{"id":1963,"date":"2014-05-18T08:38:27","date_gmt":"2014-05-18T12:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1963"},"modified":"2014-05-18T08:38:27","modified_gmt":"2014-05-18T12:38:27","slug":"history-is-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1963","title":{"rendered":"History is Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Edwards,<\/a>

Edwards graveyard, Wilson County, Tenn. (photo: author)<\/p><\/div>\n

A trip to the New York Public Library\u2019s Milstein Division this week with three friends was a chance to catch up on the progress we\u2019re making with our family genealogies. Each of us has made surprising discoveries\u2014a grandfather who, as a baby, was left at the doorstep of a foundling hospital; Tennessee Civil War veterans who lived the agonizing struggle of \u201cbrother against brother\u201d; the ancestor who lived next door to the real-life House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and was a member of the Salem Grand Jury two decades before the witch trials; the family grave markers revealing sons who died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza outbreak. I even know the names and a bit of the history of the ships that brought some of my ancestors to America in 1633 and the early 1900\u2019s (Griffin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, <\/em>and Amerika<\/em>).<\/p>\n

All writers can find inspiration in history, says a recent blog<\/a> on the Writer<\/em> magazine website by Hillary Casavant. From my own experience, looking at lives reduced to a few lines transcribed from some 180-year-old deed book, or the estate inventory that includes not only \u201ca cowe and hoggs,\u201d but also salt, pepper, and a coffee pot makes you think about what was valuable in a person\u2019s life generations ago. (As a measure of changing living standards, my household has four coffee-pots and three tea-pots. No cowe or hoggs, though.)<\/p>\n

These shards of insight prompt the thought, \u201cI\u2019d like to know the story behind that<\/em>.\u201d Just such an impulse set a writing colleague on a path to research one of her ancestors, born in the late 1800\u2019s\u2014the first woman to serve as a probation officer in the London criminal courts. Information is scattered, and she has the challenge of writing a fictionalized history. Another writer friend is compiling a set of essays on her family\u2019s history that is closer to a conventional memoir, but viewed through a psychological lens\u2014a thoughtful analysis of how a father\u2019s treatment of his sons echoes through the family generations later.<\/p>\n

Writers use history in many different ways to \u201cmake it real.\u201d From my recent reading, additional examples are Robert Harris\u2019s An Officer and A Spy<\/a><\/em>, a novelization of the infamous Dreyfus case, in which all the players are known, and the mystery The Cold, Cold Ground<\/a><\/em> by Adrian McKinty, which uses the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland\u2019s HM Prison Maze not only as a backdrop but weaves it into the actions and motivations of the fictional characters. Movies plow this ground endlessly. I really enjoyed The Monuments Men<\/a><\/em>, which, although it prompted inevitable historical quibbles, stayed closer to real experience than the more highly fictionalized The Train<\/em>, the 1964 Burt Lancaster\/Paul Scofield movie on the same theme, which I saw again on TV last night. (Illustrating how far from real life Hollywood must sometimes stray, Wikipedia reports that Lancaster injured his knee playing golf, and to explain his limp, the movie added a scene in which he is shot while crossing a pedestrian bridge. Also, the executions of a couple of characters occurred because the actors had other \u201ccontractual obligations.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Casavant provides links to websites that can provide historical inspiration, including the<\/p>\n

lists of history facts in Mental Floss<\/a>, a blog of noteworthy letters<\/a>, and the Library of Congress\u2019s 14.5 million photo and graphic archive<\/a>. To her suggestions, I\u2019d add that one\u2019s own family history, the unique combinations of external events and internal dynamics that made them who they were, can also be a rich resource. In a sense, it\u2019s a recasting of the much-abused advice to writers to \u201cwrite what you know.\u201d Or, as George Packer has said (his ancestors lived adjacent to mine on Hurricane Creek in Wilson County, Tennessee, BTW), \u201cHistory, any history, confers meaning on a life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A trip to the New York Public Library\u2019s Milstein Division this week with three friends was a chance to catch up on the progress we\u2019re making with our family genealogies. Each of us has made surprising discoveries\u2014a grandfather who, as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,174,41,35,60,29],"tags":[166,128,162,416,98,414],"class_list":["post-1963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-first-draft-blog","category-genealogy","category-real-life","category-storytelling","category-writing","tag-creativity","tag-history","tag-movie","tag-real-life","tag-story","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-vF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1965,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions\/1965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}