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While writing about Scotland in the mid-1700s, I’m always on the lookout for primary sources, that is, accounts written on or near the time an event took place. This morning I was browsing for one “gallant Scotus” who died at the Battle of Culloden. I found him: Donald 4th MacDonell of Scotus 1705-1746. Not much else, yet.

Just below him on the queue was Creator: MacDonald, Donald, d.1746 “A genuine account of the behaviour, confession, and dying words, of the three Scots Rebels, viz. Donald MacDonald, James Nicholson; and Walter Ogilvie. (all officers in the Young Pretender’s service) who were executed the 22d day of August 1746 for high treason”

In it there are various points of view about the 1745 rising, motivations for joining, who is responsible for war atrocities, as well as loyalties and regrets over its failure. I try not to take sides, but this one got me riled.

What horror. The men named above were accused of treason for following the “popish Pretender” Prince Charles Edward Stuart, which they did, but also accused of a list of heinous crimes — “a black Train of Murders, Slaughters, Rapes, and Villainies of All Sorts to the innocent and peaceable,” which numerous historical accounts record did not happen. Just the opposite. While there may have been rare exceptions, the rebel army soldiers of the 1745 Jacobite rising went out their way to be respectful to all citizens and behave with dignity.

The sentence carried out on three of the four men:

That you must be drawn to the Place of Execution, where you must be hanged by your Necks, but not until you are dead; for you must be cut down alive, your Heads must be severed from your Bodies, your Bowels must be taken out and burnt before your Faces. And your Body must be divided in four Quarters; and these must be at the King’s Disposal.

Oh, “And God Almighty be merciful to your souls.” Since the King most certainly isn’t.

This June I was delighted to learn that How We Survive Here was honored as a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in the Memoirs (historical/career/legacy) category. The impressive medal they sent (I wasn’t able to attend the ceremony in DC) arrived a couple of weeks ago.

But it truly felt like I was hitting the big time when my local newspaper, the Mercer Island Reporter, published an article about my journey writing the book. It seems appropriate that the photo in the article shows me attempting to blacksmith, which strikes me (sorry) as a metaphor for what it’s like to forge an historical novel into being. The picture was taken in 2013 during the time I was seeking to better understand the protagonist, Michael Harm, of my historical novel The Last of the Blacksmiths.

Thanks to Corey Oldenhuis of Sound Publishing for writing up this article. (Click on article below to go to the full text on the MI Reporter website.)

It’s happening! My book How We Survive Here: Families Across Time is being released this November. It’s already up and available for pre-order on Amazon.*

What a journey. Back in 2008, my German cousin Angela Weber visited me, bringing along 19th-century letters written in Old German Script by my German immigrant ancestors. Angela knew how to translate the letters, a true blessing. Otherwise their contents would still be a mystery.

I wrote my historical novel The Last of the Blacksmiths (2014) based on the people of those letters, blacksmiths and wagon-makers to Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-1800s. I fictionalized the story to universalize it, but Angela pressed for something more — the actual publication of the letters to make them available to all. She was right, of course. In addition to their value for historians, the letters also contain many surnames of other German immigrants, something of value to genealogists.

As we got going on the project (the letter translations in the book are by Angela), How We Survive Here became so much more than letters, eventually transforming into a full-fledged memoir. It’s the story of:

Last but not least, How We Survive Here was written in the hope it will inspire and help many others as they explore and write up their family histories.

The release date (November 10, 2018) is one month and counting, so here we go. Thanks to all of you for coming along on the journey.

*Though it’s convenient to shop on Amazon, I believe it’s also important to support your local bookstore, another place you can order a copy. Or, request that your local library add it to their collection.

Privies, also called outhouses, can also be a worthy subject of history, can’t they? A part of everyday life. Privies used to be a common sight on every farm. They were located near, but not too near, the main building, and came in varying sizes — one-holers, two-holers, etc. Sometimes, there were two privies, one for men, one for women. Signs would be posted on the doors saying which was which, or the genders could also be distinguished by a crescent moon for women and a star for men.

Speaking of which, on the C&O Canal Trail, the National Park Service supplies a privy, aka a port-a-potty, every five miles or so. For the most part, they’ve been well-maintained and even have toilet paper.

In the comfort of today’s “privies,” owners sometimes feel inspired to elevate the mood of the visitor. In Hancock, we stopped for dinner at Buddy Lou’s along the Canal. In the restroom, I happened upon a framed three-stanza poem, a vase of flowers beside it, the first stanza of which follows.

The Trail to Hancock

I took the trail to Hancock all
in the sweet May weather,
Through Frederick and
through Hagerstown, with
heart as light as a feather,
The trail that climbs the
mountains so, goes
over peak by peak,
And the dogwood and the judas
trees made every moment speak.

B.B.

I awoke this morning under a leafless canopy of towering white oaks, tulips, and beech trees. Who knew about  Prince William Forest National Park? Not me, and at this point in the season, not a lot of other people, either. With 40 degree temperatures and gray cloudy skies, there were no neighboring tents nearby, a good thing because, at the early hour of 7 a.m., I accidentally set off the car alarm in my rental.

Prince William Forest National Park was founded in 1936, and is located just off I-95 near Quantico, Virginia. Now deep woods, the area has a long and diverse history. The winding, seemingly endless journey up Scenic Drive to get to the Oak Ridge Campground last night was not so scenic, but even in the pitch darkness I could tell this was a seemingly endless tract of forest. The park covers some 15,000 acres, mostly secondary growth forest.

