Five Ways to Research Your Family History

The writing of my historical novel Brookhaven took about 150 years. 

I must have seen something like this before, but I can’t recall a specific example. Many novels include an acknowledgement page, cutting the people who helped or inspired the author. My historical novel Brookhaven has an author’s note explaining some of the novel’s background. But it also has something you don’t usually see in a novel – a nine-page bibliography.

 

I included more as a reminder to myself of where the novel come from. 

 

A grandmother who referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” A father who told slightly mangled family stories, including one that sounded like an epic journey. A research paper in high school on what the “plantation system” really looked like. A family Bible with a mystery embedded in the birth and death records. A mountain of reading old and new American history books. An aunt who spent decades researching family history, long before the invention of the internet. Discovering I liked, as in really liked, the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longellow, once the top-selling poet and author in the United States who was dropped into the dustbin of literary criticism. 

Photograph: A page of family records in the Bible, pre-preservation.

Some Thursday Readings

 

This Just In – poem by J.S. Gilbert at Frivolous Quill.

 

Murmurs in the Cathedral – Jeffrey Streeter at English Republic of Letters.

 

Third Annual Poetry Prize for Submissions – First Things Magazine.

 

“A Look at the Heavens,” poem by John Clare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Mother in Satin – Donna Hilbrt at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Research Can Teach You a Hard (if Useful) Lesson

I learned a very hard lesson while writing a historical novel. I learned how hard it can be, and it’s hard for both the research you do and for the research you have to ignore. 

I’m writing a novel that takes place in two historical periods – the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, and 50 years later, during the run-up to World War I. The story was loosely based on a story handed down in the family about what had happened to my great-grandfather. The emphasis is on the word “loosely,” because the more I researched, the more I discovered that what was passed down as a family story had very little basis in fact.

 

Because I discovered this about 40,000 words into the manuscript, it stopped me cold. For weeks. I kept hoping I was wrong, but I learned my extended family had two oral traditions about my great-grandfather. And the version passed down to me was the wrong one, or perhaps I should say “more embellished.” It made a great story, but it was flat-out wrong.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph: Some of the 1,700 Union cavalry troops who rode through Mississippi in 1863 during Grierson's Raid.

Some Thursday Readings

 

1863: “Even the birds are seldom heard with their cheerful voices”: A Confederate Reflects Post-Chancellorsville – Ryan Quint at Emerging Civil War. 

 

Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts – Alex Sosler at Front Porch Republic.

 

1863: What a Difference a Year Makes – Patrick Kelly-Fischer at Emerging Civil War. 

Rosebery Topping, a Dark Teesside short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free to download today on Amazon.

Murders for August – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

The more a character puts in a bucket, the more there is to spill – Nathan Bransford.

 

At Walthan Abbey – Spitalfields Life.

 

What book blurbs really mean – The Secret Author at The Critic Magazine.

Tracing the Life of an Ancestor Isn’t Easy—or Always Accurate

Oral history may not be particularly trustworthy. 

My father was four years old when his paternal grandfather died, so any direct memories he would have had were likely dim. He told me the story, passed down by his father, that his grandfather Samuel Young had fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, had found himself stranded somewhere in the east when the war ended in 1865, and made his way home primarily by walking. My father said “the Youngs were a family of shopkeepers,” and had lived and worked around Brookhaven in northern Pike Country, and they had owned no slaves. (Pike was a large county; during Reconstruction it was split into two counties, Pike and Lincoln.)

 

When his grandfather reached home near Brookhaven, Mississippi, my father said, he discovered the family was gone. Neighbors said the entire family had fled to East Texas to escape the devastation of war and Union control. He continued his trek across Louisiana and eventually found his family. At some point, the family returned to Mississippi. My father also told me, again passing down the family story from his father, that Samuel had been too young to enlist, and so became a messenger boy. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: My paternal great-grandparents, Samuel and Octavia Young.

Restoring the Family Bible

More than 40 years ago, my father gave me the Young Family Bible. It had been given to him by his father, who’d received it from his father. The value of the book, as experts like to say, was “intrinsic,” In other words, it was zero, except for what a family member would believe. 

The book as received from my father was wrapped in brown grocery-bag paper and tied with twine. It has sat on a closet shelf in my parents’ house for a long time, probably since they moved there in 1955. I have very vague memories of it from childhood. 

 

When my father gave it to me, I did the time-honored thing: I put it on a closet shelf. Eventually, I removed the wrapping and twine and wrapped it in acid-free paper and a box. Its value to me and the rest of the family was what it contained – four pages, inserted between the Old and New Testaments, of family births, marriages, and deaths. The earliest date was that of my great-great grandfather’s birth in 1802; the last date was in 1890. All of the events were written in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s Samuel Franklin Young. He also wrote his signature on an inside cover. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.