Alternate-History

This is not so much a post about anyones fiction in particular but more a thought on the kernel of the fictions we tell ourselves and the stories that get told about family. Today I spent the majority of my free time using Ancestry.com to explore my grandfathers line on my mothers side of my family. The website was allowing free access to census records and the tidbits I learned were proto-stories and confirmations of things I treat as apocryphal about my families past.

The one thing I did not learn was wether I have American Indian blood somewhere in the family tree and that still saddens me because it's the ibe thing my grandfather wanted to find when he was alive. What I did find was an amazing group of clues to a past that is hidden and made mysterious by the limited records. His grandmother on his fathers side lived for a long time with her father on an Ohio farm but soon after marriage live for a time in a boarding house with many foreign immigrants without her husband for the tine before her children's births back at her fathers farm. There are no records if the father anywhere other then the name. It's a mystery and one no obe has every spoken of. She crossed a state line in the mid 1800s and crossed back when travel was a hardship.

I also happily learned that I did have a Scottish relative on his side... My grandfathers great grand mother was from there. It does not match the myth of the crazy scottsman who got himself a Indian wife but poses a deeper and more interesting story.

My day has barely toughed the surface since there are records I have not yet seen that would yield answers while opening yet more questions. It's experiences like this that stimulate my imagination; I want to make up and tried to make up the stories of these people now forever lost to me. There is a distant uncle that fought for several tours in the civil war across three different companies and another that seemed to have served to. Farmers, electricians, servants and engineers dot my families past along with cooks and gardeners. I'm afraid I'm no where nest as interesting....

Ok I know it's nothing about books but I can see so many stories out there that if your families history intrigues you I'd encourage you to dig in. It's as cool as anything you can read by our best fantasy authors....