To Bore Or Not To Bore ... that is the question

“Reading family history books is boring” said just about everyone on the planet. Well, that’s not entirely true. For a genealogist, the initial frenzy of flipping through pages to find tidbits of information you don’t have is exciting. In fact, it’s almost deliriously exhilarating. But, after that, well…. let’s be honest…. do you read it from cover to cover all the time?

“Of course I do!” goes up the cry from the masses of genealogists everywhere. Why? You’ve skipped to all the bits you want to read, the rest is boring, isn’t it? “Not if it’s about my family!” Ahhh…. there’s the rub. No book is boring if you are in it. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be you in it. As long as you have some confirmed relationship with the subject of the book, then it’s not boring, it’s a classic of literature.

“Writing family history books is boring” said no genealogists, ever, as they have their heads down, gedcom files filtered and newspaper articles fluttering in the breeze. Well, that’s not entirely true either. The initial statement of “I’m going to write a book about this ancestor” is full of promise, adventure, visions of long nights of stained coffee cups and thoughtful poses by the keyboard…. but, well… let’s be honest….. it hardly ever comes off quite as expected. It’s not easy. Being an energising novelist is not something that naturally flows out of research. It takes hard work, perseverance, and quite a lot of quiet time in a life, which many people don’t have.

To come out with a work of historical “fact-ion” ala The Secret River by Kate Grenville is not an easy task, even for the most dedicated genealogist. We don’t all have that creative streak of being able to weave characters out of miniscule amounts of information. We don’t all have that imagination to create plots out of small articles. We don’t all have the money to retrace the steps they took in the countries they lived in. We don’t all have the tenacity to fore-go genuine researchers opinions and throw caution to the wind to create a story about “our” ancestors. We don’t all think we should.

There is nothing wrong with writing an historical novel. It’s a gift to be able to do it and to bring that work to a very wide audience worldwide, but, it’s not the only reason or way to write a genealogically based book. Nor is writing a boring fact filled research paper the only way to do it. If you do enough research. If you collate your information into an order that progresses through a life. If you gather enough primary and secondary sources, the story starts to write itself. A few snippets of information, like births, deaths and marriages isn’t enough to write a story but it may be enough for a school research paper.

Think of your own life and what has been documented in it. Your birth, your marriage, your school achievements, where you lived – all documentary ‘evidence’ of your life. Dig a bit further and you might find a newspaper article of when you swam the 100 metres at the school swimming carnival and came third and got a ribbon for your efforts because the real swimmers of the school were on an excursion that day. There may even be a photo of you in your swimming costume with the other kids. So a genealogist in the future could write about your unfortunate life which didn’t allow you to compete against Ian Thorpe at the Olympics. You suddenly become labelled without the researcher actually knowing the slightest thing about you.

But that’s not what your life has been about. There is nothing documented about that park down the road from your house that you played in as a child, or the corner shop you bought your Saturday bag of lollies in for 6d. while Dad listened to the horse races on the old transistor radio. There’s no mention of the long walks to school because the school bus didn’t go as far as your house which was on a dirt road at the back of the town. No one documented that you didn’t have electricity that far out of town so you had to chop wood after school each day for the copper and the bath water to get heated. These are the things that made your life. Not the swimming carnival.

So how do we know these things about our ancestors? We don’t… unless we look more closely at the areas they lived in, the eras they lived in, the society that lived in. And then we need to think and empathise before we start professing to “know” them in any way. We have to really “research”. When you do that, the life begins to come through the pages of your documents with very little creative effort needed. You have to put in more effort to your research to be able to say you can write a book that a genealogist will want to read from cover to cover.

You have to Dig Deeper. You have to Learn More. Anyone can do it. It just takes dedication to the memory of the subject of your story. Go on, your coffee cup and keyboard are waiting….