It was a thrill to receive this year’s Alexander Henderson Award for my book Southwark Luck: the story of Charles Homer Martin, Ann Forrester and their children. It’s not often that a book about the life of a very ordinary man and his children wins a prize.
Since it's great to receive recognition for the time, effort and care required in family history writing, I’d like to encourage more people to aspire to winning this prestigious award. If you’re reading this magazine then you’re already involved in genealogy, so it’s too late to pass on the advice of a librarian friend. She said to me once ‘Having seen what people go through to work out their family history, I know never to start.’ But her advice came far too late for me, so here is the story of my own long journey towards publishing Southwark Luck.
Where genealogy is concerned, I didn’t start out to write anything. It all started in 1999 as a kind of computer game when I saw the software package ‘Ultimate Family Tree’ on sale at Officeworks. I’d reached my fifties and had started to think about the whole idea of ‘where I came from’, an idea picked up so well in the subsequent SBS TV programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ At the beginning my aim was simply to collect information together and input that information to the genealogical database. Playing with the software was like playing with a new toy.
I quickly discovered that nearly all family history work involves sleuthing – the brain strain of actual detective work. Sorting out the relevant connections to your family line is one of genealogy’s great attractions – the thrill of the chase. It’s very addictive. Why don’t they divert problem gamblers onto this path – it would be much more productive for all concerned!
But I digress. Using BDM certificates ordered from England, NSW and Victoria, and laborious examination of microfilms of parish records, I slowly built up a family tree going back at least six generations for every line in my mother’s family. Even though most of the surnames in her tree are fairly ‘uncommon’, such as Pierssené, Flockton, Butterfield, Bushell, the startling result was a database containing almost 25,000 names, all of which emerged from my efforts to find the right ‘lines’ and exclude the wrong ones.
After discovering that some forebears were early convict settlers of Australia, I found some biographical data about these people in reference texts such as those by Mollie Gillen and Michael Flynn, transcribed it, cobbled bits and pieces together in pastiche form and added these scrappy bits of storyline to my software programme. This massive data collection and digestion process took some years – about five. One of my sisters began to refer to this project as ‘Louise’s albatross’. My daughter jokingly started calling me her ‘lost mother’.
Along the way I discovered that the software printed out actual reports and, once I saw a burgeoning narrative for each individual, I became aware that there was great potential for writing that person’s life story in a much more satisfying way than the software allowed. At that point, around 2004, I printed out the entire report for every one of my mother’s forebears, and saved it as a Word document, not in a form that would interest anyone.
It was an ‘ah hah’ moment. Seeing that huge outpouring, I realised I could not waste all my research efforts. I could not leave digital files sitting inside my computer, or hard copy files stashed on my study’s shelves, liable to be promptly discarded should I be hit by the proverbial bus. The information needed to be disseminated in a coherent way. The year 2004 was my starting point as a writer of family histories.
From the outset I had one personal guideline - I most definitely did not want to publish a book with pages and pages of descendancy charts, although some authors focus on this. The latter might maximise sales at a family reunion, as everyone likes to see their name in a book, it seems, but this approach did not appeal to me. Dealing with the privacy issues did not appeal either. I made an early decision that my cut-off point for research was 1900. Anyone born after that date would have to be someone else’s research project.
As I read that totally fragmented and very boring initial Word document, based on the contents of a database, some of the characters intrigued me. I realised how important it was to put more flesh on their bones, fill the gaps and make their stories meaningful. For this process, the word ‘disinterring’ seems most apt. Bringing a person to life became my objective, but as a novice writer in this field I was unsure of the best way to proceed. A line in Muriel Barbery’s book The Elegance of the Hedgehog resonated with me: ‘history is a list of events joined by logical connections’. I realize that’s what I instinctively tried to do, right from the start. Make the story flow.
It’s easier said than done. Creating a ‘flowing’ document is a particular challenge with a family history. Usually you don’t know the story when you begin. You may have no idea of what you’re looking for. You unearth hitherto unknown events which may or may not be relevant. Disjointed sections of a life story emerge as you immerse yourself in the life concerned. You try to imagine possible scenarios, and then go looking for supporting or refuting evidence. I talked to many extended family members and am very appreciative of the stories they were able to contribute. But research only comes together, becomes meaningful, once you embark on the serious undertaking of writing a book and all the gaps are exposed. So it’s a good idea to start writing early.
