Quirky Genealogy

Every writer knows that the title of a book and the picture on the cover is crucial in attracting readers. Family history writers, too, are in the business of attracting readers, although their genre is a difficult one. A widespread view that family history books are 'boring' means its authors are too often bashful, humble and self-effacing about their work.

Stop right there .... we could be injecting a bit of fun into our titles.

Here are some witty examples from some published genealogical material:

• A Lot about a Little, edited by John G Jennings
• Over-Halling the Colony, George Hall - Pioneer, edited by Russell Mackenzie Warner
• The family of Mann, by James Dargan
• Pickett lines : descendants of Samuel Piggot/Pickett and Mary Thompson, by Penny Ferguson
• Sailing on .... The Hibbs Line, by Allen Maunder
• Lore of the Roses - Thomas and Jane Rose Family Descendants
• In Morse Code: tracing the family histories of James, Charles & Edwin Morse who migrated to Van Diemen's Land between 1842 & 1855, by Alan F. Dyer.
• Unravelling the Code: The Coads and Coodes of Cornwall and Devon, by Dr Joe Flood
• Can't See the Woods .... for the Woods, the search for one Henry Woods, by Catherine Meyrick

Think of the fun you could have with book titles for the following family names:

• Case Studies
• The Wide Brown Land
• Keen & Able
• White Lies
• Black Humour
• Ridge Lines
• Farr Horizons.

We family history researchers already know how to inject a bit of fun into, and find joy from, our work and how to share a bit of humour with others. For instance residents of Australia who were born overseas, yet the details of how or when they arrived can't be traced, are called ‘the swimmers’. Australians do love irony.

Some family history researchers actually make you laugh out loud. At an archives office in Sydney I’ll never forget one woman who discovered something unpalatable, a lie told to her by her father. She slammed the microfiche slide reader shut and shouted ‘If he was alive, I’d kill him'. Lovely black humour.

I'm trying to practise what I preach with my next book, 'Sentenced to Debt', due out in a few weeks. It's much more than a family history and is intended for general readers of Australian history. I've found a relevant cartoon-like picture to work into the cover. It depicts a scene at the Old Bailey in 1807, where a famous barrister named William Garrow was a noted defence counsel from 1783.

More miseries. Being nervous and cross examined by Mr Garrow, 1 Apr 1807, one of 49 etchings by Thomas Rowlandson, published on 1 Dec 1808 in ‘The Miseries of Human Life’ by R Ackermann, Repository of Arts, 101 Strand, London

While the book's title is not humorous, neither is it boring. It's somewhat quirky, as it has three meanings.

• It's a play on words for the First Fleet convict Robert Forrester who was 'sentenced to death' at the Old Bailey in 1783. 
• It describes the outcome of Robert's life in Australia, virtually sentenced to debt, resulting in a unique case study of an archetypal 'Aussie battler' coping with a string of natural disasters, and 
• It recognises the debt all Australians must acknowledge as Aboriginal land was claimed by the Crown according to the terra nullius principle and given away, sold or leased to incoming settlers.

To purchase this forthcoming book, due out on 18 May 2020, click here.

Writing Family History to be Read

'Writing to be Read' was the focus of a talk on 15 November at the GSV by Richard Broome, Emeritus Professor of History at La Trobe University. The author of many academic works, he is also the co-author of 'Entwined Lives', a family history for his wife's family.

If he writes family history even half as well as he speaks, we audience members were lucky to be the beneficiaries of his advice.

He began with the assumption that your writing needs to have an audience – not just you. You need to decide who your real or imagined reader will be and write for that reader.

You also need to decide how you will position yourself within the story. Will you be an anonymous story teller, objective and distant, or will you make this story personal to you?

To engage others with your story, you need to find the fire, rekindle the delight and the spirit of enquiry that you felt at the start of your journey into family history, before you spent years bogged down in the digging process.

As you begin the serious business of writing down the story you've finally excavated from various sources, you need to decide how to begin the story. At the end? At a watershed moment? At the time of a significant encounter? You need to imagine your story with a stimulating title, a table of contents containing interesting chapter headings and a desired word count and completion date. This overview approach will help retain your focus as you write. Professor Broome told us that once he commits to the actual writing of history he treats it as a 'project management' task.

