Tag Archives: Interview

Interview with Tracy Whittington

February 9, 2013 11:00 am , 1 Comment ,

ClaimingYourHistoryTracy Naber Whittington is the author of Claiming Your History – a delicious idea book full of inspiration on ways to make your family history a part of your life. With ideas ranging from naming your children with names from your ancestry to creating your own heirloom quilt from your children’s baby clothes, you’ll find the book is both a delight to read and a reminder that genealogy is more than just research.

This interview with Tracy not only gives you a peek into what inspired her to write the book but also offers a fascinating look into how people serving our country overseas find the time and resources to carry on their search for ancestors.

How long have you been interested in your family history?  

Since college.  I was lucky enough to start when three of my grandparents were still alive, and I gathered an enormous amount of information from them and their siblings.  After college, I was a Presidential Management Fellow with the Department of Defense.  Part of the fellowship program was a 4-month rotation in any federal agency I wanted.  I chose the National Archives, which was like being in heaven.  I stayed late every night to go through census rolls (this was pre-internet), and I learned so much that I later taught genealogy classes to the public as part of our outreach.

Has being a Foreign Service Officer helped or hindered your genealogy research efforts?

Being a Foreign Service Officer has the potential to help my genealogy research, but so far it hasn’t.  I would kill for a posting to Germany or the Czech Republic, where I could spend weekends visiting archives and graveyards.  But no such luck yet.  On the other hand, I met my husband on my first day of diplomatic training.  He’s as much of a family history buff as I am, and together we’ve become much more serious about research.  So in that respect, being an FSO has proved very fortuitous!

How do you research from La Paz or the other places you’ve been posted?

Distance has actually proved to be less of a challenge with each passing year.  My first overseas posting was in 2005 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.  I had no internet connection at home, so my research came to a standstill.  After that, I was posted in Montreal, then Washington D.C., and now La Paz, Bolivia.  Here in South America, we have a decent internet connection.  We’re able to use Ancestry.com and follow genealogy websites and bloggers.

What inspired you to write Claiming Your History?

As a child, I pretended my grandmother was really an illegitimate descendant of some royal family or that ordinary items in my house were actually priceless heirlooms.  I had a romantic vision of history based on Victorian novels – where everyone dressed for dinner, had libraries in their homes (and probably servants), and used titles before their names.  I was deeply disappointed to discover my ancestors were all peasant farmers from Eastern Europe.  Then, in college, I started reading social history and realized it wasn’t only the elite whose history mattered.  Average people – who they were, what they owned, where they lived – that was history, too.  Over the years, I came up with more and more ways to incorporate my family’s history into my life and to value it just as much as the history of those Victorian nobles.  My idea wasn’t to provide expert guidance on how to conduct research or preserve an old house but to give my readers the inspiration to do those things.  That’s why I added an “on the internet” section to each entry – to provide resources for taking my ideas much further.

Your author profile mentions blogging. Are you blogging now? Geneablogging?

Not geneablogging…yet.  My husband and I are about to kick off a new blog, StreetDogStory.com, which we hope will bring attention to the plight of street dogs around the world (we have a rescued street dog from Africa).  A children’s book we’ve written about her will be e-published this spring.  We also write a small travel blog to chronicle our life overseas for family and friends.

Are there any new family history projects in the works? 

Yes!  We’re developing a history/lifestyle blog called Nostalgia Field Guide.  It’s still in the early stages, but I’d love to come back to Moultrie Creek to talk about it when it goes live.

Your book is one of the best designed/formatted ebooks I’ve seen from an independent author/publisher. What software/platform did you use to write, layout and convert your manuscript?

Thank you!  I wrote the book in Microsoft Word and hired a wonderful freelancer, Robert Henry, to format it for Kindle.  He used Notepad++ to clean up formatting and coding, converted it to HTML, put in into a ZIP, and let Kindle Direct Publishing convert it into a Kindle book.  Robert and I are both very detailed-oriented, and we spent a few weeks just making sure spacing, margins, and especially links were all 100% correct.

Tracy, I love the Nostalgia Field Guide idea and can’t wait to learn more about it. Yes! Consider this an open invitation to come tell us more about it at any time.

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Author Interview: Ryan Littrell

December 9, 2012 2:00 pm ,

Ryan Littrell’s Reunion: A Search for Ancestors is a fascinating story that is hard to put down. Not only does he describe his research efforts, he also tells the history of the MacDonald clan who are his ancestors. While describing his research effort going back generation by generation, he brings the clan’s history forward until both stories meet with the ancestor who immigrated to America. Ryan accepted my request for an interview and provides more insight on the book and his research efforts.

