I married into a family of amateur genealogists.

My husband’s grandfather, George, has a basement full of letters, photographs, and journals spanning at least two hundred years. I’ve spent hours at his table, reading old letters and studying photos.

I could tell you how much a pig cost in West Virginia in 1918. I know how long a distant ancestor struggled with a cough in 1909 and exactly the kind of tired that miners wore on their shoulders day in and day out in the last years of the 19th century.

When I say that family stories are important to this crew, it’s no exaggeration.

As a novelist, I’m aching to tell these stories. And as the descendant of novelists and poets and people for whom the story is more important than the facts, I’m also interested in learning how to do it right.

The only person in my family who’s ever done genealogical research was a distant cousin who somehow traced us back to Thor. (Yes, that Thor, with the hammer and the thunder.) So serious scholarship isn’t really our jam. What a fun challenge to hone my storytelling ability and gain a new skill at the same time!

In the spirit of Gee, I wonder if I can pull this off, I have decided to take the reins of this monstrosity and see what I can come up with.

If you’re drowning in history like I was, feel free to follow along for some tips and a road map to your family’s next greatest treasure.

Pulling Together the Pieces

The first step is to organize what I have: a basement of paper. But instead of allowing myself to feel overwhelmed, I’m going to remind myself of what children’s book author and memoirist Cornelia Maude Spelman says: “If we have letters, photographs, and family papers [check!] and if we have family members who are willing to share information [check check!], we can find out a lot.”

First, I organize the artifacts by type: photographs in one pile, letters in another, certificates and other items (newspaper articles, school report cards, etc.) in a third. I can further organize them by separating each pile by decade or era — letters home from the front here, letters to friends from a Depression-era mining town there.

At this point, I am already overwhelmed. I’m surrounded by piles of paper, and so far, each one seems to carry equal weight. How do I turn an unorganized mess of records and souvenirs into a cohesive story?

This is where Spelman’s expertise comes in handy. She wrote Missing: A Memoir after spending years contemplating the nameplate she’d inherited from her grandfather. “My grandfather’s brass nameplate had been in front of my eyes for years before I ‘saw’ it,” she says. Reflecting on her grandfather’s life led her to craft a multigenerational memoir about her relationship with her mother and her mother’s relationship with her mother — all linked by the nameplate of a man who’d died suddenly decades earlier.

What a hook!

A friend of mine, Joanna Grey Talbot, has done the same. She’s hard at work on a novel based on her grandmother’s life. As a jumping-off point, Talbot is using the autobiography her grandmother wrote as a school project in the 1930s.

I need to find my hook.

I look around and my eyes fall on a photograph I’ve seen hundreds of times, one that I’ve always loved. In it, George, age four, stands next to his father, Glen, on the day that Glen left for basic training at Fort Knox in 1944. There is something about seeing that little boy, so proud to be next to his father and also a little unclear about the hubbub, that gets me every time I see it.

(Knowing that Glen lived into the 1980s, raising and then helping to raise three children and three grandchildren, also softens the sting of seeing this imminent separation from his son.)

Finding the Hook

I’ll start with the image in the photograph. The juxtaposition of Glen — six feet tall and prepared for war (physically, if not emotionally) — and little George — tiny next to his father, trying to look serious but looking a little bit goofy instead — is touching. The black-and-white of the photograph underscores the seriousness of the moment. And the spot where they are standing, out on the dirt road in front of the house, is a spot I know well, as it’s across the street from where George lives now.

Talbot’s process, though it might feel like a backward step, will probably help here. When working on a project, she first digitizes each artifact, then transcribes and edits it into a more readable format, before finally adding footnotes for any people, places, or anecdotes mentioned. At the end of that process, I imagine I’ll have so many notes that the book will practically write itself!