We all know that writing is not easy, with different genres of writing containing their own challenges. He compared the writing of History and Genealogy with the writing of Fiction in the following way:

History and Genealogy is easier than Fiction in that

• writer’s block is easier to avoid, 

• facts exist to be explained and 

• the storyline is more evident.  

History and Genealogy is harder than Fiction because

• you cannot make it up, 

• you have to be able to see the wood for the trees, needing to create order out of chaotic facts, like solving a jigsaw puzzle, and 

• you need to provide evidence for your narrative.

Genealogy has rigour but it creates the 'tyranny of evidence', or 'death by certificate'. To make it more digestible, the family history writer has to go further and create a narrative, give the story context, use themes to drive it forward. The Professor admitted with a grin that after he’d finished helping his father-in-law David Donnan write 'Entwined Lives', he realised he'd inadvertently ended up with the structure used in the romance genre: The encounter, The yearning, The barriers, The estrangement, The lost chance, The circuit breaker, The new beginning (Happy Ever After).

The ideas in Professor Broome's one hour talk resonated with me. I definitely write with the desire to be read, the desire to engage my readers in something interesting. Long ago I worked in the finance sector and realised that I quite enjoyed explaining complicated topics in international finance like the Euromarket to the general public. Some of my colleagues sneered when several articles were picked up by what they called 'the gutter press' but it pleased me to reach 'the man in the street'.

Since then, my personal writing quest has shifted to learning the craft of telling a good non-fiction family story. I've been a member of the Writers Circle of the Genealogical Society of Victoria for many years. As there are many love stories in family histories I also joined Romance Writers of Australia for some years and more recently the Historical Novel Society of Australasia.

In these groups I've learned much, including the need for good openings and conclusions. For example, my book 'Robert Forrester, First Fleeter' opens with:

'When Robert Forrester moved to London in the early 1780s, he was a ‘nobody’ in terms of documented history. The events of one night in April 1783 turned him into a ‘somebody’. 

Several hundred pages and forty-odd years later, the concluding lines say:

'Robert Forrester struggled to make much impact in his world during his own lifetime. He would have been startled to think that a book would ever be written about him. He would have been a ‘nobody’ had he remained among the masses at home, but he ended his life as a ‘somebody’, one of the resilient if inadvertent European founders of modern Australia.'

The Forrester book has been popular and has been reprinted twice since it was first published in 2009. It has now been completely overhauled and will soon be republished as 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter', still with the original opening and closing lines. These lines have proved to engage the interest of the reader from the start to the finish of this particular book. Trying to 'write family history to be read' is well worth the effort involved.

Lessons in Writing Family History

The recent Historical Novel Society Australasia Conference in Parramatta, NSW (University of Western Sydney, 25-27 October 2019) was well–organised, well-attended, reasonably-priced and a great way to meet congenial people who like history and like writing about it. 

A Convivial Gathering at Dinner, HNSA 2019

Among the offerings of the HNSA’s three-day event, I was attracted to the workshop ‘Writing Family History’. The blurb for this session said ‘Writing family history demands curiosity, research, interviewing, writing, and critical thinking. How do you develop the research skills of a researcher, the investigative skills of a journalist, and the imaginative empathy of a creative writer? How do you deal with dead ends, false leads, and too much/too little information? This practical workshop with Paula Morris will address how to approach researching and telling true stories, with writing and research exercises, and discussion of excellent published examples.’ 

Prof Paula Morris at HNSA 2019

Paula Morris was also the keynote speaker for the weekend, wittily remarking that ‘history is slippery’ (the local Rugby League team is known as the Parramatta Eels). Three other useful comments from her keynote speech were: ‘History is a spiral – we carry our pasts into our future’; ‘History is people – not abstract, but personal and particular’; ‘History is Point of View’. 

Professor Morris teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland and her published works include ‘Rangatira’, an award-winning account of a Maori aspect of her family history. (I bought a copy of the book but haven’t had time to read it.) In the workshop session she did not disappoint us. For a start, she admitted what all of us family history researchers know: the research process is often much more enjoyable than the writing part. 

