From Genealogy to Fiction, Part One
Transforming my family history into fictional drabbles
I got interested in my family history about 30 years ago and genealogy became one of my favorite hobbies when I retired.
The story of my father’s family is mostly about my French (Bolduc), German (Theler) and Irish (O’Dwyer — McAuliffe) ancestors who migrated to San Francisco in the 1860s.
My mother’s family is mostly Scots and Irish (Muckle — Gallagher) and these ancestors were all in the neighborhood of Virginia City, Nevada by the 1860s.
The first story I wrote for Genealogy: Find Your Past was about re-discovering my mother’s family and organizing a reunion in Carson City in 1996. You can read that story here. Carson City is also my favorite “C” destination in my Favorite Destinations series on Globetrotters. You can find that story here.
I started writing for Medium in May 2022 and concentrated mostly on travel stories, more or less extending my WordPress travel blog which was active from 2010 through the middle of 2020.
Then in March 2023 I began writing stories for a Medium publication called This or That which evolved into another publication called the Challenged. Then last September, Nancy Oglesby, the founding editor of the Challenged, introduced still another publication called Fiction Shorts and I started to dabble in fiction.
At the beginning of this year Nancy reorganized her publication to feature daily drabbles and here we are 7 months later cranking out 100 words of wonder every single day.
A few weeks into my daily drabbles I dreamed up a character who was more or less a composite of several of my mother’s relatives. I called him the Old Prospector and the stories took off with lives of their own.
A few more weeks down the line I realized that my overall story seemed to be deviating from my family history and a few holes began to appear here and there. I then came up with another series more closely following the lives of my great grandparents. A few more weeks of drabbles and it became apparent that the two series would eventually blend together.
As of July 22, 2024, I now have 26 stories in My Old Prospector Drabbles series and 15 stories in My Will and Aggie Drabbles series. Most of the recent stories take place in the late 1870s and early 1880s when the main characters were living in Bodie, California.
Nancy no longer allows drabble series in Fiction Shorts and so my two series are now published in CJ Coop’s publication called The Lodestar Gazette. I still publish non-series drabbles in Fiction Shorts.
My present plan is to end both series of drabbles by the end of the year. Then if I am still drabbling in 2025, I plan to introduce a new series based on the next generation of my mother’s family which will feature my grandmother Maggie, who just happens to be the oldest of Will and Aggie’s kids.
I also hope to develop a new series featuring those members of my father’s family who became teachers. My great grandmother Margaret McAuliffe Dwyer has already been featured in one recent drabble (see here). And her oldest daughter Nora is also the subject of another drabble which you can find here. Margaret’s husband James and another daughter Alice were also teachers, as are two of my siblings and one of my nieces. And my younger daughter is a former teacher.
In Genealogy and Fiction, Part Two I will show how I transformed various events that occurred in the lives of my ancestors into fictional drabbles. The sources for most of these events are articles I found in various Northern California and Northern Nevada newspapers.
