Genealogy as inspiration for writing

CatrionaGrace

CatrionaGrace

Mind the thorns
Active Member
Spin-off from the truth is the stranger than fiction thread as originally inspired by JT Woody.

Family history can be a great jumping off place for story ideas. Twenty years ago, I came across an 1852 divorce notice wherein a a woman unrelated to me (alas) divorced my great, great, great grandfather. She then moved to Texas with their children as well as his children from a previous marrage. That is the last mention of him I've ever found. I've always wondered, what happened? Conjectures about that question resulted in Book II, entitled Days of Sun and Shadow, which goes on presale the first week of November.

Has anything in your family history inspired your writing?
 
I found a distant cousin named "Elesmere Weatherless [Last name]" and i LOVED the name! It inspired a freewrite pirate story.
I never did look up his history because i wanted to keep my pirate captain picture in my head :LOL:
 
CatrionaGrace said:
Spin-off from the truth is the stranger than fiction thread as originally inspired by JT Woody.

Family history can be a great jumping off place for story ideas. Twenty years ago, I came across an 1852 divorce notice wherein a a woman unrelated to me (alas) divorced my great, great, great grandfather. She then moved to Texas with their children as well as his children from a previous marrage. That is the last mention of him I've ever found. I've always wondered, what happened? Conjectures about that question resulted in Book II, entitled Days of Sun and Shadow, which goes on presale the first week of November.

Has anything in your family history inspired your writing?
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The children from his previous marriage--- was one of them your progenitor?
 
Yes. When ggg grandfather left his first family in another state, he absconded with my ggg grandmother, a fair-skinned enslaved woman who passed in their new home. His wife had him legally declared dead and went on with her life. Pretty common practice in the days before divorce was an easy thing to obtain. The whole thing was a deep dark secret in my southern family, of course, and apparently no one was going to tell my generation about it, though the older folks knew. I figured it out doing research, asked my dad to confirm my conclusions. He laughed out loud and told me I'd make a good LE investigator. He didn't give compliments often.
 
CatrionaGrace said:
Yes. When ggg grandfather left his first family in another state, he absconded with my ggg grandmother, a fair-skinned enslaved woman who passed in their new home. His wife had him legally declared dead and went on with her life. Pretty common practice in the days before divorce was an easy thing to obtain. The whole thing was a deep dark secret in my southern family, of course, and apparently no one was going to tell my generation about it, though the older folks knew. I figured it out doing research, asked my dad to confirm my conclusions. He laughed out loud and told me I'd make a good LE investigator. He didn't give compliments often.
Click to expand...
And you used that bit of family history in The Song of the Bluebottle Tree. 😊

I don't think I've used any of mine in my stories yet, but my characters definitely have family trees. I even keep track of them in my genealogy software.
 
I've often thought that my 2d-great-grandfather's story would make a great saga, going both forward and backward, and I've been blessed with a lot of family history. Going forward, he was born in Indiana in the early 19th century, worked his way westward across Iowa and Kansas, homesteading on the way. He also fought and was wounded in the Civil War, and later continued his way westward, dying in Idaho near the end of the century. Going backward, his Scottish forebears were essentially exiled from Scotland as brigands and bandits, and found their way to North America, where they apparently found religion and established a number of Presbyterian Churches on their journey, working their way eastward from Virginia and Kentucky (Tick Creek KY being a classic place name). His daughter, my paternal great-grandmother, married at 14 and moved from from the family farm and extended family and friends, her husband being an orphan who had made his way west, but who developed TB and left his wife and young for the mountains of Colorado in a futile effort to cure his illness; he made his way back to his wife's extended family just in time to die. And I've got lots of records of both sides of my father's family going back to England and Scotland. With lots of side stories. Looking back, a lot of tragedy, but I suspect that at the time they were all too busy surviving to realize it.
 
Holding a piece of family history in your hands, really gives you a unique perspective on your past relatives.

The story was told to me by my grandfather while I held it in my hand. It was the gun that killed his fathers sister. I rolled it over in my hands while he spoke. She was fifteen, she had just broken off her relationship with her boyfriend who could not handle the rejection. He came to the door with the gun in his hand. When she refused to reconcile, he shot her. She died a few hours later. This was in the late 1800s. My brother has the gun now, I had to repeat the story to him, as he wasn't there when the story was told to me. He passed on the story to his boys, letting each of them touch a piece of family history. I have no idea what happened to the boy. When asked my grandfather did not know either. This is why we write stuff down!
 
My son's birthday gift from me last year was the 1842 French percussion double barreled shotgun that his ggg grandfather carried in The Late Unpleasantness. Son's best bud is a gunsmith who said he could return it to serviceable condition. Son declined, saying its battered condition was part of the family story.
 
I have become caretaker for a lock of my grand-aunt's hair. She died in 1892 at the age of seven. With a note by her mother, "my darling Ethel."
 
It'll be interesting to see how genealogy evolves as posterity becomes increasingly smaller. At least in the US. My generation (X) was the last to have kids at a replacement level. I forget the numbers, but the current rate is like half a kid per woman short.
 
I've always been fascinated by my maternal grandmother's story. She was born in what was then part of the Hungarian Empire, in 1906 (currently Slovenia). She had no family except her mother, who contracted pneumonia when my gramma was 15. She spent a week in bed with her sick mother before she died, around 1921. Soon after that, as a teenager, my gramma came to Canada completely on her own.

She died when I was 7, and I have many happy memories of her.
 
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