As writers our only tools are language and imagination. The way we use our words matters. In the current ‘information age’, people are deluged with written words and spoken sounds but don’t necessarily grasp and absorb their meaning and a ‘knowledge age’ eludes us. Writers have to try to convey meaning for the stories they wish to tell. 

History is made up of a lot of fallible people but something drives us, as an author, to make a choice about who and what we write about. Central to the story is its Point of View (POV), through which everything is filtered. Which character will tell the story and will that character write in the first person, as ‘you’ (very distracting), or in the third person (either close or limited, or as an omniscient narrator)? Once you’ve decided, stay with it. The next important decision relates to the story’s structure, that being the great challenge in how to tell the story. 

In her workshop, Paula Morris focused mainly on two types of family history writing, Creative Non Fiction and Memoir. Creative Non Fiction books based on research (like ‘Rangatira’) are very different from Memoirs, which rely on personal memory, often partial and faulty. As an example she pointed out the significant discrepancies in the accounts of childhood given by siblings close in age and growing up in the same family. As authors, our ethics count and we have to make clear whether the story is fact or fiction. In Creative Non Fiction she emphasised the importance of truth telling. Do not make things up. Focusing on a character and a setting for the story you are trying to tell does not mean lying or making things up, especially dialogue. Paula emphasised that last point. 

To write an engaging family history, we have to be able to make an imaginative leap into the past. We have to enter ‘the dream of the story’, as Paula Morris put it. As a writer, how do we get close to that experience? 

Authenticity is important: when writing about the past you need to get the details right. You also need to keep the story going without stopping to explain things with an info-dump: just bring in historical texture as part of the story. Texture includes demonstrating social class, which had a big impact on people in the past. To aid reader understanding you need to choose between authentic vocabulary versus modern language, but use language believable for the era. Idiom is quite a useful way to jump-start creating another era in a convincing way. 

Dr Kelly Gardiner. who chaired several sessions including ‘Learning from History’, asked her three panel members ‘what is your story about?’ They answered. She promptly asked them ‘what is it really about?’ Again they answered and then she asked her third question ‘what is it really, really about?’ After a bit of head-scratching came reactions like ‘quite a lot of anger at what happened in the past’, ‘a sense of rebellion at what we’ve lost’, ‘the resonance of place’. 

Dr Kelly Gardiner (left) with 'The Silver Screen' panel, HNSA 2019

By the end of the Conference, the reflections of these and other speakers brought out the interesting observation that it is often our grandmothers who have subtly influenced our view of the world and what is important to us. What’s more, we need a good emotional connection to a place in order to write about it, as we can’t help our feelings coming out in our choice of words and the reader picks up on this. 

To conclude, I learned on the weekend from Paula Morris and others that you need to embark on your family history writing project with ‘a violent curiosity’. Otherwise, as a writer, you cannot sustain the effort and time required to complete your story. This sentiment resonates with me as I reach the end of a long road re-writing the story of 'Robert Forrester, First Fleeter'. Almost a different story now, it will soon be republished as 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter'. 

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.

Writing a Brief, Finished Piece

Family history research can go on and on, without any obvious ‘output’. Are your relatives tired of hearing about the people you are researching? Are their eyes glazing over? Are they tired of hearing about the story you’ll write ‘soon’. With family history, it is hard to know when to call a halt to your research. Sometimes you need an incentive to finish something and see a result for your efforts.

Writing a 1,000-2,000 word article for publication can be just what you need to stop procrastinating and galvanise yourself to action. Note the operative words provided by the headline. Writing. Brief. Finished. This is your challenge.

The need to tell a good and interesting story within a limited word count provides very good training for any writer, especially a family history writer. The task requires you to: 

• Focus on the story – what is it? 
• Focus on your principal character, with no superfluous digressions about other characters. 
• Organise and shape your work into a coherent structure. 
• Avoid verbosity, by using succinct wording.

