In Black and White: Cross-Cultural Genealogy

Vintage Puzzle by Fel1x Following the post on composite likeness , I began giving some thought to the next step....Since I am writing about a person I've never met...a black male in a time not my own...in a world with differing social mores...I must find devices to piece together the complete man from a fourteen-year-old boy through the stages of manhood. Composite Personality Just as I had morphed the photos of four generations of Carter males to come up with a visual representation of my protagonist's physical appearance, I have overlaid the layers of our elders' comments with observations of living descendants for three generations of Carter men. Layer 1: Hezekiah Carter (son; deceased) In the summer of 2004 our family traveled from our home in New England to the Livingston Grand Reunion in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Prior to the in-gathering of the descendants of Frank Livingston, we stopped over in Whiteville, North Carolina to visit with family from th...

When we last looked at character development , we discussed the soul wounds that our protagonist-- young Isaac Carter --had experienced up till his fourteenth year of age. The succession of losses in his life most likely left him with fears of abandonment and of financial hardship, taking the form of a mask of self-reliance. All of this sounds so academic and detached. Now is the time to determine how these theoretical fears and compensation affected the behavior, thoughts and attitudes of Isaac as he matured. Gaining insights by looking backward The first step to filling in gaps in descriptive character detail, such as answering the question:  What did the fourteen year old Isaac look like? is to examine what you have and work backward. STEP ONE: While we have no personal artifacts to guide us, we must first look at what we DO have. Below is a list I compiled of all of Isaac Carter's documentation to date: 1850 U.S. Census (9, living with parents & family) 18...

One of the biggest frustrations for me as a researcher/writer is coming to a screeching halt at the appearance of a giant pothole in the middle of the road. It's not quite the same as coming to a dead end. There's more information to fill in the path...somewhere...but  where...and when?  Just as I was really getting somewhere with character development, I received an email which opened up a whole new avenue of exploration in regards to the old Newbern Courthouse. New Bern, Newbern or New Berne? Allow me to begin with just a brief note on historic spellings for our city. Victor T. Jones Jr., the Special Collections Librarian in the Kellenberger Room at New Bern-Craven County Public Library, says in a recent Facebook communication: Officially they started writing New Bern as two words in the 1890s. Before the Civil War, it was mostly written as one word (Newbern), though there are some examples of it as two. During the Civil War occupation is when the "e" was ad...

Lies, you say? Courtesy of Linda Rowlands Gravestone at Washburn Cemetery, Scranton, Lackawanna, PA Yes, lies. We all believe them, whether we realize they are untruths or not. For instance, when I was five years old my grandmother was killed by a drunk driver as she stepped foot onto the curb. For years I had remembered part of a conversation I overheard shortly after her funeral regarding her grave marker.  She was the first female child of David and Hannah (Rowlands) Jones to die, and she was buried in the Jones family plot. The grave marker was engraved with the surname JONES. My grandmother's  married name, however, was NEWTON. It seemed that it had been proposed that her name be engraved on a separate stone with the surname facing the opposite direction. That is what my mother and I had always believed had happened. In fact, I thought that I had seen such a stone when we went to the cemetery for my grand aunt Hannah (Jones) Holden's interment. In fact, no such...

Some life application of the 3 Core Questions Recently I presented the three core questions for character development to a Teen Sunday School class and asked them to answer these questions about themselves: Image by STiX2000 on deviantART What is YOUR core need...your motivation in life...and what would you do if you could not attain it? What is YOUR greatest fear? What incidents in YOUR life have wounded you and caused you to believe a lie, or have shaded your perception of life events?  These questions are a great tool for getting to the heart of our inner truth! I believe most people are caught up in a cycle of  Greek drama, weather comedy or tragedy, hiding their true selves to cover their vulnerability. Sometimes, however, by wearing a mask people begin to believe a lie about themselves or even about the people and world around them.  Back to young Isaac Carter I believe that the greatest fear is linked to the core need, and acts as a negative moti...

First off, let me give a big shout out to C. S. Lakin, whose series The Heart Of Your Story on her blog, Live Write Thrive, has been a great source of direction in this phase of planning for the writing of my family history memoir! You can find her posts about character development and other topics  here . Next, I want you to know that determining young Isaac Carter's answers to the 3 Core Questions  has been much more difficult than I thought it would be. In fact, I'm still figuring it out...and for that reason I am focusing today on just the first question: 1. What was young Isaac's core need,  and what would he do if he could not attain it? As I've contemplated the events of young Issac's life in late 1853, I've realized that he must have experienced a life shift which changed him down to the very core. His parents were both deceased sometime prior to September 1853... ...his grandfather was very ill for at least a year... ...his family was b...

Yesterday I mentioned that I needed to answer the three core questions about each of my main characters before moving on. Well, when I sat down to work on it I realized there was something else I needed to consider. Birth Order My training in psychology always has me thinking in terms of family dynamic . What was the role each person played in the family? Back in the early 1980s when I studied Alfred Adler's theory of Birth Order and Personality , I began applying this information (along with the meaning and origin of names when selecting fictional characters' names) to my family groups to try to reconstruct a possible family dynamic. In a brief examination of the birth order and ages of the children in Isaac Carter's household in 1853, I noticed an immediate pattern: Comfort (21)     } 2 years between Comfort and William William (19)     } Mary Ann (15)  } 4 years between William and Mary Ann ISAAC (14)      } 1 year between Mary Ann ...

Ancestors as Characters Have you ever thought of your ancestors in terms of Characters  in your family history? I have to admit that when I first started out on this journey to write a family history memoir , I first had to narrow down which story I wanted to tell, and once I decided that, I had to begin thinking of our ancestors in terms of characters within the book. After all, when you pick up a book, what is it that grabs your attention and entices you to continue reading? For me it's getting to meet the protagonist within the first couple pages and witness his/her reactions to whatever it is going on in the midst of the action. Okay. So, we've established that our protagonist is going to be Isaac Carter. Actually , our protagonist will change over time as we move from generation to generation. But at the onset, our principle player will be young Isaac (14). Now, who else is in this story? The next set of people I looked at were his siblings who were also apprenticed....

What is a family history memoir? There seems to be some discrepancy today of what genre our book might fall into: family history?  memoir? historical narrative? or some combination of the above.... Ahnentafel with modified register  for Isaac Carter For our purposes here we will agree that a family history is usually a narrative telling of one family, often including female collateral lines. It's scope often begins with the first immigrant in America and continues to the present; however, sometimes it may extend beyond the emigration story to life in the nation of origin. The narrative itself is a compilation of facts extracted from oral tradition and documentary sources, and may contain assumptions and conclusions drawn by the researcher/author. Many family histories conclude with the actual genealogy in an Ahnentafel chart. Here you'll see the first page of our Isaac Carter's ahnentafel with a modified register, which means that the report also includes an in...