Concluding a Narrative Writing Project

 

AI Generated

At 5:51 p.m. on 1 February, I finished the final narrative for my latest work, Echoes of Britannia.

It was a genuinely momentous moment. For the first time, I have written a narrative for every ancestor I can currently identify. That mattered to me more than I can easily explain. I wanted to leave my research to my descendants in a way that restores my forebears’ humanity after generations of being flattened into little more than names and dates inside a software program.

Treating their lives seriously mattered. Some of them made choices I wouldn’t have made. Some lived in ways that feel foreign or uncomfortable to modern sensibilities. But they deserved to be acknowledged. If not for them, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.

I wanted to record their lives in a durable format, so I chose to present these stories as bound books. Actually, ten bound books. Yes, I did get a little carried away.

When I began sketching ideas last March for a book about my husband’s and my British ancestors, I had no idea how much research I had accumulated over the years. And, in all honesty, some of it was utter garbage. Early on, I trusted unsourced online trees. Some “sources” later turned out to be incorrect or wildly speculative. Pruning my tree was not fun, but it was necessary. I wanted a stable, explainable record; one where the evidence supports the tree, not the other way around. Family history shouldn’t rest entirely on folklore, though the tall tales sometimes earned a place, clearly labeled as such.

Initially, I imagined two volumes: one covering our five primary British ancestral lines as they extended into the United States, and a second devoted to their allied families “across the pond.” That plan didn’t last long. The records I had gathered, baptismal, marriage, and burial registers; land charters; court cases as plaintiffs and defendants; censuses taken hundreds of years ago, contained far too many compelling details to compress into just two books.

As the stories grew, so did the project. Two volumes became ten.
Volume 1 focuses on our family in the New World.
Volume 2 covers our medieval gentry.
Volumes 3 and 4 record the lives of knights and barons.

I thought that might be the end but I quickly learned our “British” ancestors were not always British. Volumes 5 and 6 explore our Anglo-Norman families who arrived in the British Isles around the time of William the Conqueror, who, somewhat astonishingly, turns out to be one of our many great-grandfathers. His lineage alone justified Volume 7: British High Nobility.

Even that wasn’t the end. Our family tree is less a tree than a bush. The final three volumes follow far-flung Continental European ancestors whose descendants eventually migrated to Great Britain.

Along the way, I’ve learned an extraordinary amount about historical eras I once barely understood. I’ll be sharing some of those discoveries here on the blog over the coming weeks.

Although the narrative writing is now complete, there is still plenty of work ahead before publication, editing, cleaning thousands of footnotes, writing an index (ugh), adding photographs, and sourcing every one of them. Still, the hardest part is finished.

And that feels pretty darn good.