There are many potential awards for articles about distinctive individuals or stories within your family. You could choose any one or more of the following:

•       ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, for 2,000-5,000 words

•       Banjo Patterson Writing Awards, for 3,000 words

•       Cancer Council Arts Awards, for 1,000 words

•       Federation of Family History Societies, UK, for 1,000 words

•       Henry Lawson Society Literary Awards, for 1,000 words

•       International Society of Family History Writers & Editors, American award, for 5,000 words

•       Janet Reakes Memorial Award, for 2,000 words

•    Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards, Melbourne, includes awards for 3,000 words (short story) or 10,000 words (narrative non-fiction)

•       Rolf Boldrewood Literary Awards, for 3,000 words

•       Story Writing & Art Competition, for 3,000 words

•       The Stringybark Short Story Award, for 1,500 words

As an example, let’s consider the requirements for the Janet Reakes Memorial Award, which I entered in 2011. The topic was ‘My Most Unusual Ancestor’. The guidelines for that particular competition specified an article presenting an interesting biography, yet also explaining the genealogical steps involved in 'uncovering' the story, all within a maximum of 2,000 words, excluding citations. Articles not fully referenced would be automatically disqualified, making this a competition perfectly suited to the rigorous ‘academic’ standards demanded of a family history writer.

After reviewing all my possible ancestors, I decided to write about a certain Dr George Young, c.1726-1803, the man who established the western hemisphere’s first botanic garden, on the Island of St Vincent in the 1760s. Exploring the history of the Caribbean at this time, I’d compiled research material totalling 15,700 words. Trying to focus on what seemed important in George Young’s story, I culled the material to an article of 7,206 words (Competition Draft No 1).

After further consideration of what was specifically relevant to Young, and the events which moved his personal story forward, Competition Draft No 2 contained 2,039 words. Yet this draft was all about him; it was his short-form biography. I had not explained why I’d chosen him as my most unusual ancestor, and how I’d uncovered his story. In other words, I had not addressed the guidelines for the competition.

To make sufficient space for these issues within the overall word limit, more editing work was needed. Every ‘point’ brought into the story and needing explanation was omitted if not essential. Strict attention was paid to saving words by deleting padding & digressions. Some examples of the culling process follow, where 57 of the words which were deleted from Draft 2 are in bold script:

• Britain’s Seven Years’ War against the French commenced in 1756, soon after George Young graduated as a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow in 1754. His education proves that his family had money but his name is a ‘common’ one and it’s frustrating that his origins remain unclear, except that he was born around 1726.
• In 1765 Governor Robert Melville visited St Vincent. Melville had also studied medicine and was a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.
• The garden had high strategic priority, facilitating the economic development of Britain’s overseas possessions by allowing experiments in acclimatization of basic foodstuffs and medicinal plants to be undertaken in the tropics. Accordingly, its control was entrusted to the Secretary at War in London, to whom regular reports were to be transmitted. (NOTE - There was no need to include this fact in the body of the article as it appears as an endnote, not counted in the word limit.)
• His will also named three children, George, William and Sarah, in that order. The George Young buried on St Vincent on 8 June 1767 may have been a fourth child, placing the surviving George’s birth around 1768 to 1770 but no baptism has been found for George Jnr.

By examining meanings and rewording for more concise expression of the same ideas, many more words were saved. Consider the following paragraph, for example:

•       While British attention was focused on the American War of Independence, the French gained an advantage in the competition for the sugar riches of the Caribbean and recaptured their old possession. Dr George Young was a member of the Council of St Vincent when it capitulated to the French in June 1779. British forces retreated from the island and local farmers began encroaching on the garden, growing cotton and tobacco. A hurricane in October 1780 wreaked further destruction on Young’s creation. He now resided with his wife and family at St Lucia, providing medical services as Physician (a more senior medical role than Surgeon) to both the Windward and Leeward Islands. Late in 1783, after the war ended, Young returned to St Vincent on half-pay, as was customary during peace time. In 1784 he was approaching sixty……..

The 137 word paragraph (above) became the next paragraph, with 91 words:

•       While the British were diverted by the American War of Independence, the French pounced, and Dr George Young was a member of the Council of St Vincent when it capitulated to the French in June 1779. British forces retreated to nearby St Lucia, where Young was on the army payroll as Physician. Local farmers on St Vincent began encroaching on the garden, growing cotton and tobacco. A hurricane in October 1780 wreaked further destruction on Young’s creation. When the war ended the ageing Young returned to St Vincent on half pay……….

