The Forgotten Manuscript: Bringing Family Stories to Life -

My paternal grandmother was interested in genealogy, and so was her father and his father. Theirs is a well-researched line in my family tree. I am a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, twice even, because of some distant cousins who married each other. She loved to show us portraits hung on her dining room wall and say, “We are descended from Benjamin Franklin through Bache’s and sons of Bache’s.” I didn’t figure out the groans and chuckles until years later. I wish my own fascination with family history had developed before she died.

When my parents downsized, I gladly took all the boxes marked “family,” and among them was a box full of her “process papers.” Memorabilia, photos, correspondence with art galleries and various cousins, handwritten notes, and supporting documents for her years and years of pre-internet research. I have examined each piece several times, marveling at her persistence and the emphatic scrawl across the top of some papers (to me, I imagine) “NOT RELATED.”

Among the jumbled box was a loose binder with faded yellow legal pads inside.

Over 200 pages of a handwritten manuscript, but definitely not in her handwriting. The first pages have drawings of her tree with familiar names and dates, and as I tried to figure out what I was holding, I carefully turned to a random page in the middle and realized that her father, my great-grandfather, had written it. I got very still and quiet as if it could disappear as quickly as it was found, I began to whisper-read it aloud to myself.

“My earliest recollection is when my father was an instructor in Ordnance and Gunnery at Naval Academy in 1884 and 1885, where my older brother Jimmie and I wandered about the Academy getting into mischief. I remember we wore kilts.”

Transcription of the manuscript.
Reading Early American Handwriting
Mac microphone for dictation

Kilts? My head was spinning. What a find! I imagine my grandmother accepting it from her father and offering to type it up for him before it was lost to her piles of more interesting work.

Her father’s stories must have been too close.

She knew them all by heart and maybe had even heard them a million times. So patiently they waited, not written in vain until a great-granddaughter he had never met found them.

When I read this next part, I put it down and called my dad.

“We were in Japan for three years, and some incidents are vivid in my memory. Of course, Jimmie and I had to go to school at an English Establishment called “The Victoria Public School,” Americans were in a minority, so we were much bullied, and although we never started fights, we were blamed for them and soundly whipped on the opened hands with heavy rulers.”

My father was unaware that his grandfather had lived in Japan as a boy and did not know that he had two little sisters who died before his 10th birthday. I called my Uncle, who did not know these details either, and he was riveted. Little by little, I read the pages aloud to the microphone on my Mac and watch his words appear. I have to go through and edit after I read to be sure the text is correct, but it is relatively fast and very accurate.

What is not fast is the side research I am doing as I go. I’m off if my great-grandfather mentions a place he went fishing in 1886 outside Santa Barbara or the Temple he and his brother ran away to in Kamakura, Japan, in 1888. I am most obsessed with this part of family history.

I am gently filling a balloon and lifting my ancestor off the page, giving dimension where there was none.

In this instance, I have the gift of his own words and descriptions to run with. I haven’t read further than I have dictated, and sometimes weeks pass when I don’t return to the task.

Research to enhance family history. — **The possibilities for side research are endless.**

Another beautiful aspect of our research into family history. There is always more to learn and record and do, and depending on what appeals to you on any given day; you can jump from your paternal side and life in the Navy in the late 1800s to the farm in West Virginia a century earlier on your maternal side.

How I Work

I have a little table easel I can clip the pages to so I can read/dictate easily without having to look down, and this also makes checking my work against the document cleaner while saving my neck. A task lamp and a magnifying glass are handy. I recommend choosing a consistent word you will say when you can’t decipher the handwriting so you don’t have to break your rhythm with lots of stops and starts.

When I can’t decipher a word, I say “something,” and then I can search the whole document for that word later to work on figuring it out.

I save up a few for when my dad visits, and he usually figures out what it says. Most word processing programs will allow you to search within the document for the word you chose, and you can tackle them one by one when you have time. I often take a picture with my phone of the word that I can’t read and isolate it by cropping the picture so that I can have it handy when I look at my handwriting guidebook (reference below) or so that I can text it to my dad or the wider family thread to see if anyone in the family has a guess!