Creating Interest in History

The entrance to Granville Island where the 

Vancouver Writers' Festival is held 

Canadian history is just not sexy enough to sell well. That was the message I heard from Charlotte Gray at the Vancouver Writers' Festival. (I wasn't taking notes so that is not a direct quote but the gist of what she said.) After Ms. Gray took a look at what was selling in bookstores, she started writing about historical crimes in Canada rather that the books about more typical historical events and people which she was noted for. She saw that true crime flies off the bookstore shelves and, if she were to write about historical crimes, she could write about the history she loves.

It's true. I love reading about history but give me an historic crime or mystery to puzzle over and it makes the pages of books of historical non-fiction turn quicker and quicker as I race to find out what happened. That's especially true when it is creative non-fiction and I can see the characters come alive through dialogue and action.

But putting words in our ancestors' mouths might not sit well with genealogists who don't want to tamper with the facts. However, our writing can focus on the mysteries that we find and we do find many. What, after all, are the hunts for clues to break down the brick walls in our research but cases of detectives trying to solve mysteries?

John Phillip Colletta used his trail of detection to create interest in his family history in Only a Few Bones: A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy and Its Aftermath. His tale can be used for inspiration when writing about our own family histories. But that is an American story where history is considered sexier. What about our Canadian stories?

Closer to home is a recent book about a Canadian mystery, John Little's Who Killed Tom Thomson? The Thomson mystery is one that was never solved and, even though it is Canadian, it still garners interest in more than just this country. Maybe if we look closely, we can find unsolved mysteries in our own families to write about or perhaps, like John Phillip Colletta, we can find family mysteries to puzzle out on the written page. Take a closer look. I'm sure we can come up with a few.  

Research Break

I'm taking an education and research break this week and plan to be back next week with more inspiration from my time away.

Truth and Lies and Photos

An intriguing photograph of my grandmother

Old photos can be treasure troves of information. They can also be very frustrating when the details about them haven't been handed down with the image. Just who were those people? Were they close relatives or friends or was the photo one sent to a member of our family by someone they knew who lived in another country?

I have a number of copies of photos in my collection that have no provenance. There were no helpful names noted on the back of the originals, they are just what appear to be studio images of single young women. Too bad there weren't more clues to give me a head start.

But there are usually more clues than are realized at first glance. A fascinating book about the subject of what can be found out from photographs is The Dead Horse Investigation: Forensic Photo Analysis for Everyone by Colleen Fitspatrick. It would be a good idea to use some of the techniques listed in the book to get more information about the photos that I have been able to identify. It seems like another in-depth technique similar to using the genealogical proof standard - a lot of work, but sure to pay dividends if you do it right. 

Those techniques might be able to tell me a lot more about the photo of my grandmother which you can see above. Unfortunately, it was given to me when my grandmother was no longer with us so I couldn't go to the source to ask where it was taken, why it was taken and who owned the car. As she lived in both Canada and England during her life, it would be good to know even the country where it was taken. No matter how deep my analysis goes, however, I will never know why Gran was behind the wheel. Did she drive at one time or was this a shot taken in fun? In all the time that I knew her, I never saw my grandmother drive a car. I guess that goes to show that photographs can misled as well as enlighten.  

Inspired by Setting

One of the early neighbourhoods which influenced me

Sometimes inspiration for my articles comes from unexpected sources. The one for this week came from a book about writing fiction. I know that we don't want anything fictional to show up in our family histories but there is nothing that says we can't steal some of the ideas behind creative writing.

An important part of any fictional story is the setting, the place that contains the characters and action. Sometimes setting is so important that it becomes a character in and of itself. But when you think about it, the place in which our ancestors lived their lives created some of the action that took place. Think of farmers who settled along the Mississippi or the Red River who made periodic flooding a part of their lives or people who lived close to their industrial workplaces and lived with the consequences of pollution. Of course, many of us grew up in much cleaner and more settled areas.

Just like setting is important for fictional characters so our ancestors' settings were important for them. Added to that, an even more intriguing idea was introduced when Hodgins, the writer of A Passion for Narrative quoted from a speech by David Malouf.* It was about how, as we were initially getting to know our world, our ideas were shaped by the place where we were brought up; first by the house in which we were raised, then by the street and town in which we were located. So, we were socialized to believe that the rooms, their contents and the size of our house were the norm and that all other places were as flat, barren, hilly or treed as the geography that surrounded us. In fact, that all countries were like our own. No wonder the Scots who came to Canada from crowded lands where the trees were sparse were at a loss when they first landed in early Canada where forests grew down close to the water.

Much like the Scots we can be confounded by new places that don't match our expectations. But where did these preconceived notions of how a place should be come from? In the chapter about setting there was, of course, an exercise suggested to gain an understanding of how  thoughts about our surroundings were developed. In this exercise, we were asked to describe out childhood home and its contents and then to do the same for the area outside, close to our home. This was a writing exercise as well as a way to underline how our first homes and neighbourhoods influenced us. Our childhood homes were where we gained our ideas of how places should be.

I tried the exercise but in my attempt to remember my childhood home, I came up with a hodge podge of stories about my two childhood homes in Montreal suburbs, one at the end of the airport runway and one in a brand new subdivision which had yet to be landscaped - lots of tunneling opportunities there. Also in the mix was my grandmother's home close to London. I'm sure I dredged up an image of an airplane back in the day as well. So maybe my varied childhood homes set me on my wander ways? I don't think that is what the exercise was supposed to show me. What does it show you and does it give you an idea of what some of your ancestors faced?

Sources:

Hodgins, Jack. A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction. McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto, 2001. 

* p 73 – 74.