I’m always looking for examples of creative ways people write family histories that breathe life into ancestors long gone. I have posted a list of books I particularly admire in the Toolbox section of my website, www.MemoirMentor.com. I recently finished another family history I’d like to recommend to you, one that will surely go on the top of my list. It’s The Journey Takers, written by Leslie Albrecht Huber. I am impressed with the way Huber structured her family history and told her story, and I’ve picked up some ideas I’d like to implement in the Parrett family history I’m writing.

Huber’s narrative traces the lives of several families on her paternal line who made the brave choice to forsake their homeland–in this case, Germany, England, and Sweden–to immigrate to America. Hence, the title, The Journey Takers. This is an interesting focus, one that provides a unified theme to the varied individual life stories. My husband and I have frequently discussed writing a joint family history about all of our immigrant ancestors who came to America. Huber has beat us to the punch and provided a superb template to boot.

The Journey Takers is also about Huber’s own journey, actually several journeys, including research trips to her ancestral homelands to comb through archives, talk to the locals, and walk the land her people called their own. While researching for this book–a ten-year project, she tells us–her own young family is also in a state of flux. Educational pursuits and job responsibilities require the Hubers to move to several different states and spend a year in Spain. She recounts these different experiences in an engaging way, candidly telling us about her difficult pregnancies, parenting adjustments, and frustrations about being sidetracked from her research and writing goals. Her children are her top priority, she tells us, but she’s also ambitious and driven to complete this book. The worst thing she can imagine, she thinks, would be to lead an ordinary life. A woman so driven finds ways to fulfill her goals. I had to smile at some of her solutions: bouncing a restless toddler on her hip at the Family History Library, juggling babysitters, toting her mother and pre-school-age children with her as she navigates the Oregon Trail. I felt like I knew this woman and could relate to her conflicted desires. 

The sections about Huber are told in first person, of course, and are also written in the present tense, which makes them feel both personal and immediate. The ancestral narratives are told in the past tense and third person. Huber has done her reseach, in both primary documents and social history, which she combines in an interesting, seamless way, documented inobtrusively with endnotes that appear at the back of the book.

Here’s the best part, however. The book is full of scenes…and you know how I like scenes. The book is worth reading just to convince yourself that scenes infuse lifeless names and facts with flesh and bones–and a heart and soul. Huber does a fine job with this creative form of writing, inbuing her scenes with engaging detail, dialogue, and emotion.

I love the slick way she transitions into scenes. For example, after describing horrible conditions on board an 1861 immigrant ship bound for America from Sweden, she writes the following:

When I think of Karsti’s voyage across the ocean, one image stands out in my mind.

Karsti hurries down the steps leading below deck in the semi-dark as the massive, angry sea tossed the ship back and forth. Behind her, she hears the hatch door slam shut with a resounding thud. She reminds herself that this is to protect the passengers–to keep the water out, not to make them miserable. A few lanterns give off a dim glow, the only light available. She searches for something to hold on to in order to steady herself against the relentless motion of the ship. Around her, she sees other passengers gripping their beds, their faces white.

The scene carries on in this vein for several more paragraphs, helping us visualize what Huber clearly visualized from her reseach about that voyage. It’s all done to good effect. I include below several more  examples showing how Huber transitions from narriative to scene. 

Sometimes I imagine Karsti at Castle Gardens. She stacks her luggage, which represents all her possessions, around her. She rolls up a piece of clothing and places it under her head….

In my mind, I can see James stopping to knock on a door. A few seconds later, Elizabeth answers. Her long, brown hair is pulled up neatly on top of her head….

I picture their wagon bumping over the parched ground as John guides the horses along the dirt trail lined with sagebrush.

The book contains many other fine examples of this type. We can learn a lot by reading books similar to the ones we want to write. This is no ordinary book, written by no ordinary writer and genealogist. Leslie Albrecht Huber has nothing to worry about. 

Leslie Ann Huber, The Journey Takers, Foundation Books, 2010, 332 pages, 6 x 9, with appendix and bibliography. ISBN 2010924144, $19.95 (paperback). The book can be ordered through Leslie’s website, http://www.thejourneytakers.com/.

Next post: A bit about my glorious Baltic Cruise

More than two centuries ago Abigail Adams penned a letter to her husband, John, the future president, when he was then serving as a representative to the Continental Congress. She admonished him that while he and his colleagues were crafting new laws, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” 

I recalled Abigail’s advice at the end of an aggravating day researching in libraries and archives this week. Men, Men, Men…that’s all I read about. Women were invisible, for the most part. If their existence was acknowledged, they were usually identified as Mrs. So and So. Didn’t they have names of their own?  

