Plots from the Family Tree

LUCY BURDETTE: I went to a family wedding in Illinois over Labor Day and happily spent the weekend with my father‘s brother and his sons, my cousins. One of my cousins is the genealogist of the family, so we took this chance to query him about our history, and also to get details about old family stories from my Uncle Don. I knew the tragic story about my grandfather who co-managed a silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey with his sister and another relative. As I'd heard it told, he had wanted desperately to sell the factory, but the others refused to accept a very good offer on the business. And then came the development of synthetic fibers and the Depression, which reduced silk to a nonstarter. And so they were stuck with the factory worth exactly nothing. Obviously this had a big impact on him both financially and psychologically. My uncle said his father had never been willing to discuss this.

What I didn’t know is that we also had a relative who made Ferris wheels in Paterson, NJ. When the market for those dried up, his company turned to metal crypts, a product that never goes out of demand.

Now surely I can find a good plot in all that! What stories do you have in your family that might be good fodder for a novel?

HALLIE EPHRON: Metal crypts! And your protagonist inherits a basement full of them... only they're not all empty. (Cue scary music.)

My family favorite story is about my father's mother who died before I was born. She famously saved the family from economic disaster. In one of several unpublished manuscripts my dad left behind, he says, "In 1921 my father was in the woolen business, and when the depression of 1921 came, he went bankrupt. He told mother something she had guessed long before. She put her arm around him and said, "We'll be all right. For the last two years I've been in the real estate business. I've bought and sold five houses and I've got enough money to buy that rug store we saw in the Bronx." Now, if only I still owned five houses in the Bronx.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Both sides of my family talked so little about their family history that I'm beginning to wonder what skeletons were in the family cupboards! I know that my maternal grandmother, recently widowed, had to sell her wedding ring during the depression to put food on the table for her four kids. I also know that she taught school in California for a while, before she came back to Texas to live with my folks when I was born. Now I wonder what adventures she might have had there.

My dad started his own business in the Forties, selling raw popcorn to movie theater chains. He was The Popcorn Man, and quite the entrepreneur. I'm seeing a musical here!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: SO funny--my dad asked Gramma Minnie to tell him about life in Russia in the say, 19-teens. She lived in a little village somewhere in Russia, and she told him, "Oh it was lovely, and everyone was lovely." Gramma? Ya THINK?  Doubtful. So I'm wondering what she was hiding, right? My mother's mother, Gramma Rose,  was a strange fashionista. And I do mean..strange.  When she died, I was maybe 10? And we went to clean out her closets. her house was beautiful, immaculate. BUT in the closet: she had several dresses--in several sizes. Like, every size. Like--the blue one in a  2,4,6,8,10..etc. The red one in a 2,4,6,8,10. Untouched.   It still disturbs me. And now when I buy two of something, it gives me chills. I'm seeing scary movie, got to say.

NOT Rhys's great-grandmother.

 RHYS BOWEN: My great aunt Min (really Sarah Ann) told many stories of the family history on my mother's mother's side. My favorite story was that my great great grandfather was disinherited when he ran off to marry a gypsy. It's always intrigued me to know I might have gypsy blood. My great grandmother on my mother's father's side must have been a fabulous woman. She was French--Josephine--and she married a 35 year old Welshman when she was just 17.(I've no idea how or where they could possibly have met) She had 14 children with him. I have a picture of her, surrounded by her grown children, and she still looks incredibly young with a tiny waist. When my great grandfather died she married again. He died. In her eighties she decided to go out to Australia, to her daughter. So she went alone on a ship. I clearly get my adventurous spirit from her, although I wish I had her waist! 

INGRID THOFT: My grandfather came to the United States, through Ellis Island, when he was seventeen-years-old, his only companion his best friend.  That journey would be a tale all its own, but after making his way across the country, he drove an ambulance in San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake in 1906.  He was still a teenager; I guess anyone was allowed to drive an ambulance?!  Eventually, he married my grandmother and became a homesteader in Montana.  My maternal grandmother, who I’ve mentioned before on the blog, was a radio actress on WBZ Radio Boston in the 1920s and 1930s.  I think her stage name, Constance D’Arcy, would be a great jumping off point for a historical murder mystery!

JENN McKINLAY: I am descended from pirates, thieves, and other assorted ne'er do wells. Shocker, I know! Scottish, English, Irish, and Russian - my grandparents  were all escaping something and arrived in America to start anew. My aristocratic Russian grandmother married an Irish fisherman - much to the dismay of

both their families - and my Scots and English grandparents met at a dance in the basement of a church in Yonkers where they were carousing - playing piano, dancing, smoking, and drinking gin. My grandmother told me they got into big trouble for that! My people seem to think of the rule of law as more like a set of "guidelines". LOL.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We had a family story that didn't come out until my mother and her siblings were adults. My maternal grandmother was the cherished younger granddaughter of the Most Important Family in our upstate NY town, so when she left her parent's farm after graduating from the Argyle academy to waitress at a speakeasy in a neighboring town, eyebrows were raised. 

But that was nothing compared to the man she brought home and told her parents she wanted to marry. First off, he was German. Secondly, he was ten years older than she. Finally, he had been married before - and his wife had died in childbirth, along with their baby. My grandmother would not be deterred, and so she became Mrs. Greuling. It wasn't until the birth of their first child that her parents softened up enough to visit the couple.

But what none of the family knew, until after both Grandpa and Grandma had passed away, was that Theodore Greuling had been married TWICE before. Unbelievably, and tragically, his second wife had also died while giving birth to a girl, who didn't survive. A family member tracked down their gravestones. The baby's name was Lois, and her mother was Lila... which were the names of my mother and her older sister. Grandma never knew her husband had named two of their daughters after his lost wife and child. 

Now THAT'S a novel-worthy family tale!

How about you red readers, do you have plots in your family history? Will you share them?