long periods of racial and social segregation and we are still attempting to ameliorate the consequences of this legacy. So perhaps only the most cock-eyed optimists among us believe one Bermudian people will finally emerge from the many in any of our lifetimes.But despite the divisions and hardships of the past, the compact size and intimate nature of Bermuda means there have always been more commonalities than differences between us.By and large, we embrace the same customs, traditions and cultural and social values, we share the same national experience and we are beneficiaries of the same distinctive Bermudian inheritance which all of our forebears contributed to.As Bermudian society has grown increasingly inclusionary in recent decades, the cultural bonds which unite us have grown more apparent — as well as increasingly strong.Over the course of a 30-year broadcasting career, Oda Mallory — who took her professional name “Blondell” from a medieval troubadour renowned for celebrating stories about historical characters and events in song — was among the first Bermudians to publicly highlight this common history, and these overlapping experiences.Her show “Living Memories”, which ran at various times on both VSB, and the Bermuda Broadcasting Company, was a weekly master class on how to conduct oral history interviews.The recordings of those shows represent a treasure trove of cultural heritage, preserving important aspects of our history, and development which would have been otherwise lost to us.Mrs. Mallory’s guests, who ranged from household names to the most unassuming and retiring of our senior citizens, all responded to her reasoned, temperate questioning with anecdotes, and recollections, which underscored that the life of a community, like that of an individual, is made up of a small number of great events and a great number of small ones. And each story represented an individual thread in the overall tapestry of modern Bermuda history, every one of them contributing to its overall pattern and design.As active online as she once was on the radio, Mrs. Mallory is adapting her unparalleled collection of information about Bermudian individuals, families and historical events, both great and small, for use in the digital age. Given her seemingly inexhaustible reserves of energy, she will likely continue to help Bermudians avoid succumbing to cultural amnesia for many years to come.Later this summer she will be relocating to North Carolina to be close to her daughter. Given the Internet’s ability to erase distance, Mrs. Mallory’s decades-long mission to acquaint Bermudians with their island story will not be materially affected. And her heart, of course, will remain in Bermuda.