Today’s guest on Help From my Friends Friday is Author Bob Mueller. I know Bob from Crimescenewriter, a list where we co-moderate a large group of writers working to get their facts straight. Please welcome Author Bob Mueller as he shares a fascinating way to develop our characters. ~ Donnell
All About The Story: Do Writers Make Good Genealogists?
By Bob Mueller
Author Bob Mueller
If you’ve ever stopped by my blog, you know I’ve talked more than once about my genealogy research. I love doing the research and learning about the people who came before me.
On the other hand, I get that a lot of people don’t care much about family history. They think it’s boring, that it’s living in the past, that it’s a world that no longer exists or is just foreign to them.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like the Venn diagram of fiction writers and genealogists could be a single circle.
We writers spend day after day crafting and editing the perfect setting for the characters we spend hours upon hours creating. Some writers will make multiple drawings of their characters, or scour actor agency photos for the perfect match to their mental image of the character.
I know all sorts of details about Danny Cumberland, the main character in The Sad Girl series. I know his parents, and that they were both only children, so he doesn’t have any close cousins. He was a loner in high school.
Ditto Danny’s Navy friend, Marco. He grew up in Alaska, and his dad was in the Air Force. His two siblings were named for famous aviators. Marco and Danny bonded over their small-town backgrounds.
I could tell you about Danny’s girlfriend Teresa, but you get the point. We writers know a lot about the people in our fictional worlds.
I’m learning all sorts of cool things about the main
character in my next book, too. Aaron Cooper moved to Oklahoma from Puyallup, Washington to stay close to his girlfriend Sonja. She came back to Oklahoma, leaving a career in the Air Force to help her mom take care of her dad, because her older sister wasn’t doing it. There’s some tension there.
Fantasy authors are even more involved. They build worlds from scratch, creating creatures and species and nations and magic systems. They know what materials it takes to cast this spell or that one, and where those materials can be found. They develop tribal and national histories, establishing lineages and rivalries.
Historical fiction writers have it still harder because of the number of experts in every era. They have to research it seven different ways from Tuesday or else they’ll hear in great detail about everything they got wrong.
And all of this needs to be done before the first word of the story gets written.
Do we know as much about the people in our own worlds?
I started genealogical research not long after my dad died, building on the stuff he’d already accomplished the “old-fashioned way,” pre-internet, using letters and phone calls and microfiche. I’ve found some information he was never able to locate. I’ve got lots of names and dates, which is really cool. For example, my maternal grandmother was one of 13 kids born over twenty-five years in deep rural West Virginia. My paternal great-grandfather had six children over nine years.
You know what I don’t have? The stories. Genealogy is so much more than the names and dates and places.
It’s about the why.
It’s about the stories behind those dates and places.
I know Nan was the oldest surviving child of those 13 kids. But I don’t know how she met Ed Baldinger, who was originally from New Orleans, or why they got married in New Jersey. I don’t know much of anything about Grandpa Baldinger, really, because he died before my parents even met.
I don’t know why she left her family and never spoke to them again. None of her siblings ever seemed to know either.
I don’t know exactly why my great-grandfather Johann Carl Müller left southern Germany on a ship bound for the United States, or how he met my great-grandmother in western New York. I don’t know why they moved from New York to Texas, either. I know he was a farmer in New York, but by the time he got to Austin, he ran a feed store.
I came across a writing prompt on Reddit a while back asking, “If you could invite an ancestor to have a meal with you, and discuss their/your life, who and why would it be?”
I’d meet with everyone I could because I want to hear all the stories. I’d spend hours talking to JC about why he made his trip. He was one of eight children; two of his brothers eventually came to the States. My dad speculated about why they made the trip, but as far as either of us has ever been able to find, they came to the US separately, not necessarily planning on meeting up with each other. JC was the first to immigrate. By the time his older brother Phillip arrived, JC was already in Texas. Phillip settled in New Jersey, and I’ve not found any evidence of regular communication between the two. Their brother Robert also immigrated, living in St Louis for many years before visiting Austin and dying there.
I think writers should—or could be, at least, great genealogy researchers. We’re all about the story and the setting. I keep reminding myself that people don’t exist in a vacuum. We—and our characters—are surrounded by people who affect our decisions and actions. Those tidbits, those nudges are all part of our story.
And aren’t we writers all about the story?
About the Book: Six months ago, Danny Cumberland rescued his daughter and her friends from an international trafficking nightmare. They came home from Argentina and started the healing process.
Now Danielle wants to find her missing mother.
Nikolai Egger, the leader of the kidnappers who snatched Danielle so long ago, disappears during a prison transfer. Then the cops find several badly charred bodies in a van. Is one of them his?
A dead man arrives in San Diego on a bus, carrying nothing but the Cumberland’s new address.