What inspired you to intersperse your research going back with the clan’s history coming forward?

I don’t know that any particular thing prompted me to write the book like this—that is, telling my story alongside the story of my ancestors. I just think that once you begin searching for your ancestors, you find yourself wondering what they were like, and who they really were. The next thing you know, you’re seeing how their history might be entangled in yours.

Are you bitten by the genealogy bug or did this project satisfy your interest in family history?

I’ve definitely been bitten. As soon as you discover an ancestor, you’re discovering a whole new set of stories—not just that one ancestor’s story, but also the story of her father, her mother, and the story of her whole family. Soon you’re searching through records in a whole new place, maybe even a whole new country. And the further back you go, the more ancestors there are to discover. So the search is open-ended, and that beginning question—“Where do I come from?”—never really goes away. You never get a final answer.

You appear to have developed the common fascination with graveyards most of us enjoy. How about battlegrounds?

A lot of people would probably say that a battleground leaves them with some of the same feelings as a graveyard. There’s a sense of presence, all around you. I’m thinking of when I visited the site of the Battle of Culloden, which plays an important part in my book. This was where an army, mostly made up of Scottish Highlanders, made their final stand against the British government in 1746. I walked along the line, and saw the stones that marked where clansmen were buried, according to tradition. And there’s just no way to put that into words. It’s too big.

What was your most surprising discovery related to this project?

That’s a tough question, because there were so many discoveries along the way. But if I had to pick one, it would be that email revealing my uncle’s DNA results: Each person who matched my uncle’s DNA was descended from a single family that lived for many generations in one particular spot in the Scottish Highlands. My whole life, I’d had no clue where this part of my family had come from. But suddenly, with one cheek swab from Uncle Chuck, we knew the truth.

Have you considered writing your grandmother’s story? The little bit you wrote tells me she was a fascinating lady.

Thanks for that, and I hope the book gives a sense of what she was like. I may write more about her in the future, but I also think that this book is very much about her, even when it doesn’t mention her by name. After all, it’s about the search for my grandma’s ancestors, the story of her family. She’s my link to those people, and so she’s on every page.

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Author Interview: Mariann S. Regan

December 3, 2012 2:00 pm ,

Mariann Regan is many things: a wife and mother, an English professor at Fairfield University and a family historian. Her most recent book, Into the Briar Patch: A Family Memoir, is a spotlight book here at Moultrie Creek Books. She has very graciously responded to my interview request which I’ve posted here.

Reading the book, my main thought was what an emotional effort this project had to be for you. What pushed you to write this book?

My white Southern family never talked much about the family past. It was in the late 1990s before I even thought to ask myself whether my ancestors had owned slaves. And I found that they all had. Learning that fact was an epiphany for me. I wondered, cautiously at first, whether that major historical experience had shaped the family character. How could it not have? As my ideas picked up speed, the full difficulty of my topic came into view. What had my ancestors been thinking? How could they choose to be the “bad guys” of history? How could I ever possibly be all right with that? In my childhood, I had felt my family to be too often harsh and judgmental, more so than I could bear, even though they could sometimes be kind and encouraging. Was there some connection here? Was that a metaphor for my background — “raised by a family of slaveholders”? For months, I tried to stop thinking along these lines. It was a psychological burden I thought I could not bear.

After putting aside these matters for a while, I realized that to reach any kind of inner peace, I had to forge an answer to my own questions. I used my academic and literary background to step back, way back, and find an analytical perspective. Only then could I research my family history with a clear eye for emerging patterns. I had to move past fear or sentiment or blame, past any kind of judgment, and simply try to understand these characters, my family, in their many-layered historical story. What forces motivated them to think as they thought, to act as they acted? I found myself asking basic questions about human nature. How could goodness evolve into evil, within any given human being? I couldn’t proceed simply by chronology: that would be inadequate. Instead, I tried to let symbols arise in my mind that could support each chapter and at the same time link all the chapters together. The cover represents my concluding “take”: a tiny baby within an endless briar patch.

I’m amazed at the cooperation you had from your cousins – especially with them writing their own stories. Were they happy to participate or did it take some arm-twisting on your part?

Yes, I also was amazed. And heartened. My cousins were superb. They welcomed me with open arms because we were all Family. In the South, Family is spelled with a capital letter. My husband and I stayed with them in the summer, in their various households in North and South Carolina, every year for seven years. We had long talks, and our confidences grew deeper each year. I keep confidences very seriously. We all grew close from this experience, and last summer we even had a landmark “First Cousins Reunion,” a celebration with eighty people attending.

