THE STORY

                             

THE CHARACTERS
Jane's Genealogy

                                                                WRITING THE STORY

I never knew my grandparents - paternal or maternal. The curiosity about those four people from whom I descended remains a lingering curiosity. What were they like? Am I like them in any way? I often wondered what it would have been like to sit at the foot of my grandmother and ask her about life in the 1920s. And how it was that she came to be a model? I wondered why my great-grandfather moved the family from Boston to Del Rio, Texas right before she was born. That act, at least, gave me and my grandmother something in common – we are both Texans by birth. And then, when I considered older generations, I imagined what it must have been like for my great-great-great grandfather to witness the Boston Fire of 1872. From family stories, I knew he owned the only mercantile left standing in Boston and received payments for lumber in animals and jewels from his customers.  
 
There was less information available to me about my mother’s side of the family. I knew from old photos that my grandmother (left, with my grandfather on their wedding day) married a man years older than she when she was barely eighteen. What was it about him that captured her heart soon after they met?


So you can understand how it came to be that I had more questions about my family than answers. But I did have a thick file of genealogy research and records dating back to the 1500s, many possessions, antiques and photos once owned by past generations. In fact, one of those photos spoke directly to me in a fashion. I didn't realize this until I was an adult, but my great aunt had written a note to me on the back of a photo of my paternal grandmother (right; 1930): "Karen, This lady was your grandmother Dorothy (Dot to us all.) She had a soft voice. Yours reminds me of it."  If my voice is like that of a grandmother I never knew, what other traits do we share?

And if all the photos I have of my ancestors had similar notes written on the back, what clues about my family would they reveal? Further still, what events did the antiques passed down to me witness? If they could speak, what stories would they tell? 



Of particular interest was the family trunk (left). This trunk was first owned by my great grandfather, passed to his son, then to my father and now to me. For some odd reason, this trunk was in my childhood bedroom from an early age. Though topped with a menagerie of stuffed animals, it always seemed rather mysterious to my young mind. Perhaps I viewed it with a child's sense of the famous magical wardrobe in the classic C.S. Lewis story. Could it open up to another world? I never opened the trunk and my father never offered to so it seemed all the more mysterious to my childlike imagination. What was inside? What had been inside? 

These ideas were the sparks of inspired curiosity that would form the genesis of JANEOLOGY. I should mention, of course, that I have only used objects from my family history to inspire this story. All else is fictional.

 

FEATURE ARTICLES AND REVIEWS FOR JANEOLOGY

The Genealogue - Genealogist Has a Novel Idea - http://www.genealogue.com/2008/04/genealogist-has-novel-idea.html

FAMILY PHOTOS

The images that made me ask the question: Who were my ancestors and what were their stories?