Family History Writing: Telling Our Stories

Writing about oneself, especially in retrospect, is always a dangerous undertaking. Do you tell the truth and risk being seen in a bad light? Or do you soften the edges to make it more palatable? Will it be considered your own brand of narcissistic, revisionist drivel or worse yet will it mean a damn thing to anyone? Do you paint yourself as the hero or the victim? Or is it a bit of both. Will people think better it worse of you having read what you wrote? Is there an audacity in speaking for yourself? Perhaps, but I will claim it as my right to set the record straight. Albeit from my own biased perspective. It is the life I have lived, who better to describe and interpret it?

It seems that I judge my audience rather harshly in asking these questions, even if rhetorically. And so it goes. When I attempt to reconstruct the lives of my ancestors, I really want to know who they are. Not the sanitized, picture book stories of the past, but what were their thoughts and aspirations. What were their disappointments and struggles. How did they get through the hard times? This is not a curiosity that many share. Many are perfectly happy not knowing any of it. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that digging any deeper might cause their carefully constructed fictions to spontaneously combust. My walls are built of tissue paper and some of theirs are stone.

Why put it down on paper? That answer is easy. Of all the ancestors that I have researched, including my parents and grandparents; my great grandmother’s diary, my grandfather’s letters and a transcribed interview of my Dad, speak with a clarity and authenticity of no other. Even Wills from hundreds of years ago speak with a precision that is impossible to duplicate. There is more of you in what you write than perhaps anywhere else.

So, where does that leave us? You and I can leave it up to posterity to figure out who we were or we can take the risk of telling it ourselves. At the end of the day we get to choose what we tell, and how we tell it— will it smack of fact, or fiction? Whether we write with precision, sterility, humor or horror pieces of us will slip through. My great grandmother’s diary—by the mere fact of choosing what to record, what matters to her, even when she doesn’t explicitly tell me how she felt— Whether it was which flowers she said were in bloom or when she wrote about visiting “her” special Bay Tree near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. She connected with me in those moments.

Of course our audience will shape how we write. Are we telling the story to or for ourselves? Are we apologists for our family? Or is our audience generations removed in the future and we are scattering bread crumbs that we hope might be helpful to someone else some day? Do we hope something will resonate in a world we cannot even imagine?  Maybe simply organizing how we see the landscape of our life is helpful to our journey and perhaps someone we cannot even imagine. 

So let’s get started. Some of us have written small pieces or maybe longer ones about ourselves. But for a moment let us imagine a descendant 100 years from now picking up our writing. What do you want them to know? That century is important, it lets vanity and criticism evaporate in the great scrap heap of time. 

So here is the assignment: write a letter to a 4th great grand son or daughter, niece or nephew, or even a stranger that will tell them something that might help them understand what your life was life, or life in general is currently or in your past. What worried you for the future or informed you about the past. It’s a big ask—but think about it. Even if it takes awhile to come to fruition.

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