From the first, I made sure to tell my cousins, straight out, that this historical family memoir would be taking on some tough subjects, like slavery and Jim Crow and desegregation. They said that was all right with them. I also told them I was not out to praise or blame anyone, but to understand how history influenced people. They got that point. As I wrote my drafts, I shipped them to my cousins to read. They read them, diligently. There were at least four major drafts, with massive changes instigated by me as my thinking evolved. Half a dozen cousins pored over them and helped me get the details right. What years was it? What kind of shotgun? How much did the price of cotton drop? They knew these things, and I didn’t. They added passages and stories, but they didn’t “censor” anything.

Mainly I listened. I didn’t twist any arms. Arm-twisting just results in getting your own views repeated back to you. I wanted to know who they were, who my Family was, and how they envisioned life’s struggles. I wanted them to be frank with me. That’s why I gave them each a personal interview in the book’s Afterword.

What was the biggest surprise/discovery that resulted from this book?

I was flabbergasted that while writing about all these “loaded” subjects, I was able to build trust with my cousins, and they with me. And that trust is real. We still have enormous, glaring differences in our politics and religion, but we trust one another fundamentally. The experience has strengthened my faith in basic human connectedness.

My cousins shared with me some secrets I had not heard about my own past, and their pasts, secrets that I cannot share with you and that I did not include in the book. Of course, the book is candid enough as it is. Yet we are keeping some secrets through this day. Now, that’s trust.

Are you planning to continue your family research?

I’ve never stopped. Right now, I’m blogging about a project I’m working on—with several other family members—to locate our biracial second cousins and third cousins who are descendants of slaves by some of our relatives from the 1800s. Genealogically, this is a difficult search to do, but we’re getting there. We want to identify these living biracial relatives, meet them, and share our various family histories if they would like to. My model for this effort is the book Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade, co-authored by Thomas DeWolf and Sharon Morgan. It is newly published by Beacon Press — I recommend it highly. I’m rather idealistic, I suppose. I believe we can acknowledge and express the hurts of history, even if they have affected us deeply. The process of facing the past will help us reclaim our humanity.

Any new writing projects in the works?

I’ve spent my career in academe — 40 years being a professor of literature at a university. The teaching part was fun and inspiring. The politics part was something else, entirely. I’m working over the umpteenth draft of an academic satire: Face, Incorporated. Face University is gradually swallowed by its own corporate tendencies until it becomes . . . what can I say without spoiling the plot? . . . something very much like a casino.

Okay, I’m intrigued! Hope I won’t have to wait too long to read this one . . .

After answering my questions, Mariann added this note which I’m more than happy to pass along.

I’d like to give a shout-out to the Storm Restoration Teams of the Georgia Power Company in Moultrie, Georgia. Here in Connecticut, the night of Hurricane Sandy, our 75-foot oak tree was uprooted. It boomed down across the power lines, knocking out power for the entire area and blocking the road. The very next day a team of guys appeared in Straight Line Power trucks. They had been driving for almost 3 days, since the Sandy forecasts began — 15 hours to Texas to get their trucks, then 40 hours up to Connecticut, whose cities were among the hardest hit. Our little town had 400 trees uprooted. These fellows called me “Ma’am.” They were polite, smart, and fast. They had the lines back up and everyone’s power restored before nightfall. They were heroic!

If you’d like to learn more about Mariann’s research efforts, stop by her Briar Patch blog.

 

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Author Interview: Denise Levenick

September 6, 2012 6:00 am , Leave a Comment ,

Denise Levenick, known in the genea-community for her blog, The Family Curator, has just released a new book, How to Archive Family Keepsakes. It’s an amazing reference, full of many useful ideas for organizing and managing our family treasures. I was delighted to get her to answer a few questions about her book.

In the introduction, you mentioned a childhood encounter with your grandmother’s archive. Was that also the spark that began your interest in your family history?

My grandmother Arline was undoubtedly the biggest influence on my interest in “old” things. Her stories made long-dead relatives seem like next-door neighbors; I really felt like I knew them. She also loved reading to me, especially greatly embellished pioneer stories. Our favorite was a book of narratives reprinted from Capper’s Weekly newspaper. The stories were mostly about wagon trains, Indian attacks, and escapes from wild beasts. But the news clippings about her own early life were just as exciting, although I am still unraveling the truth to many of those tales.

I thought your decision to define your family papers as archives was a stroke of genius. Did that definition impact others in your family? If so, how?