Danny and his friends find evidence that the trafficking rings’ tentacles are entwined more deeply than anyone thought possible, even reaching into federal law enforcement. They’re running out of people they can trust, too.
After a traumatic shooting literally in Danny’s face, he sets off on cross-country trip, scrambling to deliver the evidence that will crack the ring wide open. But can they trust the person they’re meeting?
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/books/discoveries/
About the Author: Author of three books including the Sad Girl series, Bob Mueller has been a cop, soldier, pizza guy, computer programmer, and even a funeral escort. But he still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, so for now he tells stories. Born in north Texas and raised in southeastern Ohio, Bob calls Oklahoma home these days. He’s a member of International Thriller Writers, Tulsa NightWriters, and Oklahoma Writer’s Federation. Bob’s also a father of eight, grandfather, and a pastor’s agnothiest husband. When he’s not writing, he enjoys reading (thrillers, historical fiction and non-fiction, and police procedurals), genealogy, and motorcycling.
Website: http://www.bobmuellerwriter.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobmueller
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/indefixa
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/BobMueller
Instagram: https://instagram.com/bobmuellerwriter
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/BobMueller
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbmueller
Bob,
I know exactly how you feel. Maybe I write to give completion to the lives of my ancestors that I know so little about. I’m missing the stories behind the statistical facts I get from the census, military records, and land grants.
I’ve often thought if I could talk to a deceased family member it would be my maternal grandfather. According to my mother (now deceased), he would visit everyone on Sundays after church. I believe he knew where the bodies were buried.
Bob, thank you for being my guest today. I think this is fascinating. If you read Connie Gillam’s post from last week, she agrees with you, albeit she honors her ancestors using their character names. What site do you use and when you’re logged on do you have a wide area to search or are you restricted to your family tree and where it leads you. (Does that make sense). Happy Friday.
This makes me want to dig into my family history more. I done a lot of free searches but can’t find out anything about my maternal grandfather, who I was told came from Ireland but I think he was actually born in Kentucky. Half the stories I’ve heard do not appear to be accurate. I wonder why that is and that, in itself, would make an interesting basis for a story. I’m wondering if Bob can recommend one particular ancestry site that is good.
Thanks Donnell, for keeping up these blogs and for the superb guest bloggers.
Thank you, Candy, for reading and commenting! Happy Friday.
Hi, Bob, and so wonderful to know more about you. I’ve always told my sons stories about family. Lord knows over my lifetime, I heard plenty about WW2 and the Great Depression, experiences my family went thru, but not my children. It’s family history. If I could meet a relative again, I would want to be with my grandmother. She raised six kids after her husband died when my mom was five during the depression. She was very generous with cake and tatting.
Vicki, that’s quite a family — enough for a series 😉 xo
Great article, Bob. I started researching my family tree last year, and the history is fascinating, along with a few surprises.
Thanks so much for the kind comments, everyone.
Connie, that’s an interesting idea, knowing where the bodies are buried. 🙂 There’s a lot of power in that knowledge, even if it’s never exercised.
My family lines are from SW Germany (my dad) and NE Switzerland (my mom). Dad had found quite a bit of information from his cousins and from contacting churches and such. That was all before the internet, really, although the LDS church was just beginning to make their data available.
I use a variety of sites, but most of my work I do on Ancestry. My kids and wife got together for Christmas and bought me the big membership, World Explorer, which gives me access to foreign stuff. Family Search (the LDS church site) has quite a bit of information available, and most of it is free. Some you have to access from a Family Search Center, but you can get quite a lot of work done even if you don’t have a center close by. Many public libraries have AncestryLibrary accounts, too.
I have a small tree on Ancestry, mainly to let other people see me; that’s got about 1000 names or so. My “real” data is at http://genealogy.ravensbeak.com. I use a program called TNG to maintain that site, so don’t be too impressed by the looks. 🙂
Vicki, that sounds something like my dad’s mother. Her husband, my paternal grandfather, died just short of my dad’s 7th birthday in 1927. Leona – Gran – only had three boys to raise, but it was in the heart of the Depression. There were quite a few cousins in Austin though, so I don’t think they had nearly the trouble that so many others had.
As to family stories not being true, I think there’s a good bit of romanticizing the history. If every family that claimed a “Cherokee princess” in their history really had indigenous ties, the Cherokee Nation would outnumber probably every other tribe and racial group in the world! Oftentimes, I think family history is like a game of telephone, and facts get mangled and distorted, even if a fragment of truth remains. For the longest time, we only had family legends about when JC Mueller arrived in the US and all of the local records of their marriage were lost. But I finally found his immigration information when I discovered his passport application, and that confirmed much of the family legend.
[…] about genealogy, unintentionally following the topic that the previous week’s writer had chosen. Check it out here. Donnell and I co-moderate a writer’s research email list, and she was kind enough to invite me […]