I know, I know, we genealogists know all about this. We shake our heads about the sad inequity of it all, but most of us continue to research and write about our male forbears–because it’s easier–and thus perpetuate the situation.  

Sometimes it just gets to me—like when I scour cemeteries for my ancestors and see women identified on gravestones as someone’s wife. Why aren’t men identified as someone’s husband? Or what about the many occasions when men have stones with their names on them and their wives aren’t mentioned at all? Where were they buried?

The incident that really got me riled this week occurred during a tour of a lovely mansion that serves as a museum and repository for the Ross County Historic Society in Chillicothe, Ohio. Our tour group, consisting entirely of women, entered the mansion’s parlor and our female guide pointed to a painting hanging over the fireplace mantel. She identified the man in the painting as the owner of the home and recounted his many achievements. The man’s wife was portrayed in another painting that hung alongside her husband’s. She smiled down at us from her place on the wall, but we never learned a thing about her. I should have piped up and asked, “Can you tell us something about the woman?” But I didn’t.

I’m as guilty as the next person. I’m here in Ohio researching my paternal line, writing specifically about the men in that line.

I supposed it’s partially the fault of society’s naming conventions. Our birth surname is part of our identity, and it’s natural for a researcher to trace the history of her birth name. If we inherited our surname from our mother, our research focus might be different. And, of course, there are the age-old culprits that keep women out of historical records–power, authority, sexism, etc.–making it virtually impossible to find out anything about our female relations.

I can understand why women aren’t mentioned in military histories. I really get bugged, though, when early church histories mention only the contributions of men. Come on, we all know that if women weren’t around, men wouldn’t set foot inside a chapel! Just kidding here, folks, but women do form the backbone of most churches. Why aren’t they mentioned?

Some people and institutions have been trying to balance the historical record by recognizing and publishing the accomplishments of women. I’m currently involved in a project directed by a friend of mine that involves interviewing and recording the life stories of women in our church. In the last nine months more than 60 women have been interviewed, providing a valuable archive for future generations.

After I finish my Parrett family history, I plan to do more to “remember the ladies” among my forbears by writing their stories. I also need to finish my own personal history.

I’d like to hear if any of you are involved in projects that honor your female heritage. If you, like me, have been busy chasing after the men, consider Abigail’s admonition. She was a wise woman. John thought so, too.

Today I stood in an Ohio corn field owned by my third-great-grandfather, Joseph J. Parrett, nearly 200 years ago. It’s early June and the slender, soft green corn stalks extend only about a foot above the soil. The field lies in Jefferson Township in Fayette County, not far from Parrett Station Road, named for my Joseph and the other Parretts who settled here in the early 1800s on Ohio bounty land set aside for Virginia Revolutionary War soldiers.

My Joseph was twenty-two when he arrived here in 1814 with Rebecca, his wife, a year-old son, and nearly forty other relatives and in-laws who had made the three-week journey in four wagons up the Wilderness Road from Eastern Tennessee. The son of Revolutionary War soldier John Parrott, Joseph had recently served a term for the Tennessee Volunteer Infantry in the War of 1812.

I knew all that before coming to Ohio this week. Libraries and Internet searches filled me with facts. I didn’t know what it was like to stand on soil that once belonged to him, filled with a jumble of thoughts about family, mortality, and the excruciating physical labor required to support a family of ten two centuries ago. I needed to walk the land, witness its expansive flatness, observe the way Paint Creek snaked through his landscape, stand alongside his cemetery grave marker on Memorial Day. Coming here, I feel better prepared to write about Joseph Parrett’s world than I was when I only knew facts.

Of course, while I’m here, I’ve been combing the local libraries and archives, looking for “filler material” I couldn’t access from my home base. And I’ve found stuff—good stuff—that will help enrich my story.

For example, I didn’t know until now, that my Joseph, called “Tennessee Joe” to distinguish him from other Joseph Parretts in the county, liked to flop on a chair on his front porch in his later years and spend his evenings “combing his wiskurs.”  I love this personal little window into his weary soul.

May he rest in peace.

My spring classes ended last week, setting my students adrift until fall without weekly writing nudges from me. Whatever will they do with all that free time this summer? I feel a bit like a hand-wringing parent who has just sent her daughter off to college for the first time. Maybe a reminder letter from home will do the trick…and here it is:

Your Summer Writing List!