I wish I were a Genius, but it seems like it took forever to get to that AHa Moment, “Hey, this stuff is a Real Archive, too!” And yes, this realization had an enormous impact on our family’s attitude. Overnight, it seemed, “Grandma’s stuff” just felt more Important. We let go of worrying about how to manage it all, and instead focused on organizing and preserving. I know it probably sounds simplistic, but the paradigm shift in attitude made it possible to work with the collection as a legitimate project rather than a room full of stuff that needed to be “organized.”

As you know, I’ve inherited a few more family archives since those early days with my grandmother’s trunk. My husband has become very tolerant of the boxes and bins and we now have a system that seems to work. Of course, it helps that some of those collections have come from his family members too. We still have boxes to sort, but now he’s the one filling them with documents, photos, and memorabilia.

Do you think the digitization of personal archives will have an impact on the growing interest in social history?

That’s a great question, Denise, and I think you have hit on something here. Like many bloggers, I’ve made interesting connections through articles on my website, and quite a few with historians working on special projects. Not long ago, a retired historian contacted me about a short excerpt I posted on my blog from a wagon train diary found in my aunt’s papers. I don’t know how she came to own the transcript, but it is one of those manuscripts that belongs with other historical documents in a public archive. I learned from my email exchange with the historian that documents like these do pop up from time to time and are valuable resources for researchers. He also gave me several good suggestions about donating my copy to an institution.

I would like to think that the family keepsakes we transcribe and post on our websites will be found and utilized by social historians. I think it would be  wonderful to know that the letters between family members transcribed and posted on a genealogy blog became part of a bigger story on some aspect of our culture or history.

Your worksheets are fabulous! They are going to be my salvation as I attempt to bring order to my family archives. How do you maintain your worksheets – on paper or as digits?

LOL. I am drowning in paper. Those worksheets are digital first and only printed “As Needed.” I certainly don’t want to bring more paper into my life, but I do need help organizing the information and my ideas. Sometimes just the typing and screen visualization are as good as the old-fashioned list-making.

Seriously, I’m glad you are finding them useful. I am a real Worksheet person, and find that I make better progress with a clear plan and tasks to check off when complete. I am a big fan of word-processing Tables. I wish I were more efficient with spreadsheets, but tables just come easier to me.

There were several “PRANG” moments as I read your book. One of them was the discussion on copyrights as it relates to inherited archives. Yes, it makes sense once I see it in writing that personal papers have copyrights, but I just never thought of it before. What surprises did you uncover in your research?

My grandmother was a great letter-writer, and although I don’t have too many letters in her own hand, I do have many letters she received from others. I would love to incorporate these in a story about her life, but by copyright law they belong to the authors and their heirs. If I get serious about this project I may have to collect releases just to be safe. Of course, all the letters she received from her parents as their heir came to my mother and my aunt, and thus to me and my sister. Maybe I wouldn’t need so many releases after all!

Any thoughts on what we should be doing now to develop our own archives?

Another great question, and one I’ve been grappling with especially since losing so many family members the past few years. I’ve made some big decisions prompted by what I’ve found left in other people’s archives. Probably the biggest suggestion I could offer is to destroy anything you want kept private. Letters you wrote to blow off steam and never mailed, photos you should tear up, or receipts or other evidence of bad decisions you’d rather forget. You are the curator of your life. If you don’t want folks to read, see, or know about something while you are alive, don’t keep evidence of it for them to find when you are gone.

On the same thought, leave your family with evidence to remind them of the your true self. I’ve always wanted to raise chickens; it’s a family joke, and my son gives me chicken-theme cards and gifts. I’m saving every one of them for all the smiles they recall. When we found every hand-made card my sons and nieces had sent my mom, plus ones from my sister and me, the story wasn’t that we had grown up to be great artists. The story was that Mom loved our efforts and cherished them. It’s a good story to hear from someone you love after they are gone.

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Author Interview: Gena Philibert-Ortega

April 30, 2012 8:00 am , Leave a Comment ,

Gena Philibert-Ortega is the author of the recently released From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes. As an unrepentant food junkie, this book immediately caught my eye. It didn’t take five minutes of my Saturday morning reading hour at Barnes & Noble to realize I had to have it – and an interview with its author. Gena very graciously responded to my request and you can see the result here.

Other than Katherine Scott Sturdevant’s Bringing Your Family History to Life Through Social History, you are one of the few people I’ve seen who has focused on social history. Why do you think that is?

I love Katherine Scott Sturdevant’s book and it has been one of the inspirations for my own research. I think in general there are too few genealogy books being written (I guess in saying that it’s obvious that I love to read). Genealogy books that incorporate social history exist but mostly in the form of non-fiction storytelling, few are how-to books. Some great books that combine genealogy with social history include Annie’s Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg, Only a Few Bones by John Philip Colletta and Isle of Cannes by Elizabeth Shown Mills.