This morning I took a brief mile hike along the Farm to Forest trail. This picture was on the interpretive trail sign at the start, the landscape now overgrown again with trees. Spring is just arriving, no wildflowers yet on the forest floor, but it’s nice to revisit the deciduous-type forest of my youth.

When I arrived at Heathrow Airport, in some ways it felt like I’d never left Seattle.

Once in Inverness, when I climbed on the “Stagecoach” bus from the airport into the city center, I knew I’d left for sure. Not just because of the eye-bending colors, but also because the driver’s seat was on the right (wrong) side of the bus. It had been a long, loud ride across the top of the world, just a little farther to go.

A short time later, I was loading into the Moniack Mhor shuttle for the last leg of my 24 hour journey…

and taken straight to my pleasant, silent room with a view.

If I kneel on my bed and peer out the window, I have a view of the Hobbit House studio as a foreground to the mist-soaked, patchwork countryside. It’s so very quiet here.

Sunrise.

Tomorrow evening I’m looking forward to giving a talk at the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor on “Creating a Legacy from Family Documents.” It’s a topic near and dear to my heart.

Ever since I wrote a novel based on the true story of my ancestor Michael Harm — the German immigrant blacksmith to Cleveland, Ohio — my appreciation for family history legacies, especially their role in our self-understandings, has taken on new life.

In particular, it’s impressed on me the importance of sharing what we know for subsequent generations.

“You’ve really created a legacy for our kids,” my sister-in-law said to me recently, referring to The Last of the Blacksmiths.

“Well, yes and no.” I saw what Cheri meant, how the retelling of Michael Harm’s life resurrected him in a way, giving his descendants a better understanding of what he’d lived through, as well as insights about how we came to be who we are today. Then again, I have more work ahead. “I had to fictionalize some things in the book to make it a good story,” I told her, “so I still need to tell the true story of his life. I’m working on that right now. Michael Harm’s genealogical narrative.”

That’s still in the works. The nonfiction version, so to speak.

For those of us privileged inherit family documents and oral histories, the task of organizing it all can feel daunting. I recommend taking it in baby steps, little by little; you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.

An invaluable resource for me in the baby-step-by-baby-step approach has been my genealogy writing group, a spin off of my local genealogical society. I recommend joining a writing group, or, if your genealogical society doesn’t offer that, consider starting one. (If you want to know the particulars, send me an email and I’ll share how ours works.)

By submitting five pages every two weeks and then gathering for a critique session, I not only get the pages written, I benefit from immediate reader response. I find out what wasn’t clear enough in my description, what I left out, what really resonated, what needs more research. Each of us in my group is approaching family history based on the resources at hand — family photos, childhood memories, recipes, the memories of a parent living in the home, family letters, and so on.

As for me, family letters are my precious inheritance. I’m excited to be publishing them in my new book, How We Survive Here, a family history memoir that contains three dozen rare letters, translated by my German cousin Angela Weber. The book includes the adventures of my quest to trace the people who wrote the letters, researching on both sides of the Atlantic, learning to blacksmith, harvesting grapes in Germany, trying to tackle the German language, and so on. It’s due out from Coffeetown Press in 2018.

Do you suppose my ancestors, the German blacksmiths and wagon-makers, ever envisioned a day when their letters would be published and preserved for posterity? What each of us manages to accomplish, little by little, in sharing our family histories will create a legacy for the future in ways we can’t imagine.

Case in point. The other day, casting about for insights into how my Highlander ancestors lived in the 1700s, I was browsing the history shelves of Powell’s Bookstore and came upon Highland Folk Ways. “This work is a fascinating record, set down before it is too late for the traditions to be remembered,” the book jacket description begins.  The author, Isabel Grant, was in a unique position to create this legacy: “Taught from an early age the stories and traditions of the Highlands, Isabel Grant’s first serious piece of research was for a book based on the farm accounts of her own great-great-grandfather.”

Each of us has wisdom to share, inherited from parents, and grandparents, from family documents and treasures, and from our own experiences. I urge you to begin, and/or to keep going, recording what you know with the materials at hand, to create a valuable legacy for those who follow.

Browsing the vendor offerings at the International Germanic Genealogy Partners Conference, I wondered what I could possibly find that I’d be willing to carry home in my luggage. And then, there it was, a book I’d been trying to track down for eight years. In the introduction to the English edition, the translator Steven Rowan notes:

The Swan Song of the Cleveland Germans? The second edition of “Cleveland and Its Germans [1907]” can be scanned for symptoms of the ongoing process of assimilation which would receive a sudden shock of acceleration within a decade with the entry of the United States into World War I.

This statement is painfully true, especially given how strident the anti-German hysteria became in Ohio cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati. As a consequence, German families changed their surnames to sound less German, German books were removed from libraries, the German language was no longer taught in schools. But even without the onset of WWI, the assimilation process was bound to continue. In that light, Rowan’s conclusion also resonated:

At this distance the death of German Cleveland has an inevitable and elegaic quality, but it also warns us of the costs of compulsory conformity in a mass society.

Hmm, food for thought. Anyhow, I’m happy to have the book for its biographies and write-ups, and it completes my collection.

What with the discovery of that book today, and the many great people I met and stories I heard, I’m one happy camper. After many hours inside, though, I felt a bit desperate for some greenery, so headed over for a walk on the grounds of the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory at Como Park. The greenery and serenity and silence were golden.

I’m off on another adventure, attending the first ever International German Genealogy Conference in Minneapolis, MN. With almost 700 registrants, it’s one of those moments of anticipation, not knowing quite what to expect, but it ought to be fun.

And, I expect that no matter what else happens, there will be Bier.