Dear People… When you’re lying in your comfy hammocks basking in the summer sunshine, perhaps sipping a tall, frosty glass of lemonade and listening to the birds chirping in the maple tree, let your mind lazily drift back to your childhood summers—those idyllic, seemingly endless, carefree months when you cast off your shoes along with your cares and wallowed in being a kid.

I did some thinking along those lines and came up with all kinds of story ideas. Realize that I grew up in Southern California, where summer is pretty much a year-round event. Nevertheless, I still have some vivid memories of the way my life changed when the school bell rang mid-June, and I was suddenly free as a bird. I’ve listed some of those memories below, hoping they might spark your recollections of what it was like when May turned to June and you skipped into those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.”

• Summer clothes—finding the right bathing suit; wearing sandals or “go-aheads” (thongs), or going barefoot; never worrying about sunscreen
• Keeping cool—wading pools; playing in the sprinklers; going to the plunge; wanting a “doughboy” pool; sleeping with the windows open and the covers off
• Summer food—popsicles, eating all the watermelon, peaches, plums, and apricots I wanted; dinner consisting solely of tomatoes and corn on the cob. (Arguing with the family about whether it was better to eat corn like a typewriter or spiral-style.)
• Summer chores—picking fruit off the trees; helping Mom make jam; earning $ with Kool-Aid stands; working in the yard
• Staying up late—playing hide and seek and other games in the dark; staying up to watch old movies with my night-owl mother (Ziegfield Follies, the Hope-Crosby “Road” movies); sleeping late in the morning
• Reading, reading, reading—a book a day (Nancy Drew, books by Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder)
• Playing, playing, playing—putting on “shows”; cowboys and Indians; hula hoops; jacks; jump rope; Kool-Aid stands
• Vacations—camping and fishing; visiting relatives; long, boring car trips; going to the beach
• Summer romances—hmmmm; unrequited love, mostly
• Sound, smell, and feel of summer—ocean waves; sand in your shoes; sunburn; coconut suntan oil; lawn mowers; warm grass; roses; ripe fruit; barbeques; weenie roasts at the beach
• Radio/Records associated with summer: listening to the Dodgers on my transistor radio (especially 1959 when they won the World Series), listening to “A Summer Place” and “Mack the Knife” (big hits of 1959); The Beach Boys; Jan and Dean; Peter, Paul and Mary.

I’m sure there’s more, but this is a start. Now make your list…and write, dear friends, write!

I just returned from a dynamite conference for female memoir writers hosted by the highly esteemed Story Circle Network in Austin, Texas. I have been a member of SCN for about a year and have been impressed by the excellent online resources the organization provides to life story writers of all kinds. It offers online writing classes, online writing groups, editing services, book reviews, and much more, besides providing a variety of publications that teach and motivate.  I’ve occasionally asked myself, “Where do these women find the time to do all they do for this organization?” Most of it comes free with an amazingly reasonable annual membership fee. The women who run this organization are experienced writers who generously share their time to encourage the development of other writers. Susan Wittig Albert, SCN’s founder, is the author of more than 30 books! (Susan is pictured left in top photo, along with Peggy Moody, another SCN board member.)

While I had become an “Internet groupie” of SCN, I didn’t have a full sense of the organization’s strengths and wide reach until I attended its national conference last week. Frankly, I probably wouldn’t have gone had I not been invited to present a workshop. Conferences are expensive when you factor in air travel and hotel fees. I thought SCN did a fine job keeping the conference costs affordable, however. So I went…and had a great time, not only presenting a workshop, but also mingling and learning from others.

A few things stood out. The conference attracts and addresses the needs of women of all ages and backgrounds–and writing abilities. Close to 200 women attended, and what a friendly, welcoming bunch it was! What an atmosphere of sharing and learning together. I loved the whole experience. I attended as many classes as I could, taught by inspiring, well-prepared teachers who got us thinking, digging deep into our psyches, and writing. I returned home full of ideas I plan to use in my California classes and in my own writing. (Bottom photo: That’s me selling books in the conference vendors’ area.)

So, if you’re a gal who’s looking for more ideas and inspiration to keep you writing your story, check out the SCN website. An annual membership only costs $35–a real deal, considering what you get for it. You’ll be joining a group of more than 600 women from all over the world, all writing their life stories.