The End of a Family Project

The Woods family in 1935

There's that time when you finish a project that has consumed your life, your awake time in the early morning, and each reasonable mental opportunity throughout the day. My latest is a history of my mother's family, following one a year ago on my wife's family.

Two different experiences. Diane's family of great people have had only passing interest over time for their family history, but thankfully preserved enough to knit together a progress of family lines. I had the benefit of her uncle who had written out a history fifty or more years ago, typed in carbon copies, with names and dates and a few anecdotes. Fortunately, her parents had bundled it well enough to survive and be passed along. But for the most part, I had to follow up with census data, cemetery research and work by others in related lines, and place histories to construct the families in their times. The experience was generally positive, and completed in about a year of pretty focused work.

But I knew that was going to be a warm-up for tackling my own heritage. While Diane's family was pleased with the effort, they were not themselves caught up in family history beyond the stories and few artifacts that remained from their parents. My grandmother, however, kept a great deal of memorabilia and treasured her connections to a substantial population of ancestors and cousins. My grandfather frequently expressed pride in the principles and fortitude of his family line, though it was less fecund than my grandmother's. My mother inherited much of the family paper.

In such a family, one grows up with myths built from overheard conversation and fragments of information learned 3rd and 4th-hand. Sometimes the fragments lead to strange and flawed constructions of history. The the names are there and SOMETHING happened, or not, and it passes into lore. Part of the fun of family history is finding the truth behind the lore.

In my experience, the lives and times are rarely as grand or impoverished or sinister as the story. It every case it is much more complicated, and part of the fun is discovering how they negotiated the complications and their times. They were in given circumstances (as we say in the theater), and they negotiated them, exploited them, improved upon them, abandoned them, and made other choices.

The fun part for me was bringing my academic skills to the project. Familiarity with research methods and standards, good explository writing, sophistication in thinking, and support for assertions and conjecture are fundamental to good academic writing of any kind.

I think the project came out well. I posted the PDF to Google Drive and await the verdicts of a respected sibling and cousin before sending the 200 pages to a printer.

Now I'm thinking about what might be next. Perhaps I can write something that non-family members might read. I can get into this retirement thing.

Sunday, July 5, 2015