The culling process freed up enough space for the extra words needed to satisfy the competition guidelines. The article’s final structure, when analysed, comprised roughly 25% on the ancestor selection process (woven into the story), about 25% on the ancestor search process (also woven into the story), and about 50% on Young himself. The endnotes were quite extensive but were excluded from the word count.

Competition Draft No 3 contained 1,999 words. It was emailed to several people as a check on its clarity of meaning. After I’d culled so much, could they easily follow the resulting story? A few useful suggestions led to several minor adjustments.

Then came the final test: meeting the competition deadline by submitting the entry on time. No more dithering, tweaking or refining could occur. On the day before entries closed, I pressed the ‘send’ button and hoped for the best, feeling grateful that I’d learned a great deal about tightening up the purpose and focus of any piece of writing. The process has value for all writers.

This article, based on a Workshop given by Louise Wilson to the GSV Writers’ Circle on 4 September 2013, was published in Ancestor, Quarterly Journal of The Genealogical Society of Victoria Inc, Vol 32, Issue 1, March 2014, pp 38-9

Non-Fiction Detail

As a non-fiction family history writer, the issue of an appropriate level of detail is something I grapple with constantly - how much is too much?

For example, when reading Brenda Niall's (non-fiction) biography of Georgiana Macrae, Georgiana, I frequently found myself bogged down in some very dense material and carried forward in the progression of the story only by the chapter headings. Yet Ken Follett's (fictional) novel The Pillars of the Earth, containing masses of detail about the techniques used to build medieval cathedrals, managed to keep my interest engaged for over 1,000 pages.

This raises another vexing issue - the need to balance 'explanations' against the overall length of a book. I belong to a family history writing group, where the members provide each other with an informal critiquing service and constantly demand that more information be provided: more descriptive details of a place, or an occupation, etc. This form of micro-analysis might improve one page, but taken to an extreme will make for a very long and boring book at the macro-level. Is this level of research effort and detail warranted if there's not much of a story to tell in the first place?

As a writer I try never to forget the golden rule I learned as a maths teacher many years ago - the need for each lesson plan to be built around conveying and reinforcing one idea at a time. Writers also need to be rigorous in their self-assessment of the intellectual idea or concept they are trying to convey in any one publication - its underlying premise.

Such considerations guide my decisions about the actual content of any single book. Sometimes I follow the more traditional format for a family history, providing short snippets about individuals while following a family line down through many generations, as with the Pierssené and Dennis books. In other cases, where I have a great deal to say about an interesting individual, I narrow the focus of the entire book to that one person. Robert Forrester, First Fleeter and Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter are examples. Southwark Luck adopted a hybrid format - with half the book devoted to one man and his wife and the remainder telling much shorter stories about each of their children. Each of the latter chapters could have been much longer, with more extensive research, but then the book overall would have been far too long.

Trying to streamline a story by shortening (or removing) unnecessary descriptions, by moving extraneous detail to appendices and endnotes, or by deleting material altogether, creates a whole new set of problems - will the readers follow your train of thought? As one of my writing friends expressed so succinctly: 'For every shortcut, a reasonable question follows' (in the minds of readers).

All of this just goes to show that the act of writing a book is a high-level intellectual endeavour, requiring the writer to make constant value judgments about the words being committed to the page and the impact of each word on the reader.

Library Copies

Writing any book takes a great deal of time and only a few become best sellers, so most writers do not derive a living wage from their book-writing efforts. Yet books are important to any culture, especially those telling a story of importance to that culture.

The Commonwealth Government recognises the unremunerative aspect of literary endeavours in our small national market place via certain schemes to support the work of Australian writers. The minimum requirement for an author to share in the payments under these schemes is that his or her book needs to be held in at least 30 public libraries around Australia.

Libraries tend to order only those books they think will be of interest to their own local 'constituents'. It is difficult to get the message across to many librarians that men who arrived on the First and Second Fleets have descendants all over Australia, not just in the environs of Sydney. Likewise, the descendants of Cornish immigrants like the Dennis family are spread all over Australia.

Hence this message. If you enjoyed any of my non-fiction family histories and would like me to keep on plugging away at producing them, your help as a 'salesperson' would be much appreciated. Please show your own personal copy to your local librarian, point out the relevance to your local community, and request that a library copy be ordered. Thanks a million!