The Story Only You Can Tell

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. The hedge display has moved on to the white frothy flower of the Elder around us here in County Cork, and the evenings have stretched long and golden. I’m sitting with a cup of Lyons’ tea and I hope you’ll join me, with whatever you fancy yourself, as we start into today’s letter. How are things in your part of the world this morning?

I received the following message recently from Ellie in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I think many of our readers will recognise themselves in it.

“Mike, I’ve been researching my Irish family for nearly six years now. I have the certificates, the census pages, the ship manifest, even a well-stocked timeline I built for my great-grandmother Bridget. My grandchildren are getting older and I would so love to write Bridget’s story down for them before it’s too late. The thing is, every time I sit at the keyboard I freeze. I look at all these dates and facts and I think, where on earth do I even begin? I feel as though I need to know everything about her life before I can write a single word, and of course I never will. So I end up writing nothing at all. How do you deal with a situation like this?”

Oh Ellie, I have read your message a few times now, and I’d say there are thousands of readers nodding along to every line of what you say. Here is the thing I most want to say to you, and I want to say it directly, because it’s the very thing that frees everyone who hears it. You do not have to tell the whole life. Because you cannot, and you were never meant to.

THE TRAP OF WRITING ABOUT A WHOLE LIFE

The record research stage trains us, without ever meaning to, into a particular way of thinking. We become collectors as we gather the birth, the marriage, the addresses, the children, the crossing, the death. We line them up on a timeline, neat as can be, and we feel quite reasonably that the life is the sum of all those facts.

But a life is not a timeline. A timeline is more like a train timetable, and nobody feels a surge of emotion and adventure as they read a train timetable! 

So, when Ellie sits down and feels that she must somehow consider the whole of Bridget’s seventy years before she can write, she is asking herself to do an impossible thing, and so of course ends up writing nothing. The blank page wins, it usually does, when we let it square up to the whole of a life.

However, I have learned the hard way that the way past it is almost embarrassingly simple. You don’t start with the life, you start with a single scene.

ONE ORDINARY MORNING IN A LONG LIFE

To show you what I mean, I’ll use an example of my own. One of my great-granduncles was Patrick Collins, and the bones of his story are as follows. He was born and reared in the townland of Arduramore, near Ballydehob in West Cork, and in October of 1883 he sailed for Chicago. That is the timeline. Three facts – a train timetable.

Over the past two years I have been writing a book based on the timelines of 33 of my own ancestors – and his story is included. I did not begin with his birth, or his death, or the great adventure of his emigration. I began with one morning, the morning he left home for good.

I don’t know the exact hour, and I don’t know what was said in that house, or whether his mother stood at the half-door or could not bear to. But I know that townland, because I have stood in it. I know what a West Cork October smells like, the new turf smoke, the heavy dew, the blackberries gone over in the ditches. I know the road he would have walked on leaving the townland, because the road is still there. I know he would not have eaten much, because nobody could on a morning like that. And I know that whatever he carried, it was not heavy, because there was not much to carry.

So, as I write about the feelings of those who were there that morning, I know they come from my imagination, but every fact beneath those feelings is both true and earned. And from that single morning, that one scene of a young man’s boots on a wet road, a sense of the whole man begins to materialise.

That is the secret, Ellie. You do not write Bridget’s life, but you write about Bridget on a single morning or an evening, and you let the life gather around her.

HOW TO FIND YOUR SCENE.

So here is what I would say to you, and to anyone sitting frozen in front of a static timeline. Go back to that timeline, and instead of looking for the shape of the whole, look for a single date you can feel inside. It might be the morning she headed across the fields to school with her brother, or maybe a visit to the local market town. Maybe you see the day she was married and you imagine the scene in her house on that morning. How about the morning she had to see off one of her own children as they emigrated to America – wondering whether she would ever see them again?  Or the day a letter would have arrived from America.

Choose one scene that grabs your fancy. Learn the facts of the time and the place, but then set them aside and inhabit the feelings with your imagination and words. You stop being a researcher for an evening, and become something closer to a neighbour leaning on the gate, asking the small questions and acknowledging life through her eyes. What was the weather like? What smells came from the kitchen? Who else was in the house, and how old were they that day? What would she have been able to see from the door? You will be astonished how much of this you already know, buried in your research or your imagination, and until now sitting silently on a recorded chart.

You will not be making it up, you are doing what the historians call “informed imagination”. Every detail rests on something real, the place, the season, the records, the way of life. You are simply turning the facts into a lived experience, so even a child can see a person through them.

Write that one scene. Aim for five hundred words and no more. When it is done, you’ll not have a finished family history, but will have something far more valuable. You will have begun, and the next scene is always, always easier than the first.

As I mentioned above, this is the very thing I have been wrestling with myself in a book I’m slowly writing for my own grandchildren, thirty-three of these ancestral lives told not in timelines but as stories. More on that book another day, but for now I want to free you from an impossible task Ellie, and hand you one that is possible in its place.

Pick a morning in your ancestor’s life. Stand in it and write what you can see, smell, hear – you choose. The grandchildren will not remember recited dates in a family history. But they will remember the morning Bridget saw her youngest leaving home for the last time, and the boots on the wet road, and the fact that you were the one who told them. That is the story only you can tell.

So, here’s a question for all of our readers this week. If you sat down tonight, which ancestor and which single day or hour in their life would you choose to stand inside? Not write about, just stand inside for the moment?

Do tell me about it in the comments section below.

Slán for now,

Mike.