You know where you can find some really amazing stories?
Your grandparents.
Your great-grandparents.
And so forth.
I’ve been up to my elbows in family history work lately, formatting a life history of my grandparents, typing up various life sketches from generations back, translating German letters from my aunt’s ancestors, scrapbooking, and exploring the endless documents available on Ancestry.com.
The longer I work, the better I get to know these people who came before me, and the more interesting stories I find and file away to tell my children later. The boy who stole his teacher’s whip during church and chopped it into tiny pieces, the man who was shot through seven times and survived to pass on his faith to his family and countless others he served throughout his life, the woman who kept a tenuous balance between association and enmity with an aggressive Indian as she established a home on the plains.
If you’re looking for some good material to hack apart and reform for your own creative purposes, take a look into your own family history. Talk to your parents and grandparents, great-grandparents if you’re lucky enough to have them. Take a look at family history websites. Google people. You’d be surprised what you can find about your ancestors in this day and age.
Have you done much looking into your family history? Any good stories that you like to tell? Anything you’ve stolen from ancestors past for your creative writing?
BumblesBooks 
Family history is so interesting! Years ago for an assignment I interviewed my mother-in-law and heard some great stories about my husband’s predecessors. As for my own family, it’s a bit hit or miss, since my mother never really had any grandparents and neither did her mother. I’ve never stolen any stories for my own writing, but I’ve been intending on writing down some family history at some point. Now, if I can get the procrastination monkey off my back…
Yes, interviews are a great way to get some really fun stories! Shake off that procrastination monkey and get your family history written down–your family will thank you for it! 🙂
Family history is a story that weaves it’s tale over many generations. We never know the full story until we look back.
So true–it’s beautiful to see how a family’s story develops throughout the generations. Thanks for stopping by!
I will admit that I haven’t looked into my own family history much. Some of this is due to time and place. Most of my still-living relatives are in other states across the US with no computer access and our schedules don’t match enough to call one another with the time differences and work.
Every once in a while, I’ll hear a snippet or two about past events, and they always fascinate me. Maybe one day I’ll actually look into it further, but at the moment, I’m OK with the small snippets.
It is hard to get in contact with people when you’re spread out across the country. But snippets here and there are a good start! It’s fun to know even a little bit about your family’s past.
Wow! I love that you’re doing this!! Hope to see a book some day!!
🙂 It’s a lot of fun. Thanks for stopping by!