Intersections

I've often wondered how other bloggers handle disparate interests on their blogs. They talk about 'writing from the intersection of. . . " which is actually a good idea, if I could indeed figure out where it is my particular interests intersect and, what's more important, enlighten each other.

Mine, of course, fall primarily into two main categories -- fiction and family history -- though some in my family seem to believe the two are essentially the same thing.

Not me.

I like to think I can tell the difference. And when I can't, I try to figure it out.

For instance, this past week I spent days trying to sort of a who's who of men named John Ralph who were born in Cornwall between 1785 and 1787. I've been working on them on and off for the past three or four years. And getting not quite anywhere.

But this past week I threw myself into it -- and I think I got somewhere.

The problem was John and John and John weren't simply born in Cornwall. Cornwall is a big enough place that if one had been born in Penzance and one at Bodmin and one in Polperro, it wouldn't be that hard to tell them apart.

It happens that they were born in an area of Cornwall just slightly larger than my bathroom. And I'm not exaggerating much.

Two of them had fathers named William; one of them had a father named John. All of them had brothers named William. Two of them married women named Ann. One married a woman named Mary. All of them were miners. Occasionally they were also farmers. All of them had children. Each of them had a son John. One of the elder Johns died in 1833. One died in 1840. One died in 1841.

But which?

The process of figuring it out -- and believe me, I'm not given to enjoying those nifty logic puzzles that many people find endlessly fascinating -- has kept me awake night.

The quest took me to records on 3 continents (one of the Johns had two sons who emigrated and went to Wisconsin and two more who went to Australia). It also took me into land records, church records, civil records across several parishes in Cornwall.

It was trickier, in fact, than plotting a book (and plotting a book is, for me, about as hard as it gets). But I'm thinking -- and this is the intersection -- maybe it helps me plot.

At the very least it makes me see how threads that began years (or in this case generations ago) are still playing out and leaving clues to the past a hundred years or more later.

Backstory matters.

If there's one thing that the trio of John Ralphs taught me this week it is how much "backstory" effects what comes later. So I'm thinking again about backstory for Christo.

But I've learned something else, too, standing at this intersection. I'm not going to dump all the backstory in the first few chapters. It might help readers know who the characters are. But just telling them isn't as important as showing them.

And ultimately the way I figured out the Ralph boys was to look at how they behaved, who they hung out with, who they married and what those people also did.

What I learned?

• Dead relatives didn't live in a vacuum.
  
• Nor do live ones.
  
• Nor, it seems, do characters in books.
• Causes create effects and there are no effects without them.
  
• Everything is inter-connected.
• Don't stand in the middle of intersections -- you could get squashed.
  

Heroes?

Well, in some peoples' lives they were.

The man on the far left is my great-grandfather. And this is his saloon in Sumner, Iowa. The photo was taken in 1899 by his son, my grandfather, then age 18, who was working for a photographer that winter.

I don't know who the other men are. I'd love to know. So if you have family in Sumner, or know someone who did, show the picture around and see if we can identify some of them.

In case you're wondering what on earth I'm doing with this -- I'm trying to pull the threads of my life together. I'm taking a terrific online course from Ed2Go on using Photoshop Elements 5.0 (which I took so I could finally figure out how to do something with the software I'm supposed to be using to put photos on my website). And every week I get two lessons.

I did lessons 9 and 10 this morning (and this afternoon) and then I went off to mess with some of my own images. The guys in the bar just seemed a natural to practice on.

What? You thought I was going to mess with the perfection of Hugh-in-a-towel?

I'm in Neely's head at the moment and she's messing with the interiors of some condos she's working on. So while she messes with that -- using my software and hers -- I can mess about with the guys in the bar.

All I can say is, Must've been a cold winter in Iowa that year.

Kind of like this one.

It's in the genes

One of the things I've always been interested in is family and local history.

I really like to know all I can learn about the people who came before me. They don't have to have been related to me. But I'm interested in what makes people tick, why they do what they do (or did what they did) and all that that entails.

Recently I've been tracking a bunch of 17th and 18th century people all over Dartmoor, trying to sort them out. I have a surfeit of Sopers and more Gregory Sopers than you can shake a stick at. While "the name's the same" doesn't make the one man out of two or three, it's tricky trying to figure out which is which.

What are the subtle differences in who they are and how they live their lives that makes one Gregory different from another one in the same parish?

That's been the question I've wrestled with all week (when I wasn't doing revisions and chopping ice and shoveling snow).

In trying to sort them out (it's rather like doing a puzzle) I ran across a will from a Henry Soper in 1698 leaving his son Gregory the "justment by the name of Burches" with a lot of tacked on bits about who had to die before he would actually have a right to it.

And I found myself asking, "What's a justment?" And after a day and a half of research and some judicious questioning of my husband's cousin, a lawyer as well a family historian, I think I've got a grip on it.

"Justment" comes from the more ancient term "agistment." In ancient law it meant to take in and give feed to the cattle of strangers in the King's forest, and to collect the money due for the same to the king's use. In modern law it means to take in cattle to feed, or pasture, at a certain rate of compensation.

It has to do with more than land. It's an occupation.

My husband's cousin asked, "Do you understand what it means?"

I said, "Yep. He was a cowboy."