Over time I discovered that ‘flow’ happens once you imagine yourself living the life of the person you are writing about, once you can picture that person in your mind. Among my convict forebears, for example, I came to think of Robert Forrester as an archetypal ‘Aussie battler’ and of Paul Bushell as a ‘tough old bugger’, to use the vernacular.
During the drafting process for Southwark Luck, I changed my mind completely about Charles Homer Martin. In 1818 he was convicted of highway robbery at Southwark (pronounced Suthuck), on the southern banks of the Thames in London. Shame on him! But gradually I began to think of Charley (as he was known), as the archetypal ‘born loser’. He never seemed to make the right decisions, or have luck fall his way. We know that plenty of people are like that today. As each event in Charley’s life unfolded I asked myself ‘why did this happen?’ I’d do some thinking and go looking for the answers. I followed up every name that crossed his path, to work out the nature of the interpersonal connection. Rigorous follow-through of this type enabled me to pick up, for example, Charley’s involvement in the building scam at iconic St Matthews’ Church, Windsor, in the Hawkesbury district near Sydney.
I’ve jumped ahead of myself a little, by skipping over how I moved from the printed-out contents of a database to writing Southwark Luck. Being a romantic at heart, my initial passion was to work out how each couple met. That was when the fun began, the deep delving to find the circumstances of why two people happened to be in the same place at the same time and decided to marry. Hence the title for that first single gigantic Word document of mine was How Cleon Met Thea. Cleon and Thea were my maternal grandparents, and they shared quite a compelling love story. I tried to draw together the various strands of family history which led to their marriage. I followed their life as a married couple by exploring the lives of their children, whose births, deaths and marriages provided valuable details for the addresses and occupations of Cleon and Thea.
The data began to overwhelm me. The more information I found, the larger the book became. I decided to split my ever-expanding file into two draft books, now with the titles How Varah Met James (these were Cleon’s parents) and How Dolly Met Philip (these were Thea’s parents). The process snowballed. Progressively I split the ‘books’ in half, then half again, each time focusing on the couple where the strands met. Over time, I collected so much material that, by 2013, one Word document generated in 2004 had morphed into five published family histories, with another coming in 2014, six additional books in draft form already residing in my computer and further ideas inhabiting my head space.
It’s obvious that the quantity of information collected becomes a determining factor in creating a printed family history document. The likely page length is important. But I agonised about other aspects of structure - how to organise and present voluminous details to make them less complicated and less confusing. It was my biggest challenge.
At one stage in my life I was a maths teacher in a secondary school and the golden rule was to teach one concept at a time in any single lesson. I thought the same principle applied to writing a book – it should have a clear focus. I asked people for ideas. I looked at other family histories for clues and tried different models. For example, my first book on the Pierssené family provided an overview of twelve generations. My second book followed the Dennis family as a direct descendancy from 1650 in Saint Buryan, Cornwall to my grandfather in Bondi, Australia, providing brief details of each new wife’s own family background as she married into the Dennis family. Neither approach satisfied me.
With any book, as I finish the last page, I always ask myself the same question – why did the author bother to spend all that time and effort writing that book? And as I pondered my own family tree, I constantly asked that question of myself – why would anyone want to read a book about this topic? Who are the likely members of my audience? To me, that should be the focus for every writer. As family history research took over my life, I asked myself another question. If I restricted my book to my specific forebears, those individuals would be of interest only to my three sisters, my daughter and grandchildren, a few cousins and some nephews and nieces, most of whose eyes glazed over at any mention of their forebears.
Eventually the penny dropped - I should focus on various people many generations back, because of the much greater number of descendants who might be interested in that individual’s story. A book structured around a couple, their children and grandchildren seemed to make sense as well, as this span in a family is comprehensible to everyone. After that, family histories can often become too long, too scrappy and too confusing, with no narrative ‘thread’.
At that point in my evolution as a family history writer I split my books even further. It became obvious that where my convict forebears were concerned, their individual stories had never been told and they had thousands of descendants in Australia, some of whom would surely be interested to know about Australia’s earliest days. Each convict warranted a book all to himself. And that is how I came to write Southwark Luck, the third in my series about early convict settlers of the Hawkesbury. It’s classified as a family history because it includes the stories of Charley’s children and grandchildren. The two earlier convict books were biographies, with the children and grandchildren relegated to sequel books, because otherwise the books would have been too long.
I have long since given up on the book title theme I started with, How Cleon Met Thea. Now my titles more clearly define the family name, to make it easier for other researchers and extended family members to find my work. Perhaps Robert Forrester, First Fleeter is boring as a book title, but as a self-published author, using only the internet as a promotion tool, it has allowed me to create a market for the book. Any Googler who discovers Robert as a forebear will also discover my book. With Southwark Luck I tried to compromise with a catchier title, but the book’s subtitle clearly spells out the people about whom the book is written.
