Ancestors

Mar 192010
 

Archive of My First Blog — 11

Ancestors
March 4, 2009

 

My new novel spins off from the true stories of some of my ancestors who were members of the Utopian Oneida Community in the 19th century, including William Jones, my great-great-grand-father, whose grave in Baldwinsville, NY, is pictured here. With a few riddles about him left to be solved, I signed up for a few months research at Ancestry.com, which has placed online many of the genealogical resources of the Mormon Church. Right off the bat I found mygggrandfather on the family tree of a fellow from Owego, NY, who turns out to be a third cousin. My great-grandfather, George Washington Jones, born 1850, was the younger brother of his great-grandfather, John Morgan Jones, born 1838. How cool is that? The records available on Ancestry.com are amazing. The census records of Bristol, England, provided the address where my great-great-great-grandmother lived in 1841 and 1851, after her son- in-law, William Jones, brought his family to America. From U.S. census records I discovered that the founders of our Quinn line in the US were Irish speakers when they arrived and confirmed that the date was 1832 and pre-famine. I am not a great one for a long string of begats and finding out that way back whenever I shared an ancestor with Charlemagne. But I love figuring out who my forebears were as people, and where and how they lived. My ggggrandmother was a laundress and she lived on Tankard’s Close. Bristol, here I come!

Best Laid Plans

Mar 192010
 

Archive of My First Blog – 10

Best Laid Plans
January 30, 2009

Well, that was fast, wasn’t it? January, I mean. It’s always hectic for the Barnard clan, what with three of our four birthdays between Dec. 30 and Jan. 20. Add to that the must-watch hoopla over Obama’s inauguration, an oh-so-early tax calendar to enable timely filing for financial aid for Nellie’s law school plus the annual three-day ski trip, and I guess it’s a wonder I got any fiction work done at all! Two important breakthroughs in fact. First, structure. How to tell the story is a BIG question for any novel. And it’s often very hard to answer. Not that I actually have. All I’ve done is eliminate all but two possibilities — a conventional approach with intercutting stories told in third-person-limited points-of-view or the riskier choice of three consecutive first-person memoirs. In order to narrow down the options, I had to figure out exactly where my story begins and a bit amorphously where it ends. That is now done, and I will proceed to write the beginning both ways — intercutting 3rd vs. consecutive 1st — to figure out which best tells the story. Second breakthrough, character. I’m working on three, each an actual 30-something woman who lived in a real Utopian commune in the 1870s, two of whom are my ancestors. Two of the women I’ve long understood, but one of my ancestors remained a bit of a mystery. I knew a lot of facts about her life but never seemed able to penetrate the veil of time to understand her viscerally. Then one afternoon an image of Emma arose in my mind, an image of her in the most unlikely place and circumstance — a real place and a real circumstance in her life but something I’d almost completely discounted until that moment. Yet there she was, and in that moment, for the first time, Emma became flesh and blood. Lightning strikes, problem solved. She’s a terrific character. That’s the magic that keeps me writing.

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