Have you ever done genealogy?

While living in the small industrial city that’s the setting for Hometown News, I began exploring my genetic roots, at least on my father’s side. It involved a lot of correspondence, especially with a cousin of my dad’s generation, as well as probing whatever records we could dig up.

By this time, my spiritual practice had recentered in the Quaker stream, or Society of Friends, where it turned out my ancestors had been active from the early 1660s until my great-grandfather moved from North Carolina to Ohio and “married out” in 1893. I now had access to historic minutes, correspondence, journals, and other resources that proved helpful.

My findings are presented on my Orphan George blog, should you be interested.

What fascinates me in regards to my fiction is the fact that so many of my ancestors were essentially countercultural in regard to the broader society. They were pacifist, for one, and wore distinctive garb and used distinctive language. (Sound hippie?) In North Carolina, their community had the first manumission society in the state, buying freedom for slaves and transporting them to safer lands. This was not the Deep South of popular culture.

These findings, and the research methods, proved quite helpful when I drafted my nonfiction New England history, Quaking Dover.

The techniques and insights also played into my novel What’s Left, where I took Cassia’s lineage on both sides back to her great-grandparents, including their quite different faith traditions.

I am intrigued by the values and practices from one generation to another. What is rejected and what is embraced?

In my case, I discarded the mainstream Christianity and lifestyle of my parents and grandparents only to find myself later reconnecting with much of the radical Christianity and countercultural outlooks of my great-grandparents. Well, most of them on my dad’s side. My mother’s were an entirely different matter.

As I’ve found, genealogy often presents a much different history than we’re taught in the conventional versions, especially when our focus is on everyday people rather than the political and military leaders and the upper class. The lives can go ways we wouldn’t have plotted. For instance, my family in North Carolina had a gold mine.