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.

It’s May, the month we honor the mothers in our lives. When we think of our moms, some of us naturally picture her in the kitchen, elbow deep in flour, making one of her mouth-watering dishes. But not all moms were adept in the culinary arts, as Roz Nelson reminds us in this heart-warming story. While Roz acknowledges her mother’s many wonderful qualities, cooking was definitely not one of them. This story will surely make you smile. 

Recipe for Heartburn
by Roslyn Nelson

The backyard of the kosher butcher’s shop was lined with cages containing live chickens, ducks, and turkeys. One Sunday morning when I was about five, my mother took me with her to buy a chicken. Weekdays she worked; Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath and, of course, on that day the shop was closed. So Sunday it was.

My mother was not reticent about the chicken she wanted. It had to be big and plump. She toured the cages carefully, oblivious of the cackles and quacks and crowing that fascinated me. She wouldn’t let the butcher talk her into any bird that wasn’t fat. Planting her stought five-foot frame firmly in front of him, she told him, “No, not that one, this one.” She pointed to the fattest bird in the cages. It was in the days before cholesterol was a household word, and fatty was equated with juicy and delicious. I had to hold back tears as the beefy butcher opened the cage, seized the squawking chicken by its legs, and held it upside down as it flapped its wings in a desperate attempt to escape.

I could not, could not watch as he beheaded that chicken, cut off its feet, and eviscerated it. A shudder went through me with the sound of each chop. But I did watch and was mesmerized by the two women who sat all day plucking the feathers and singeing the stubborn ones that remained. The pungent odor of burnt feathers assaulted our nostrils. “Chicken Flickers” was what my mother called the women.

When we returned home, my mother set the gas burners alight and, holding the chicken over them, singed and removed the remaining pin feathers. With all that trouble, one might have expected a Lucullian feast when the bird was cooked. But, while my mother was a kind and good-natured woman, she was also, unfortunately, among the world’s worst cooks. Woody Allen jokes that his mother had a deflavorizing machine. I think my mother invented it.

I could say in her defense that she worked long hours as a seamstress, back in the Depression days, when women normalled stayed at home. We needed the extra cash desperately, however, and so each and every morning my mother headed out the door by seven a.m. for the long trolley ride to the garment factory, and didn’t return until six o’clock.

Neatness was not her long-suit either: as she undressed after work, she flung clothing around on chairs and tables. Dressed, her bra strap peeked out from her cotton housedress, her slip hung below her hem, her heavy oxford shoes listed to the sides. Important papers and photographs lay jumbled together in a drawer, along with her underwear.

Yet, she was strong on cleanliness. Every Saturday, she scrubbed the linoleum-covered floors, their pseudo-Turkish patterns long since erased by foot traffic. Then she washed the family laundry in the stone kitchen tubs, rubbing the clothes with the brown bar of Fels Naptha soap on a corrugated wood-framed scrubbing board, and hanging them out to dry. Afterwards, she polished the coal stove, and the exposed brass pipes under the sink.

If she was short on intellectual curiosity, she was long on common sense. As a child, it was my father’s intellect that I admired, but as an adult I realized that it was she who was the backbone, she who kept the family together under trying circumstances.

During the week, cooking the family dinner fell to my older sister. She faithfully followed my mother’s recipe for chicken soup. The chicken was boiled for hours with a five-cent bundle of herbs and parsnips that went by the immigrant parlance “soupen greens.” I secretly thought of it as boiled rubber, swimming in a fatty sea.

My father, who was something of a gourmand, loved Beluga caviar, which sold for seventy-nine cents an ouce (a great extravagance then), and smoked sturgon and pickled herring, and ate them often, in spite of our poverty. But for some unfathomable reason, he also loved boiled chicken and chicken soup, the fattier the better, and so it was on the menu two, and sometimes three, nights a week.

I simply could not get it down, and at the age of about eight, I refused to eat it at all and often made myself a supper of cottage cheese or sour cream and banana, or even chocolate wafers and milk.

My mother prepared the vegetables for the meal. I can barely make that word vegetables plural. What we had were peas and carrots, carrots and peas, either canned or boiled to a mush. I was in my teens and eating in other places before I discovered that vegetables were varied and could taste wonderful.

Our menus didn’t have much variety: the soup, of course, fried veal cutlets, which tasted OK but were guaranteed to produce heartburn a few hours later because of the fat, and a shortcut version of blintzes, in which the cheese mixture, instead of being wrapped in a crepe, was splaced between soda crackers, dipped in egg and, of course, fried. On rare occasions there was pot roast, loaded with fat, the way father liked it, and even more rarely, steak, soaked kosher-style in salt and water to remove the blood. It was so tough that stitched up, it would have made a very servicable briefcase. Even though we weren’t observant Jews, it was the only way my mother knew how to prepare it.

On Saturdays we had the best meal of the week. A trip to the Jewish deli produced corned beef and pastrami or salami, hard-crusted rye bread with caraway seeds, kosher sour pickles, and invariably, a can of Heinz vegetarian beans that my mother heated in the unopened can, label and all, in boiling water on the gas range. To this day I don’t know why the can didn’t explode. To give her her due, my mother made cole slaw and potato salad to go with the meal, which were excellent, because she had worked in a Jewish deli years before and learned how to do it right.

Every now and then, on a Sunday, my mother would make an apple pie. The crust could have anchored a battleship, and she frequently forgot to put sugar over the apples. Knowing my penchant for sweets of all kinds, she was always puzzled when I turned it down.

Long after my father died, when my mother had remarried and came to visit me in California, she drew me aside after the second dinner I had prepared and said, “Listen, don’t make such fancy meals. You’ll spoil Louie.” Louie was her second husband and hardly a gourmet.

When I look back now, my nostalgia is for a kind and generous mother, warm and loving, hard-working and undemanding. But I have to admit that I have no fond memories of, or longing for, her meals. Well, maybe the potato salad and cole slaw. They were the best I’ve ever had.

I’m always looking for interesting ways to write a family history that brings ancestors to life. I found an excellent example in Linda Tate’s Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative, published in 2009 by Ohio University Press. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a way to combine research with imagination to create complex, lifelike characters that will grip readers’ hearts from the get-go.

Tate spent 14 years writing this book after seven years of exhaustive research that involved combing through genealogical records, interviewing relatives she’d never met before, and spending summers in the area where her family lived. She began her research in 1988, prompted by a recurring dream about a grandmother who died when she was five. She begins her story with this provocative statement: “Grandma Fannie died when I was five, but now I get word that she is still alive.” Who wouldn’t want to read more?

Her family history focuses primarily on two interesting women, Tate’s grandmother Fannie, and her great-great-grandmother Louisiana, who tell their own stories with the speech patterns and vocabulary of their Appalachian culture. Tate is a scholar in Appalachian literature and grew up in a family who used many of the speech patterns of their ancestors. These women feel real, and you will soon realize that they reveal themselves, flaws and all, through their compelling, often painful, stories. In addition to the character narratives, several chapters include Tate’s account of her childhood relationships with some of these people, as well as her research efforts and discoveries. Readers learn a lot about the process of putting together a family history of this magnitude.

Tate provides an unflinching view of complicated, deeply flawed individuals, who inflict a great deal of pain on their families. At the same time, she maintains a tone of fairness and understanding, and in the end she shows how knowledge and honesty can heal the psyche. We see all sides of people and come away with a greater comprehension of a unique American culture through multiple generations . I guarantee this book will get under your skin, as it did mine. To learn more, you’ll find an interview with the author here.