|
|
The therapy of writing family historyBy Eugen Bacon*Tracing genealogy can help you understand who you are and where you come from. It can connect you with existing members of your family, in spite of time and distance. It might enrich you with knowledge to pass down generations, and will surely deepen your understanding of history or inspire your learnings from its errors. Unravelling can begin with research. You can also start by asking the right questions to the right people at the right time. Question is, when it comes to family, where does healthy nosiness end and intrusion begin? Balance and motivation – that is your key. Once things begin to untangle and hunger for facts drives you to documents, artefacts, personal interviews and the monstrous internet, unfiltered truth comes shrouded in garbage. Before you know it, you have a daunting pile begging to be sorted and turned into logic. The impetus behind writing family history – be it a recording of fact, wanting family knowledge, reconnecting with the past, archiving, genealogy, characterisation or tradition – will decide what is constructive or not. Whether parentage in the family tree is documented or not, or clarity sits behind what is coloured or not, the reasons behind the writing will inform your organisation, framing, the primer. So you decide on the core story. That is your skeleton. To bring it to life, you must conjure it like a word magician. Sometimes, only then, once you embark on writing or editing, do you begin to understand what details you desire to know more about: datelines, names of places and people, side stories, documents, property, medical history... While fleshing out the work, maybe with a sense of delight, value or even quirkiness, you might notice what is fresh; what catches the moment; what might fascinate. You make informed judgement about what level of detail is too little, just enough or far too much. Edit, edit, edit. You try to divorce yourself from your work and read it with new eyes. What is central? What does it reveal? Self-interrogation: you are your own critic. Will flashbacks retain insight, thread together runaway pieces, or will they altogether stop the flow of what you mean to tell? As you draft, redraft, chop, refine, you must trust a need to keep going back to the impetus behind the family history, the core narrative. Factual elements give weight, as there will undoubtedly be subjective elements. Unless the work is mythical or intended to be fiction (possibly to cultivate the meanderings of a disremembering mind), it needs to be realistic. Back to the impetus – your reason will guide a lot of the decisions you make, especially how or where you place emphasis before, during and after the writing. And you just might find, through the journey of your unearthing and the documentation of it, how connecting with the past can be most therapeutic. * Eugen Bacon is a computer graduate who writes short stories and articles, and works in communications in a State Government. 
|
|
