I fear this will be a long and tedious OP (or 2) for those not into the writing of narrative histories or genealogy, but for those who are I’d love any suggestions in how to structure a writing project I’m doing. A lengthy description follows:
LENGTHY DESCRIPTION THAT FOLLOWS
I’m writing a narrative history of my family based on my genealogical and historical research. It’s not for commercial publication obviously but just to be privately published for various relatives. I’ve compiled a mountain of research and even done reams of the actual writing but I’m having fits trying to figure out how to organize it.
What this isn’t: This is NOT just a “begatting” account (and in fact the pedigrees and the “descendants of” charts I could do by pressing a few buttons on Family Tree Maker). I do intend to have a long appendices that has those and documentary sources and the like, but the work itself is a narrative history, for regardless of who your family is pages and pages of names and dates and locations just isn’t interesting in the slightest (at least it isn’t to me), plus like most genealogists, I have many ancestors for whom I have records that are essentially like this:
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Add to the above perhaps a couple of land records or maybe a mention where she’s left a feather bed in a grandfather’s will and that’s all there is of her. There are no known anecdotes, she’s just a name and dates and vital info. While as a [hypothetical] direct ancestress she’s a vital link in the chain, I’ve no idea if she was intelligent (or stupid), beloved (or hated), funny (or depressing), whether she was a good cook or never cooked a meal in her lifem etc… Even if she was the most fascinating person those who met her ever encountered, which she probably wasn’t, it doesn’t seem to have been recorded. THUS, her biography in a narrative history would read something like
It’s just not interesting to most people, and it’s impossible to improve it without fictionalizing it, and to quote Blanche from Golden Girls, it’s "a ‘why the hell tell it in the first place kinda story’.
So what I’ve done instead is converted the narrative account to more of a “lives AND TIMES of our ancestors” account with emphasis usually being on TIMES (about which more are known). While without pictures or diary records or firsthand accounts it’s impossible to know much about poor Bulimia, it is possible to research what was happening in New Tidybowl around 1750 and to research the lives of others who moved from the Mid-Atlantic to North Carolina and postulate reasons why the Atwaters may have moved, and even see if perhaps there was a battle or disease that Timothy Atwater may have caused his death, and of course you can always add to if, for example, you discover he served in the Revolution on one side or another. This approach becomes something more akin to:
The above is fiction, of course, but just used as an example; in the actual narrative the events would be real.
To me, at least, it makes it far more interesting than just names of dead people and their families by giving an idea of the time/place they lived and what their life would have been like. It has also proven to be a fantastic way to learn about the particulars of American history. Actual events I’ve learned about and can connect ancestors to (sometimes directly thanks to a document and sometimes just “they were there and couldn’t possibly NOT have known about this event”) include the Black Oath (which I have documents proving a Presbyterian minister ancestor was jailed for refusing to swear), the Pendle Witches (fascinating story that supplies our modern day Halloween notion of witches [including riding brooms] and that I’d never heard of until researching an ancestor who lived very nearby and would have been about 15 at the time), the never ending Disasters of Jamestown (where the same ancestor emigrated in 1618), the Battle of Alamance (1771, where an elderly ancestor fought and considered by some historians the real first battle of the Revolution), the Georgia Land Lotteries/Georgia Gold Rush, the fly by night land speculators who flourished across the continent for more than a century (and often played hell with the economy and the people), the Indians of course, the coming of cotton to the south (and why it took so long) etc… The stories of these incidents sometimes take an entire “chapter” (such as the story who the Scots Irish were and why so many came to America), while lesser findings are used as seasoning (such as the [fictitious] dead whale reference/illustration in the account above [though again- in the narrative all comments really are true]).
By the time it’s up to the Civil War of course the records are more plentiful and the Confederate service records greatly help in reconstructing lives. While none of my own ancestors left written accounts that have survived to my knowledge, most served with soldiers from the same county and in the same regiment who did and there’s rarely a shortage of other primary sources of battles and movements and photos of the areas, so this helps tremendously in rebuilding their wartime experiences. From the Civil War generation on, I often knew the people (or at least people who knew them) and so a more reliable oral history helps flesh them.
