How to Write a Book About Your Family History 

For the past few years, my friend (and coeval) HB has been thinking about writing down his family’s story.

His parents and many of his uncles and aunts were holocaust survivors. He began collecting information and photos and clippings about them several decades ago. I’ve seen a smattering of his collection. It’s impressive. Daunting. Inspiring.

Several years after he began his research, I started digging into my (and K’s) family history. My sister D did much of the initial research, interviewing some of the relatives. I hired a young writer to follow up on D’s work. I even traveled to Ireland to meet some of my cousins on my mother’s side.

Worth noting if you do this: Your European (or whatever) family has probably NOT been breathlessly waiting for their American cousins to visit them all these years. You may get the chilly reception I got from my second cousin (once removed) when I tracked him down.

Act One, Scene One: Hero is knocking on a thick wooden door, the front entrance of a thatched-roof house on a hill overlooking the bogs.

Hero: Hi! Are you John Curran?

John Curran (eyebrows furrowed): Yes, that would be me.

Hero (huge smile): Fantastic! I’m Mark Ford, your long-lost cousin from America!

John Curran: So?

The Ford/ Fitzgerald family history is rich with names, birth dates, marriage certificates, and death notices of hundreds of descendants. There are some details as to locations and occupations. Even some wonderful stories. But those stories don’t compare to what HB has compiled. So I wasn’t surprised to get an email from him recently, telling me that he was determined to put all that he’s gathered into a book of some kind.

“I’ve decided I should go ahead write it down,” he said. “But I have this tremendous blockage of even starting to put it into words. My wife tells me I shouldn’t try to think it through before I begin. She says I should just start writing one story or profile and go from there. But I lack the confidence to do justice to the information. I also know that it will be lost if I do not. Any suggestions?”

I told him that I thought his wife’s advice was very good. “Since you are not an experienced writer and/ or biographer,” I said, “it’s best NOT to try to plan it all out in the beginning, however tempting that might feel. That’s just a subconscious tactic for putting it off until it’s too late. It’s better to do exactly what she says. Start with one person or one story, write it down, and then move on from there. However, if I were in your shoes (no writing experience and still busy with my life), I’d begin by hiring a genealogist to help put together the family tree. It’s not difficult if you have enough information, which I think you do. And when that’s complete, I would hire a professional biographer/ ghostwriter and work with him or her to turn that tree into a family history.”

For anyone reading this who would like to do some genealogical research on their own, here’s some information to get you started:

The difference between genealogy and family history 

Genealogy is the study of family ancestors with pertinent data such as birth, marriage, and death dates. Family history is an in-depth study of a family lineage with greater emphasize on and clarification of each ancestor’s life story.

The basic process  

Start by going back to your grandparents (four individuals), your great grandparents (eight individuals), and then your great, great grandparents (16 individuals). Going back to your great, great grandparents would place their birth lineage to the 1820 to1830 timeframe. Go back another hundred years to the 1730s and you have your great-great-great-great great grandparents. And they alone number 128 people. Which means there are many individuals to track and locate information about to create a full family history.

The role of DNA testing 

From the NYT: “In America, the question of ‘Where am I from?’ usually means, ‘Where did my family live before they arrived/ were forcibly shipped to America?’ Recently, there’s been a push to answer that question through DNA tests, which claim they can tell us exactly what percentage Norwegian or Nigerian we are. But there are catches. The tests can compromise our privacy, with the possibility that our genetic information could be sold to third parties without our knowledge. And they don’t truly reveal our origins so much as reveal who has similar DNA right now. Also, and perhaps more important: Culture does not come from DNA. It comes from lived experience, traditions, and stories passed down from actual people who shape our perceptions of the world.” To read the full NYT article, click here.

New resources, services, and options are added regularly on popular genealogy sites, including FamilySearch.org, a very large and very helpful free site. Also check out Ancestry.com and Archives.com.

My Three Favorite Pleasures

There was a time, when I was young, that I thought the only sensible objective in life should be to get the best ratio possible between pleasure and pain. Put more simply: to avoid everything that was difficult or even uncomfortable, while spending the maximum amount of time having “fun.”

But when boys become men, as St. Paul famously said, they must put away childish things. In my case, it was the pursuit of hedonism.

Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. Over many years, I gradually recognized that those things I thought would give me maximum pleasure (more money, more TV time, newer toys, nicer things) had surprisingly short shelf lives. And as I grew older and fell into doing – under mandates – those things that, as a child, I was trying to avoid (work and school, mostly), I discovered activities that gave me better and longer lasting pleasure.

In my twenties and thirties, I indulged in the working and learning experiences I enjoyed, while also seeking the more standard pleasures. But I noticed that if I spent too much time indulging in those (mostly social) pleasures, the good I got from them lessened – i.e., there was a point of diminishing returns.

Sometime in my forties, I began to become aware of the many ironies of life, including the fact that it is almost impossible to have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure. The more you chase after it, the farther it moves ahead of you.

I’m not making an argument for asceticism. I still believe that it makes good sense to strive for a life that is more pleasurable than painful. I’m merely saying that once I realized that (a) I couldn’t have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure, and (b) lots of things that I used to think of as difficult and/or painful could be very pleasurable indeed, I was able to look at this ratio from the perspective of my actual experience, rather than the images of pleasure manufactured to sell things.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. At least 20 years. I’ve written about it, too, in books and essays, in which I sometimes tried to categorize the types of pleasure in terms of quality, durability, and so on. And that’s all been helpful – to me, if not to my readers.

Then, about a year ago, I was looking over some of those books and essays, trying to find a common thread. And I think I did. For me, there have always been three – and only three – good and worthy pleasures. They are:

* Working towards an objective I value.

* Learning about a subject I think is important.

* Sharing my knowledge and the fruits of my labor.

That’s it. Three. Working. Learning. And sharing.

Working 

“We were created for meaningful work, and one of life’s greatest pleasures is the satisfaction of a job well done.” – John C. Maxwell

I discovered the pleasure I get from working before I understood that what I was doing was working. As a boy and through my teenage years, I enjoyed the normal boyish pastimes like playing sandlot football and sneaking into movie theaters. But my greatest pleasure came from working alone in the basement of my house, building miniature towns, choreographing war scenes with little plastic soldiers, and building real structures out of plywood to serve as forts and hideaways or as hospitals for injured birds and frogs and insects.

I also loved to start clubs. As an 11-year-old, I created the He-Man-Women-Haters club. In high school, I was president of a group of troublemakers in the guise of a fraternity.

Looking back on those activities, and comparing them to the things I did “for fun,” I see now that I preferred the building and organizing because they mattered to me in a way that playing sandlot football never could.

That’s still true today. I tried to retire three times in the last 30 years, and went back to work each time because I missed the deep and lasting pleasure of working on the many things I used to do that I truly cared about.

Working on things that I value. That was and still is key. (That’s why I write this blog.)

Learning 

“The greatest pleasure is obtained by improving.” – Ben Hogan

 I enjoyed school through fourth grade, but not again until I was in college. And even then, I didn’t always enjoy my classes. In retrospect, I can see that my favorites were those that I felt would somehow make me a more valuable person. And by valuable, I don’t mean financially valuable – knowing things or having skills that would earn me big money sometime in the future. Literature, anthropology, history, etc. were the kind of subjects that were valued in the house I grew up in. I think that’s why I got so much pleasure out of studying them.

I recognize how helpful it would be if I knew more about technical things. Like how to reset my watch. Or how to increase the bandwidth (or whatever it is) of my WiFi when I’m on important Zoom calls. And I’ve tried. I really have. But I just can’t persuade the judge in the corner of my brain that knowing these sorts of things will make me a more valuable person.

Sharing 

“A writer’s greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too.” – Andy Rooney

I was talking to a friend last week about this little theory. He understood the pleasure I get from working on and learning about things I value. But he questioned me about the sharing. Sharing, he felt, is really just an obligation. A responsibility. Something you do out of a sense of duty, not as a potential source of pleasure.

“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that sharing what I have, whether it’s my house, my toys, or my money, is probably the truest pleasure I get. And it can be expressed in so many ways. In fact, when I first sat down to write this essay, I had a fourth activity on my list of good and worthy pleasures: teaching. But after thinking about it for five minutes, I realized that the reason I like teaching is because it is a form of sharing.”

I don’t know how to categorize what I’ve just written. Is it a manifesto? A sermon?

It doesn’t feel like that to me. I swear. It feels like sharing!