How Thirty Years of Genealogy Research Became Ten Novels and a Memoir
Where Stories Lie Buried, my eleventh book, is one I never thought I’d write.
But then I never dreamed I’d write any of my other books either. I only wanted to tell a family history story.
I wrote this memoir of a genealogist turned author to answer all the questions I’m often asked – about how I started, where I get my inspiration from, how I work, and countless other details. My journey, starting over fifty years ago, began the same way with a myriad of questions about one man: Daniel, soldier, pioneer, patriarch and pacifist.
Thirty years ago, I started researching in depth and the more I found, the more I wanted to know. Daniel’s story, and that of his young wife, Emma, became my first novel, The Disenchanted Soldier. Fifteen years and ten novels later, I finally wrote the story of how it all happened.
Each chapter outlines the events that led to the stories. Finding Daniel’s ancestors in a churchyard in Derbyshire, discovering an Irish relative long after we’d driven over the very ground she’d walked on, and recreating the life of a woman who left a five-generational legacy.
My novels are inspired by an ancestral figure, by their life, and their reality. All of them are structured differently. Some are based upon key turning points, others are taken from one record and history then drives the narrative. Some stay in the country of origin, all are from the British Isles with one small exception, most are set in New Zealand. Three are set in the past; many are dual timeline or cross several generations, one is contemporary. The characters have been fictionalised – except Daniel – and even then the modern-day protagonist is of my making. But that doesn’t make their truth any less valid.
History tells us a lot about how our ancestors lives were defined, just as ours are today. The laws, societal expectations, and money or the lack of it, shaped their paths. Driven by opportunity or bad decisions, by events outside their control like wars, food shortages and political choices, everything in their lives was affected by what others chose to do. The stories lie in how they made the most of life.
Genealogy allowed me to find those stories, history gave me the facts to wrap around those stories, writing those stories has become my life’s purpose.
Where Stories Lie Buried – A Memoir of a Genealogist Turned Author launches 25 September.
Orewa Library 10am.
Pre-order now.