There is of course a great disparity of knowledge among various branches. I have one family line, for instance (the Pendle/Jamestown line from above) that is documented and easily traced to Tudor England (for non nobles they left an incredibly rich paper trail and were litigious- all genealogists know that there’s nothing like a sue-happy ancestor to make you say “Thanks GGGGGG Grandpa!”, at least from about 1550 to about 1700. (From 1700 to the 1820s ironically there’s far less known of the same branch: just their pedigree [and that incomplete- a couple of wives are not recorded] and an occasional record (that lets you say “they were in Fredericksburg VA in 1734” “Lancaster Co. SC by 1750” etc.) before picking back up again in 1820s Georgia). Then there are some lines I’ve hit solid brick walls on in the early 19th century- I know the name of the ancestor but can’t place their parents or lineages (and these lines often married members of the easily and heavily documented lines).
So anyway, the point is that I’m not going for just “begattings”, which are lifeless and boring in and of themselves [why care that your great-great-great-grandfather was born in Kowabunga County, NC in 1750 if you don’t know where that is or what it was like?) but, to the extent possible, an actual family “history”: what they lived through, what is known about the individuals themselves, their movement patterns- where they came from and why and what historical events (famous and not-so-famous) had major effects on their lives, etc… There is some juicy meat here and there (e.g. lots of wills- the will of one gggg-grandfather is chilling in how casual he is about splitting up slave families and how institutionally misogynist he is [he’s a wealthy man yet leaves his wife a beaten up pine table and the furniture she had when he married her]**). When not the history of a time/place more often supplies the bones.
It’s my hope that it will ultimately give a nice insight not just into the family but into history itself (and how completely chaotic and yet orderly it can be- lots of butterfly effects in genealogy). I hope to also give a lot of info that will make readers say “hmmm… I didn’t know as much about the history of this region as I thought I did” as I got from the research (e.g. I knew that Indians lost their land to whites by military defeat and treaties of course but had no idea of the mechanics of just how it was done [it wasn’t just “a piece of paper and get thee out” but an odd gradual- ahem- legal process], or that slaves were often not paid for at the time of auction, or that more “po-white” farmers in the county where I grew up raised sheep and grew rice [an animal and a crop that’s almost unheard of there now] than grew cotton [not as ubiquitous as you might think], or that the wealthiest farmer in the county in 1900 was a former slave who owned and controlled so much land his leading trade partner was the German military [who paid for a railroad spur to his warehouses], etc.).
While Charles II and Eli Whitney and Red Eagle and John Benson (the former slave turned super successful farmer) were not actually members of my family, they absolutely affected forever the history of my family or else would have been major points of conversation and daily life, and they make for a reading that’s not only more interesting than “Willie and Matilda had three sons: Rufus, Richard, and Henry, and Henry had 20 illegitimate kids before marrying Edith and having a daughter Maude who married a much older German named Henry and when he died married a teenaged French boy”, but really gives the reader more of an idea (at least I hope it does) than just their names and dates.
Now comes the problem of how to organize it… That’s the next Post (which I promise will conclude my OPs).
*Names with asterixes are actually real names of people and places I’ve come across. Since my g-g-g-grandmother’s sibling Asexual died in childhood so, ironically, I’ve no idea of their gender, and the namesake descendants of first ancestor named Epaphroditus spread the name through several states for centuries. Shitty Britches Creek was not only a real place in Lunenburg County VA but my ancestors really did live there and near its tributary, Tickle Cunt Branch (whose name meant exactly the same then as it does now) and Old Woman Pissing Falls. (The names have been changed: Tickle Cunt is now “Modesty Branch”.)
**Fascinating thing [if only to me] about the wills in this lineage: the female slave named Chaney bequeathed in this will is first mentioned as a child in the will of this man’s grandfather around 1800, and is mentioned many more times over the next several decades. She and her sons are given the option of freedom by their elderly mistress in 1860 [“option” because to have accepted would require their leaving the state], and more than a decade later she [by then called “Old Chaney”] and her son each inherit about 1/9th of the considerable estate of the same mistress’s bachelor grandson. Due to her continual mentioning in legal documents I suspect that Chaney’s children, if not Chaney herself, are blood relatives to this family, though obviously I have no proof.