Adding 'Interest' When Writing Family History

'Family history' is one of the most difficult of writing genres. At the very mention, eyes glaze over. People start to yawn and change the subject.

The task generally involves telling a cradle-to-grave story for someone.  You focus a spotlight on the main character, as distinct from the bit players. Word count is a driving factor for the 'output' at the end: extensive research might generate so much useful detail for one individual that it limits the number of people you can cover in any one article or book. You might end up with a biography and not a family history.

The sheer number of courses in how to write non-boring family histories says everything. It's hard to do. Recounting 'the facts' in an interesting way while avoiding the excesses of creative licence or pure invention without any supporting evidence can be a challenge. There is generally no room for purple prose. The key word is 'story'.

Recently, for a meeting of family history writers at the GSV in Melbourne, I had cause to consider how I handle this story-telling challenge and I came up with a few examples from my own published writing. Here they are:

Example 1 - Robert Forrester’s wedding in 1791, from my book ‘Robert Forrester, First Fleeter’.

Facts utilised:

• Parish Records, St Philip’s, Sydney, SAG Film 90, Mitchell Library
• The identity of Robert Forrester’s wife remains obscure and this is explored later in the story.
• There are many spelling variations for Robert’s surname, explained elsewhere in the book.
• The website of St Philip’s Church notes that the first church service in a building did not take place until 25 Aug 1793, in a wattle and daub chapel built at what is now the corner of Bligh and Hunter Streets. ‘A T-shaped building, with a thatched roof and an earthen floor, it could seat 500’. After the original church burnt down in October 1798, a new structure was commenced in November 1798 and completed in 1809. In turn, it was replaced by today’s old stone church in March 1856.
• Entry for the First Fleet’s chaplain Richard Johnson in Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.
• McAfee, Dawes’s Meteorological Journal, Microfiche 2, State Library of Victoria

Sydney, 1793, after Robert's wedding, first church building on left, from Collins' diary

Noting that most of the information about the early history of St Philip’s Church was not relevant to 1791, this is how I eventually utilized my ‘facts’ to embellish the bare bones of Robert Forrester’s wedding ceremony.

On 19 October 1791 the marriage of a Robert Forster to a woman named Mary Frost was recorded in the parish registers of St Philip's Church of England in Sydney.

There being no church structure as yet, Robert was more than likely married under ‘the great tree’ used by the Chaplain, Richard Johnson, for services in the first few years of settlement. The weather for an outdoor wedding that day was very pleasant, being fine and hazy, with a temperature of 73.2° Fahrenheit at noon (around 23° Celsius).

Example 2, from my book ‘Southwark Luck’

Facts utilised:

• In December 1821 Charles Homer Martin (Charlie) was en route from Sydney to Newcastle as a prisoner, sentenced to serve a 12 month sentence for his part in the building scam at St Matthew’s Church, Windsor.
• As part of his farewell tours of the colony prior to his departure in February 1822, Governor Macquarie made a trip to the penal colony at Newcastle in December 1821, coincidentally on the same ship as Charlie. This fact was discovered by chance. I'd searched for the name of Charlie’s ship on Trove, discovered the Governor's name associated with this ship at this time and then matched up ‘departure from Sydney’ and ‘arrival in Newcastle’ dates for both men.
• In January 1822 Charles Martin was being held as a prisoner in Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks, proving he was brought back early from Newcastle.
• Robert Forrester’s daughter Ann married Charlie at Windsor in April 1822
• The Martins’ first child was born at Windsor in July 1822, so Ann was in the early stages of pregnancy when Charlie was first arrested.
• Local magistrate William Cox much later mentioned his long-term next-door neighbour Robert Forrester as a man who had ‘raised his family to habits of industry’
• All the pictures of early houses at the Hawkesbury show a front verandah as a minimum, often a verandah on two or more sides of the house. Temperatures regularly hit 40F in summer and are subzero there on winter mornings.

Hyde Park Barracks, source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sputniktilt

This is how I developed the timeline and imagined the likely turn of events and wove this into my story about Ann’s father Robert Forrester in his final few years of life:

The affairs of his children would have absorbed much of his attention, as he sat with Jane on the verandah on warm summer evenings, or by the fire in winter, reviewing the day’s events. Such a discussion involved his daughter Ann. As Macquarie prepared to sail home to England, Ann had finally admitted to her father and step-mother that she was pregnant. With the baby’s father serving time at Newcastle, Robert and Jane probably decided that the crisis warranted an approach to their neighbour and Chief Magistrate, William Cox. His influence was needed to get Charles Martin back to Windsor.