There isn’t a lot of specific information in Glen’s letters home to his family. But there are fragments on which the narrative can hang — times when he asked after a neighbor of theirs, mentioned getting over a fever, or told his wife which mechanic to go to when their car broke down. Each one represents another person I can research, an event I can corroborate. Each one adds just that much more weight to the family’s story.

Researching Beyond the Artifact

Though I’m not normally much for extensive research, I find myself diving into this. Whether it’s the personal relevance or the feeling of detective work that I’m doing, I’m not sure, but for whatever reason, I’m eager each day to hit the books.

But there’s a whole separate category of research I need to do in order to make the story as compelling as possible. Suddenly, I’m researching the typical Appalachian diet during the Depression, public schools in the mountains in the 1940s, daily life aboard the ships that transferred soldiers home, and what those soldiers did when they first got to shore.

(For example, Glen’s ship was delayed for multiple weeks due to a labor strike among the dockworkers in New York. Here is fodder for a nail-biter of a chapter! Finally within sight of his homeland, aching to see his young family, and he’s held back by forces beyond his control — what must that have been like? On the other hand, perhaps he was grateful for the extra time to rest and regain his bearings. Only more research will tell!)

Learning to Let Go

The pithiest writing advice I’ve ever heard — and the hardest to follow — is Stephen King’s “Kill your darlings.” (The full and less pithy version goes like this: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings,” which I also love.) King’s point is that, as storytellers, however much we might love a particular line or character (or, in my case, letter or photograph), if it doesn’t serve the story, we have to get rid of it.

What does this mean for me?

As one example, I started this project with a soft spot for a letter written during the Depression. In it, one of Glen’s distant relatives describes her budget during a particularly difficult winter. I’m a sucker for the misspellings, the level of detail, the slapdash handwriting — all of it.

But the story didn’t take me there. I thought I would write about all of George’s family, which would leave room for that letter. But the story about Glen’s time in the war and his wife’s time at home kept unspooling and, as hard as I tried, I could never find a way to shoehorn anything else in. Eventually, I had to face the cold, hard truth: that letter, and the rest like it, were my darlings. Out they went.

I press on! If my objective is to tell a compelling story (and it is), then I have to serve the story and not anyone’s ego. Honestly, not everything is right for every story. And that’s okay.

The Big Reveal

So here we are.

I have organized George’s records, digitizing them and adding notes, per Talbot’s instructions. I’ve done the background research to make the family’s world jump off the page. I’ve selected my hook and built the narrative around a single photograph, like Spelman did with her memoir. And I finally, finally have a coherent, cohesive family story that I can gift to my in-laws.

And it gives me an idea: wouldn’t my mother-in-law love a book about her family next? I’m starting to think I could combine storytelling with family research forever.

Back to the drawing board!

If You’re Feeling Inspired…

Researching my husband’s family was a gift to all of us, and if I — an amateur by any definition and an ardent storyteller—can do it, anyone can!

Let’s review the important steps:

Pull together the pieces. Whether you choose to use Talbot’s multi-step process of digitize, transcribe, annotate, or something more tailored to your personality, you first need to know what you’re working with. You can only know that if you have some way of getting things in order.

Find the hook. What will pull your reader in? A list of names and dates won’t do the job. Is there an event you want to discuss, or a specific photograph, like I chose? Maybe an old family saying or, like Spelman, a personal belonging. Whatever it is, build the story as a whole around it.

Research beyond the artifact. If your hook is the funny thing that happened on your mother’s first day of school, set the scene for us. What was school like in that time and place? What did kids bring for lunch? What kind of work were they expected to be able to do? Filling your story with details like these helps anchor your family members as real people.

Learn to let go. When you pour your heart and soul into a scene or a chapter, it can feel gut-wrenching to toss it. But be merciless here — your job is to serve the story. Remember that not everything is right for every story. And that’s okay. Kill your darlings.

Enjoy your moment! That’s right — do a victory lap when you’re finished! Completing a family history book is hard work. You deserve to feel good! Sit back and relax, at least until your next project starts.