I think there has always been a greater focus on helping family historians find the documents that are central to research. Incorporating social history with family history is really about how to take what you have found and add to it so that your ancestor’s life becomes more understandable and interesting. It could be that because social history is not something that most researchers contemplate until the end of a research project, it doesn’t get as much attention. And let’s face it, adding a historical aspect to anyone’s story is labor intensive as well. What I want to show is that sometimes social history can lead you to additional resources that you would have missed by just focusing a search on online genealogy subscription websites or government documents.

I will say that one of the reasons I am so interested in social history is that it makes family history so much more interesting. As family historians we already find our research exciting and fascinating but genealogists often lament the fact that their immediate descendants are not as interested in their research. Well the hard fact is that names and dates on a chart are not interesting. What compels people is the stories of how life was, the events that were part of their ancestor’s lives and the choices made.

At Moultrie Creek Books, I am constantly amazed at the quality and quantity of self-published family histories – which includes a growing section devoted to family cookbooks. How do you see today’s digital publishing revolution impacting social history?

The result of family historians having more self-publishing opportunities is that a family’s experience is easily made available to everyone. We now have the opportunity to not only read what historians have to say about topics that they have researched but we can read what individuals are publishing about their own families, adding to our social history knowledge base. I’m hoping as more researchers become interested in digital publishing they will consider incorporating social history into their family’s narratives.

Your Food. Family. Ephemera blog is a delight! Did it inspire the book or vice versa?

Thanks so much for your kind words. My blog, Food. Family.Ephemera came first. The idea behind this blog and really for my concentration on researching women was that I questioned how we could research women when traditional genealogical sources often fail us. We all know the issues that we face researching our female ancestor’s lives, surname changes upon marriage and records that fail to document women’s lives. This same problem has been discussed by women’s historians for decades. What I wanted to do is to show that when researching women we need to consider records that are unique to women such as community cookbooks, signature quilts and journals/diaries. It’s through learning more about what women were involved in historically that we open up the possibilities of what is available to use in our research. The blog introduced this idea in regards to food while the book allowed me to expand on it.

The resource section of your book is a very dangerous place. I’ve already seen four books I’ve got to have. How long did it take you to build this collection?

It’s been dangerous for me as well! Most of the books in the resource section are ones that I have read. I’ve been interested in food writing for over 5 years. I’ve collected cookbooks since I was a child, starting with one that my great-grandmother gave me and of course the Nancy Drew Cookbook. When I went to write the resource section of the book, I went back to some of the works that I loved and thought would be helpful to readers. For me, the resource section of the book was so important because it guides the reader to works that can help them better understand ways in which their own ancestor’s fed their families. That’s what is so important, understanding how our ancestor’s lives were different and in some cases similar to our own.

Do you have any suggestions for those of us who prefer to maintain our recipes digitally?

Whether you store you recipes digitally or in the old recipe card box, I think the best way to preserve recipes, or any family history for that matter, is to share it. Never before have there been so many different options for saving and sharing information. Sharing it could be in the form of a digital cookbook, a family recipe wiki or blog. Even sharing and storing through cloud computing applications like Google Docs or Dropbox can assure that it is preserved for future generations. The notes section of a genealogy software database program is also a great place to include recipes and images.

What I love about living in this time in history is technology allows us the luxury to carry portable libraries everywhere. We can use iPad’s, smartphones or even a tablet computer to look-up recipes, bookmark cookbook websites and even store cookbooks that we write, scan or upload. Keeping recipes digitally is great; just make sure you share it with other family members so that those memories and history don’t get lost.

What’s your next writing project and how soon can we expect it?

Right now, I am working on blog posts that will feature ideas for including food history into your family history for a virtual blog tour I am planning for May. Information about this virtual tour will be available soon on my Food. Family.Ephemera blog. Much of what I am currently writing is for periodicals. I regularly write for genealogical oriented magazines such as Internet Genealogy, Family Chronicle and GenWeekly. I also have articles that appear in membership journals such as the Utah Genealogical Association’s Crossroads, APGQ and FGS Forum. I’m working on some courses for the National Institute for Genealogical Studies focusing on regional research. I have a few book projects in the works that center on researching women and social history but they won’t be available until early 2013.

This book isn’t just for reading. I blazed through it once and now I’m going through it again – slowly savoring each page. It’s one of those books that you’ll keep going back to time and again – and finding something new and interesting each time.

 

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