Lessons Learned: 31 Days of Writing Family History

 

by Nancy Gilbride Casey

 

The COVID pandemic has upended many aspects of our everyday lives. For me, family history writing took a big hit in 2020. Ideas dried up and motivation was lacking. GenPen—the writing group of the DCGS—ceased to meet, after a very successful first year.

A random Facebook post caught my eye in late December 2020. The author had challenged herself to post a single family history record on social media each day in January 2021, and offered to readers her list of types of records: birth record, death record, wedding record, etc.

The idea had great appeal. After a year of overwhelming events, here was a suggestion to "go small." I committed myself to try out her challenge. What I learned may encourage others trying to get going on writing their family history.

The first big lesson was, "I have control over my writing." Originally, I had decided to follow the challenger's list of topics. But some of the topics didn't interest me, or I didn't have a ready example to hand (such as a "family recipe"—hard to believe, right?).

So, I gave myself permission to write about something else:  a record, photo or artifact I had wanted to write about in the past, but just hadn't—maybe one I'd forgotten about, or which was too small a topic to merit a long post on my blog. This was freeing: There is no right or wrong to family history writing. Write about what fascinates, and chances are that interest and excitement will come across to your readers.

I also learned, "I can pivot," when needed. On the topic of "Interesting Letter," I intended to write about my husband's "Comanche Princess named Morning Dew" legend which I found out about in a letter from his uncle. But, the post had gotten too long and it was just not ready to publish. Rather than not write that day....I decided to pivot. I went to my living room, looked at some family photos, and the three-generation photo of my husband, my son and my father-in-law in OU attire jumped out at me. The story of the long-standing family love of football and OU which the photo embodied just rolled out onto the page.

The challenge of coming up with 31 distinct records had me asking, "What constitutes a record?" One day I wrote about my father-in-law's teddy bear, an artifact we own; it was a "record" of this childhood. Another, I wrote about various ways one can look at DNA test results—the ultimate "record" of an individual. I also included anecdotes about my children when they were younger. Even more recent family history is still "history," and these stories are as deserving of being recorded for posterity as any others.

Even the best ideas can go awry, but one can still create a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as evidenced in my post on the topic of "ancestral town." It so happens my Slovak ancestors lived very near a castle, and I imagined that they might have been awed and inspired by the site. Turns out that the castle is just a bit too far away from their town and blocked by a hill to be seen on an everyday basis (according to FB friends who have been there). A quick rewrite included a "'fess up" about my mistaken notion.

Purposefully staying small by limiting inspiration to a single document/record/photo definitely made the end product manageable—as long as I stuck with it. I confess wanting to add history/context, etc., to some stories, adding maps, additional documents, and the like. This sometimes made it hard to get the writing done by the day's deadline. But it also showed that the daily habit of thinking about writing had unleashed some momentum in what I could write about and how.

The 31-day challenge was certainly eye-opening. There were days I definitely was not "feeling it" in terms of writing, and on those days I may have picked a very easy topic. Other pieces were the culmination of several days of thought and planning which resulted in a blog post later in the week. The challenge was a microcosm of the writing process as a whole, where some days the stories flow and others they need to be coaxed along. In the end, however, each day was a win in the quest of telling my family stories. 

Image credit: "Writing with Ink" by urbanworkbench is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 

A version of this post appears in the February 2021 Denton County (TX) Genealogical Society's DCGS News, and the Summer 2021 edition of the Greater Cleveland Genealogical Society's Certified Copy.