More than Writers

There are lots of family trees in the Bible. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke trace the ancestry of Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament the Book of Numbers begins with a census, 1 Chronicles has lots of genealogical information while Nehemiah records the families who returned from exile. There are earlier mentions of people and their descendants too. Records had been kept. People considered this important. Nowadays family history research is a popular pastime. Having inherited the family papers I decided to do some research myself. A document I inherited The 1921 census was published earlier this year, but it is not yet free to access. I took out a subscription to one of the popular genealogy sites and began to research my ancestors. I can understand why people find this an absorbing and addictive hobby. The tools on the internet make it fairly easy to search records. The site I joined even has automatic tools which find hints to help locate relevant records. They are not always ac...

Growing up in Ireland, we often heard about the 'Seanchaí' (pronounced shan-a-key). They were storytellers, but more than that, they were guardians and communicators of history. The were the holders of folklore, in a time where there was not much written down; at least not for or by the common man. Of course, the role was not confined to the Irish. Many cultures had their minstrels and troubadours. Encyclopaedic knowledge passed from generation to generation.  Here in Wales, my husband's late great Aunty Olive was one such font of history. She was our own personal Google search. What ever subject you brought up, Aunty Olive had a family saga about it, which would lead her to another vaguely connected story and so on.  I wanted to make a family board game called, "Aunty Olive's Tenuous Links." You would move forward if you could connect some family history to random words on cards. The first person who could connect their last story to Aunty Olive's most fa...

My dad was a story-teller. I heard the same stories numerous times through my childhood, but he had the ability to make us laugh every time. He was a master at bringing home the punchline no matter how well you knew it. Daddy loved an audience and always had a speech ready. He lived with an acquired brain injury for over thirty years until his death at 83 y.o. So, as the years went on, he got some details confused, and as they say in Ireland, some of his stories grew with the telling . But it was always entertaining, and people just loved him. My story-telling was more in songs when I was growing up. You may have read before how I didn’t start writing stories regularly until I turned forty, then they poured out of me, as if they’d been sitting in storage, waiting to be released.  One of my most treasured possessions is a copy of my first collection of short stories which I had given to my dad. After he died, I found it in his belongings. He had ticked the end of each story, ...