Researching an ancestor's character

                                       Some of the books that may give me clues to my ancestors' characters

As a storyteller, I like to convey the personality of my characters whether they are fictional or are people who actually lived. With real people that can be easier if we have actually met the person, although any impression gathered may have been coloured by circumstance and our relative status at the time. Trying to understand historic figures can be trickier.

Some of their personality can be gathered through their actions, but it must be remembered that those actions happened at a different time. Society then had different rules, written and unwritten. There were also different social supports in place or, in some cases, lacking. So actions were constrained by circumstances that need to be explored if we are to have any hope of understanding them.

A chance remark at a recent online meeting put me on the path of another clue. It was an observation about the presenter's own behaviour being typical for a middle child. Could birth order hold some clues for understanding our ancestors? So many families in earlier times seemed to be big and messy with many more children and often featured changing partners for the parent couple if one of those parent ancestors was long lived. I have a few families in my own ancestral background in mind while I ponder this. I've also plucked a book about birth order from my shelves to see if I can find any potential for using the idea of birth order to explore ancestors' characters further. Let's see if The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why by Dalton Conley can offer me insights into my ancestors and their families.