The challenge of finding your direction as a family storyteller
As I mull over the best way to write about our family history, I’ve realized what one of my biggest stumbling blocks has been: I don’t know where to begin.
Telling a family history is actually telling a story in reverse, starting from the present and working backward in time. That is a very difficult way to tell a story! What story begins “The End” and ends with “Once upon a time?”
If I were to truly start at “the end,” I would write my way backwards through my life and then to my parents’ marriage. From there, would I work backward through each of their lives, omitting everything that happened once mine began? And how would I choose which of my parents to start with?
And where is the beginning? There is no single beginning: a person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, etc. If you’ve been able to follow the research trail back hundreds of years, there are potentially hundreds of “Once upon a times,” each leading down a different branch of the family tree.
But structure isn’t my only stumbling block. I’ve come to the surprising realization that the more I’ve had a personal relationship with someone, the harder it is to write about their life.
When someone is little more than a name in a record book, the facts are all you have. But when you’ve actually known a person, the challenge becomes deciding what to leave out. How do you reduce a lifetime of memories into a few paragraphs? How do you decide which stories best capture who they were?
I knew all four of my grandparents, in varying degrees, and each one led a genuinely fascinating life. Their births spanned nearly a quarter century and they couldn’t have come from more different worlds. Stephen Carroll was born in 1891in Buffalo, New York — a booming city at the crossroads of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Pauline Umaceny was born in 1896 into the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the most densely packed neighborhood in American history. Paul Boatman was born in 1909 in Mattoon, a small town in rural Illinois whose identity was built around the railroad passenger and freight lines that intersected there. And Muriel Mashaw, the youngest, was born in 1914 in southeastern Oklahoma — a place that, just seven years earlier, had still been designated “Indian Territory.” Four distinct worlds, converging to create the family history I inherited.
Trying to fulfill everyone’s request to “just, please, write it all down” is a daunting task — but the only way out is through. So I’m going to do what I’ve been putting off: pick a grandparent and jump in.
For privacy reasons, I’m keeping my own life and my parents’ out of this narrative, which means I’m starting with that grandparent generation. And that’s not a bad place to begin — these are the four people whose worlds were so different, yet somehow converged to create the family history we all inherited.
So here’s my question for you: which of them should I write about first?
Stephen Wall Carroll, born December 31, 1891, in Buffalo, New York.
Pauline Anne Umaceny, born November 29, 1896, in Manhattan.
Paul Henry Boatman, born October 27, 1909, in Mattoon, Illinois.
Muriel Ellen Mashaw, born May 8, 1914, in Hugo, Oklahoma.
Leave a comment and let me know who you’d like to hear about first. I can’t promise I’ll follow the vote — but I’m genuinely curious which of them catches your attention.