I’ve been on a roll this summer–a writing roll. I’ve spent many days in the library (my most productive writing place), working like a demon to finish the first draft of the five-generation family history I’ve been writing for years. Yes, years.
It has been grueling–this summer, and the years that preceded it. I’ve ignored the advice I continually preach to my students: Don’t pick a project so large you become overwhelmed by its magnitude. In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew. I did just that and I’ve been chewing and chewing and chewing. Recreating the lives of five generations of ancestors who lived over a 200-year period is a foolhardy endeavor if you’re also trying to recreate the times and places in which they lived. The research alone nearly crippled me, generating three large storage boxes of material and nearly the equivalent volume in computer files.
The grueling part has been trying to pull it all together–combining the relevant history (national, local, religious, military, social, etc., etc.) with the genealogy data I collected. Because my ancestors tend to fly under the radar and never took a pencil to paper, I’ve had very basic genealogy records to reconstruct their lives.
As I said, it hasn’t been pretty. I feel comfortable enough now to confess that there were many times I’ve smelled the gut-wrenching whiff of failure. I saw myself walking away from all of it because there was no way I was going to finish.
But, in the end, I couldn’t. What would happen to all my research? I had stood in front of large audiences telling others how to write their family histories, inserting examples along the way about my own project. People left my lectures telling me that I’d convinced them they would write a family history. How could I ever face these people if I threw in the towel? Well, I couldn’t.
But, I feel confident enough now to come clean about my struggles and self-doubt because for the first time…I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. My hunkering down in the library this summer has paid dividends. I have nearly a 200-page draft of the whole enchilada.
Sure, I’ve got some tweaking to do–major stuff in some areas–but this seems like a cakewalk after all the excruciating thinking and re-writing and self-flagellation that went into the first draft. [click to continue…]