How can you write your family’s past history in a way that
resonates with the modern reader’s interests and ways of finding information? Here
are some reasons to try and one woman’s approach to doing it.
Genealogists habitually accumulate names, dates and places,
going back and sideways as far as records will take them. There comes a point
when this all becomes a bit meaningless. You want to understand their lives too,
especially the ones who are your direct ancestors, because they are most likely
to have had an influence on who you are today. Hang on a sec, you say, I never
knew any of my great great grandparents, not even one of them. How could they possibly
have made a difference to my life? They just handed down DNA, that’s all. Well,
the circumstances of their lives influenced those of their children, your great
grandparents, which in turn… You get what I mean now, don’t you?
One of my feistiest great great grandparents, Harriet Nye, from the
south of England, married George Read in 1840, from the north of England. Just
a month after their Sussex marriage Harriet and George were on a ship bound for
South Australia. The colony at Adelaide had barely begun. What were they
thinking? After fathering five children, George shot off to the Victorian
goldfields, leaving pregnant Harriet in Adelaide to raise the children. How she supported them is beyond my
knowledge, though I found that George did send her one gold consignment from
Victoria. Three ounces of gold was worth a lot in 1852. In today’s Australian dollars I estimated it
would be worth over $1,000. Perhaps the gold saved her from having to seek
government aid. Life must have been tough for so many families whose husbands
had left for the diggings. There were so many destitute people left behind that
the Destitute Board at first refused to help those who were married. They later
relented because the needs were so great1.
By 1859 Harriet gave up and returned with the children to England. She
never saw George again. She reminds me
of myself a little. I married a Malay man, moved to Malaysia and later returned
to Australia (though I did see my ex-husband when he came to Perth to visit his
son).
So you move from collecting names and dates, to writing
about your family’s history. Many have
written (or are still writing) heroic tomes about early farmers, soldiers,
political leaders, and so on. Some family stories may even exaggerate the
importance of their ancestors to make the story sound a bit more interesting.
The big book project can go on for years and years. And in the end, who reads
it? Not always your immediate descendants who may be more inclined to donate it
to the second hand book shop. Maybe later generations and other family history
researchers will be glad of it, you hope. But will they seek out large printed
books in the future? Perhaps they will only search on the internet.
All of us struggle to find engaging ways to hand down our
family stories to our children and grandchildren, realising that the ways they seek
and consume information is very different from the ways we and our recent ancestors
have. And we are all aware that our children and grandchildren may only become
interested long after we are gone – because that’s what happened with us. We now
wish we’d listened when our parents and grandparents wanted to tell us our
family’s stories.
I have come up with a strategy that seems to be working for
me and I hope it may inspire you. Instead of a long and all-encompassing family
history I decided just to write short word portraits of individuals. Anything
from a just few paragraphs to four or five pages. They can be printed, kept digitally on a thumb
drive or a website, even blogged.
I’m focussing on my interesting female ancestors - to try to even up the gender balance, since men
are more frequently recorded in genealogical records and family histories. I
made a short list of the women ancestors I knew a bit about and quickly
realised that I could tell a whole family’s story through each woman.
Because each was my direct ancestor, they were all mothers,
hence my title 20 Mothers. These shorter
biographies were chunks of writing that were easier to fit into a busy life. Being
shorter, they are more likely to be read in this Facebook world of short term attention
spans.
Actually, in writing these portraits I’ve taken on an idea
from the Facebook world. Clickbait! If you aren’t familiar with the language of
social media, clickbait is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that
encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information
about what they will see2. You don’t have to sink as low as some
online marketers do, but you should still write a headline that draws the
reader in, followed by a short opening paragraph that immediately engages the
younger members of your family. That’s
unlikely to start off “Jean Smith was born in 1824 in Wiltshire, England.” It
will be something that connects with the experience and interests of your
reader, not your own. And, contrary to Maria from the Sound of Music, you don’t
have to start at the very beginning.
The
copy that newspaper journalists produce is subject to editing by editors above
them. They are encouraged to write each article like a triangle with the point
at the top. The tip represents the headline, the bit below that covers the most
important points of the story, those that are most likely to interest readers,
and the rest of the report falls underneath that. This way, the story can be cut from the bottom
without losing meaning and requiring the whole piece to be rewritten. Unlike
your school report or a scientific article, the conclusion is not left to the
end, because that bit might be chopped out to fit the space available. You have probably been reading the first two
or three paragraphs of some newspaper stories and skipping the rest for many
years, unaware of this principle at work.
Time is precious. We spend it on what only interests us (now
that we do not have to study for exams). So I thought to myself, if one day my
grandson just reads the first paragraph or so, what interesting thing do I want
them to know about this ancestor? What might draw him in to read more? If I
haven’t got anything interesting to say, I move on to another ancestor, or do a
little more research.
My word portraits include any available images of each woman
and their family, and maybe a few of relevant locations, buildings, a ship, occupational
references and a map. Not too many images are needed, just a few. Even if there are gaps in my knowledge about some
of them, I can easily add something more generic that I’ve researched about the
history of the place they lived, the historical period, the way people lived and
travelled then, the jobs they did.
My list of women to write about has now reached 20. There’s
about the same number from the maternal and paternal sides. Luckily I know
about both sides - so I must be even-handed. I’m including both grandmothers,
all four great grandmothers, seven of my great-greats and five of my great x
3s. Plus my own mother, of course, and me!
I keep a master list to keep track of my
writing progress. Recently I checked my list and discovered that I’ve begun 13
of the 20, better than I thought. Several are complete. However the sad thing
is that I am yet to make a start on the more recent ones – my mother, two grandmothers
and me! These are the ones whose lives I actually know from experience, people I’ve
known well.
It’s time I got writing again! I hope
I have excited you with some new ideas about what to do with your family
history. Is it time to start some short (true) stories about your many mothers?
Sources
2 2. How to Write Click-Worthy Blog Headlines Without
Resorting to Clickbait https://unbounce.com/content-marketing/how-to-craft-headlines-that-get-clicked-without-resorting-to-clickbait/
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