Once I’d settled on structural focus for a particular book, I grappled with the big challenge of making its storyline interesting. I thought about my work during my morning walks, and as I read other material. Much of the content of history and family history books written in the last twenty-odd years seemed very patchy and unsatisfying, kind of glib and not getting at any fundamental truths.
However, when reading Colleen McCullough’s book Morgan’s Run, I marvelled at the way she had developed a few basic facts of a trial, a First Fleet voyage and the first five years in the colony of NSW into a 600 page novel. She also included a great description of the life of a sawyer. Charley was a sawyer at the Hawkesbury, so now I could more easily picture his life.
The approach taken by Kate Grenville in her books was thought-provoking too. The Secret River deals with a period on the Hawkesbury similar to the date of Charley’s arrival. One commentator told me that Kate and I have focused on something similar, the difference being that when novelist Kate gets to something she doesn’t know about she imagines it and writes accordingly, whereas non-fiction writer Louise goes looking for the answers. I’m too embedded in years of mathematical proofs to be comfortable with making things up.
Basically, I am writing so that I might gain an understanding of a direct forebear. But I don’t want to write a book which is too personal, too full of references to my gr-gr-gr-grandfather, and so on. I want to make the book as inclusive as possible – so that other descendants and even ‘outsiders’ will feel that the book speaks to them too.
An essential ingredient for any valuable family history is the source of your information. Proper citations avoid a lot of unnecessary email correspondence. The process of inserting a source as a footnote or endnote is very easy using Word, and a whole lot easier if you start writing your story early, including the source details as you type your story into the document. Having spent hours trying to work out where some writers have obtained their information, and having gradually realised how sloppy and inaccurate is much that is written as ‘history’, even by academic historians, I determinedly source everything, wherever possible. Regarding complex sentences containing several sources, I try to restructure them as simple sentences, so that each sourced ‘fact’ has a fully documented endnote. Citations can be made to look quite unobtrusive but I know they are useful, as many readers have told me how much they study the endnotes section of my books.
I always work in Word, with the whole document open at once, so that information can more easily be moved to better or more appropriate places in the story. I use lots of sub-headings, with the ‘navigation pane’ always open on the left hand side of the document, to keep my focus firmly on the storyline of the document. If my subheadings bore me, then they’ll certainly bore a reader, so I try to find more material to increase the interest factor. Many of the subheadings are deleted in the final drafting stage, once I have found ways to group related material together, perhaps into a small chapter of its own. For example, while Southwark Luck basically told a story in chronological order, the Bushell book contained many themed chapters.
Many, many changes and rewrites are made as the book slowly takes shape – sometimes quite radical changes, if a new piece of evidence is unearthed contradicting my previous understanding. I constantly ask myself the question – what point am I trying to make here? This enables me to keep stripping away the superfluous and extraneous material, for consignment to an appendix or endnote.
I’m not keen on text boxes and other devices which clutter up the page and distract attention from the main storyline. Nor am I keen on two-column pages, which I find difficult to read. My family history books have all been self-published in A5 format, a size which makes the book cheaper to publish and easier to read and store on bookshelves. That A5 size can detract from the pictorial aspects of the book but my focus is always the intellectual content and no-one has yet lambasted me for shortcomings with images, even where they exist.
A foible of mine is using words of the era to tell the story, wherever possible, because re-interpreting them often changes the meaning completely. It’s the ‘Chinese whisper’ phenomenon. Some people’s comprehension skills leave a lot to be desired. But I break up the quotes with explanatory comments wherever possible.
Rushing a family history into print is not a good idea, but problems of accuracy emerge when you take a long time to write the book. As your research skills improve, you wonder about your earlier work and you may need to spend time re-checking. You also need digestion time. I often ponder things, or come across a new idea or new piece of background information when viewing a movie or reading a book about a completely unrelated topic. I delay publishing until I have explored all possible options for resolving any matter I’m unsure of, or which puzzles me.
Then the law of diminishing returns applies: if you keep on looking and not finding, it’s time to stop researching and proceed to publishing. It goes without saying that the quality of the research and thinking behind a family history will be the ultimate key to its success.
The process of writing it, of attempting to convey ideas and information clearly, may not come easily. However, few things are as satisfying as the feeling that your published work has helped people to discover their roots, know where they came from and understand themselves a little better.
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