Reflections - Writing

 You know, I have never been a good writer.  I can do a business email or PowerPoint presentation with my eyes closed, but writing stories has never been my forte.  My mom always said that because I read so much (and I read A LOT), I should be a writer – but I knew in my heart that I didn’t have the imagination to write fiction, or the skills to write compelling non-fiction.

When I first started getting into genealogy post-retirement, I never thought I’d need to improve those writing skills – and boy was I wrong!  Just doing the research, without pulling it together into narratives that document your ancestors’ lives as best you can, is not helpful to anyone.  I have so many documents in my home office, but if I don’t try to use those documents in a story, then what is all that research for?  The records will just go in the dumpster someday when my kids have to clean out my house!

So, I’ve been practicing….and practicing….and practicing.  Writing these short blog posts has been part of that practice, but I also work on writing something about an ancestor that helps me to see the flow of their lives, and maybe understand a little bit about what it was like growing up in the times that they did.  Because I’m learning to document like a true genealogist, everything I write has to have some “source” that I can cite, but I can also use my imagination about what might have been a driver for an action someone took.

For example, one of my ancestors moved sometime between two censuses (taken 10 years apart); in the earlier census, his wife was listed; in the later one, she wasn’t, and he is marked “widowed.”  I don’t have a death record for her (yet – I’m still looking!).  I’m confident that his wife died, but I imagine that in order to get help raising his five children, he moved to a location that probably was closer to other family members.  I don’t know that for sure, and never will, but it is a likely motivator for the move.

So, I will keep practicing…and practicing…and practicing.  Maybe someday I will be able to pull all of these ancestor narratives together into a book to be passed down to future generations!