I’ve been researching and tracing my family history for many years now, way before computers and the internet, and the process of following and finding people has always fascinated me. These days it is so much more easy, all the great genealogical sites, all the networks and forums make it easier than ever to trace the past which has led to where we are. Some of my family lived in Tasmania, so there was no way I could have gone to the records offices there, or the other places associated with them,, such as the synagogue in Hobart which my great-great-grandfather helped to found.
As a writer I also found the story of the search interesting, and pondered for a long time on how I could describe what I did and the difficulties and successes, the dead ends and the exciting discoveries… I began to think that actually, although exciting to me my own family history probably wasn’t that interesting to anyone else… and so I began to think about writing a novel – not a historical novel, but a novel set in the present which follows a character’s search into the family’s history. This idea brewed and festered for a long time, and then suddenly I began to write it!
I say suddenly, in fact it was during the national Novel Writing Month of 2013, an on-line challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. That became Radwinter, the story of Thomas Radwinter’s search for his paternal line… and followed by Magick when he followed the other side of the family.
Because I want to make it realistic, I do a lot of genealogical background research, sometimes following real people through the censuses and other records from the first half of the nineteenth century, but also creating realistic profiles of my imaginary family. Thomas is now looking at his wife’s ancestry and has found that her great-grandmother was French (I don’t know why, it just suddenly happened that as I wrote she became French – from Menton!) So I have been spending most of this afternoon looking at French people in Brighton in 1911, and also looking up some information about Menton, just as Thomas would. I have only written a few hundred words today, but I’ve spent hours finding out the background to those few hundred words!!
Lois Elsden 