Example 3, from my book ‘Robert Forrester, First Fleeter’

Facts utilised:

• After he’d taken produce to market in Sydney in September 1822, Robert’s eldest son John Forrester used his musket to kill one of three bushrangers who held him up when he was travelling alone in his cart on an isolated section of the road back to Windsor. John had to explain himself at the ensuing Inquest.

This was in the same year as Ann’s ‘shotgun’ wedding, so I wove the movement of the seasons into the introduction to this incident:

As the wattles bloomed in the spring of 1822, Robert and Jane had another family crisis to worry about.

Wattles

Example 4, from my book ‘Southwark Luck’

This book covered the couple Charles Homer Martin and his wife Ann Forrester (in Part 1) and their 12 children (in Part 2).  Not much could be found on their youngest child Henry Edward Martin, 1848-1939, so his was the shortest chapter.

Facts utilised:

• His early life at Wilberforce was no mystery, and his life from 1869 to 1872 was discoverable through various 'wild west' droving events and court cases in outback NSW and western Queensland.
• Otherwise I could track him only a handful of times and in the briefest of ways: in 1877 electoral rolls with a residence at Cunnamulla; in 1888 when he signed a document in Wilberforce after his mother's death there; in 1890 droving a mob of sheep from Congie Station to Bourke; in 1891 electoral rolls with a residence at Thargomindah; in 1905 droving 4,000 sheep from Winton to Roma; in 1919 as a station hand at Banchory in Queensland; in 1925 as a labourer at Cunnamulla; in 1930 and 1936 (now aged 88!) as a labourer at Whyandra, between Cunnamulla and Charleville. 
• None of his written words
• No wife, no children.

These findings were mentioned in the book, but this is how I tried to convey him as a man:

After his brushes with the law between 1869 and 1872, Henry kept a low profile as far as the police were concerned. He simply kept on droving. 

His lifestyle is drawn perfectly in the famous poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. The scenery and the colours in the landscape satisfied the spiritual needs of men with an intense inner life, communing with their physical selves and with nature. Such men could enjoy Australia’s laconic style of outback mateship, when the barest minimum of words and a few yarns around the camp fire would suffice as communication.

Sunset at Welford, Outback QLD

Example 5, from ‘Margaret Flockton: A Fragrant Memory’

Facts utilised:

• Frank Flockton (then aged sixteen) and his three older brothers were in Melbourne in August 1852, four rich kids on an adventure from London
• Margaret Flockton with her parents Frank and Isabel arrived in Sydney in 1888 aboard Massilia. 
• As was the custom of the day, descriptions of the Massilia’s passage from London via various ports to Sydney were included in The Argus, Mon 17 Dec 1888, and SMH, Sat 22 Dec 1888
• The ship spent 3 days in Melbourne and, this being Australia's centenary year, I looked in Trove's newspaper file for events of likely interest happening in Melbourne at that time
• I was raised in Sydney and have made many trips on the Manly Ferry.

In ‘Margaret Flockton: A Fragrant Memory’, this is how I dealt with the time they spent in Melbourne:

During this three day stopover in Melbourne, Frank would have taken the opportunity to show his wife and daughter the site of his boyhood adventures. He would hardly have recognised the frontier town he had visited almost forty years earlier, during the frenzy of the gold rush. Melbourne’s wealth from gold meant that it was now one of the great and stylish cities of the world, with an international reputation as ‘marvellous Melbourne’. The Centennial International Exhibition was in full swing, marking one hundred years since Australia was settled by the British.

The published timetable for the ship, the time of year and, again, the centennial year of settlement meant that I could add some unexpected ‘minutiae’ to the Flocktons’ arrival at their destination as follows:

The final stage of their voyage of seven and a half weeks from London to Sydney took another two days:

Yesterday the Peninsular and Oriental Company's R.M.S. Massilia arrived from London, via ports. The passage out has been an average one as to weather, and the good name of the boat always ensures her a liberal support by the travelling public … Arrived at Melbourne on the 16th, and left December 19 for Sydney. Passed the Heads at 8.15, and at 4.20 p.m. Wilson's Promontory was abeam. December 20, at 7.40 a.m., Gabo abeam, and Sydney Heads were entered at 4.25 am. 21st.

One hopes that Margaret and her parents were up on deck, absorbing the magical dawn of a summer’s day over ‘the finest harbour in the world’. Thus it was described by Governor Arthur Phillip when the First Fleet arrived only one hundred years before the Flocktons.

S.S Massilia

I hope you agree that my choice of careful wording remained factual but escaped the 'boring' tag so often applied to family histories. For more details of these three books, and the other five books I have written, see my website. If you'd like to keep up to date with my posts on different topics to various blogs, you are invited to 'Like' my Author page on Facebook.