Category: Writing

I’ve been using the free, on line service FamilySearch to research parts of my family history. It is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I call it, in a respectful way, the Book of Mormon.

My reference library has a copy of the actual Book of Mormon, replete with a photo of the prophet Joseph Smith from whose translations it was made in 1830. I’ve already opened FamilySearch many more times than the worn copy of the religious text.

Stories about early gatherings of my paternal ancestors include one about the funeral for “Aunt Stella.” I have a photograph of Stella in her coffin with someone identified as “Granny Reed” nearby. Stella was my grandfather’s sister. Oral history is no one knew anything about Granny Reed except that’s what they called her. According to FamilySearch, in the 1920 U.S. Census she is listed living in the household of my great grandfather as his mother-in-law, with an estimated birth year of 1864. Her complete name was Josephine Reed. It has bothered me we didn’t know more. Now thanks to the Mormons there is a better narrative of who she was.

When I write “better narrative” I mean the story is and continues to be a human creation. While there are “facts” to support it, there are vagaries in the U.S. Census data and oral tradition that went unrecorded. The temptation is to take a fact like a U.S. Census entry and make more of it than it actually is. As I wrote this post I found myself rewriting that paragraph time and again to refine my understanding of who was Granny Reed. I’m not sure how much more this discovery changes things.

I love the name Josephine and had we known about it when our daughter was born, it may have been entered into the pool of family names from which we selected hers. Granny Reed was our daughter’s great, great, great grandmother. It’s a fun fact yet not that relevant to our daily lives.

Somewhere in box-storage is a trove of genealogy documents collected from a man named Howard Deaton during a trip to Saint Louis. His focus was on our surname, Some of his work is relevant to our line and some isn’t. Robert Caro advises us to turn every page when researching biography. I don’t know I will have time to go through documents I have, let alone the entire Book of Mormon.

These are decisions one makes in compressing the story of a life into a hundred thousand words. If anything, the challenges of crafting a story come into high relief. What I’m writing will by its nature be a story built today with a perspective of right now. I don’t see how any biography or historical work can be anything else. There is a politics of history, a minefield of historian’s fallacies. There is also a poetry of history. What we hope to do is create a narrative grounded in something real that transcends the lived life upon which it was based.

At age 68 there is an urgency to get something down, edited and finished.

It’s been a quiet day in Big Grove where ambient temperatures were in the 50s and remaining snow melted.

I spent most of the day organizing material for a longer piece.

The idea is to organize documents and artifacts, dating from before I was born until the present, that are currently stored in a hodgepodge manner, using three-ring binders. Having lived a stable life, such documents survive. Once organized, I’ll write and pin a timeline to a bulletin board where I can hang stories, maybe twenty of them. It sounds straight forward, but the documents and artifacts are spread everywhere in the house. I relish the work.

A sense of place will help organize the stories once written. In presenting family history, I see a couple of narratives first.

The first place will be Lincoln County, Minnesota where my maternal great, great grandparents settled in the 19th Century. I visited there only once yet while there I collected a thick sheaf of documents, artifacts and experience.

I’ll write our history coming up in Southwestern Virginia. A published family history mentions the first presence of our ancestors in mid to late 17th century. I made three or four trips to the home place, including some as a child. I have a banker’s box of documents I collected from a man in Saint Louis who spent his retirement researching the Deaton lineage. I’m not sure how much of that is relevant but it needs review. If needed I’ll make a trip back to Virginia to research important missing pieces.

The culture of Northwest Davenport played an important role in my K-12 years. I will focus on the time immediately after my parents wed until I left grade school. It was a time when the Irish and German immigrant culture was in transition to something else, although we wouldn’t see what it would become until the time Mother moved to live with my sister toward the end of her life.

In addition to family history, I expect a brief remembrance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Davenport and Iowa City.

There will be a story about the three years I lived in Mainz, Germany while in the U.S. Army. More than anything after schooling, military service helped me learn to live on my own and exposed me to a variety of people and experiences.

I’ll tackle my transportation career and our nascent family life in two places, in Iowa City after getting my masters degree and meeting Jacque, and in Merrillville, Indiana where we lived for six years.

Other places that seem important at this writing are Colorado Springs, Thomasville, Georgia, Orlando, Florida, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Chicago, and our more than 25 years here in Big Grove.

There will be stories focusing less on a sense of place and on a broader, subject-specific narrative. It seems easiest to begin writing by understanding the collected artifacts and memories, by crafting a narrative about the place where they were significant.

I’m a long way from getting stuff organized. For now, it’s time to gather and finish making our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of chili and cornbread.

My history begins with today’s vantage: looking backward in time from an unfinished writing space in our Big Grove Township home. Such perspective helps our story makes more sense than it did while living it.

I understand all of my writing — countless emails, letters, social media posts, and blog posts — is derived from experience residing in memory. Sometimes it is unique, sometimes not.

I look, as if in a deer stand along a familiar pathway, hoping to encounter a subject, without its being aware. Armed with my senses, and hope I will find uniqueness in quotidian moments, I endeavor to capture such fleeting essence.

In that light I write this autobiography.

It is unthinkable that we are here only to consume, grow and die. There is a greater purpose, and in writing, I hope to reveal it to those close to me, to any reader who finds these words, and importantly, to myself. I find purpose in every piece I write, just as in more practical work like planting a seed, driving a lift truck, making the bed, or speaking in public.

There is a necessary organizational component to writing a longer piece. We shouldn’t be consumed with organization. Like an underground coal miner we need a framework of timbers, buckets, picks and shovels, water pumps, labor, and air circulation to do the work. We also need freedom to follow the seam where it leads.

Sometimes a remembrance stands alone as a solitary and specific instance of creation. Yet most memories are part of a social context. Understanding social context can make the narrative ours with broader applicability.

My autobiography is not as much about me, as it is about the people places and processes of which I have been a part. My task is not to chronicle events and ideas that were my experience. It is to tell a story of a life beginning in the present. It will include characters, locations, processes and events. Writing is a way to learn how to do that. Autobiography seeks ways we are unique grounded in shared experiences. If it is that, a finished work is more likely to have relevancy.

Writing autobiography is an American thing. I studied at university under Albert E. Stone who edited J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. We Americans, especially in this century, often seem completely self-absorbed. There is a native impulse to write or tell a single, brief narrative of our life when more accurately it is a combination of essential, defining moments and multiple, broader narratives. At the root of autobiography, we must answer the question Crèvecoeur did, “What then, is the American, this new man?”

I will follow an outline. It is important to note the perspective of the present necessitates blending memory and experience into a life story. Likewise, the process of writing is an interrogatory, the answers to which must come through structured thought and research. I seek to gain understanding of which I am not now possessed.

I have a pile of subject cards on my writing table. I envision a story board, with segments centered around organizing principles, such as the locale, ideas, processes, and characters that have helped define me. Just as artists create self-portraits, this autobiography would also be one in a series of them.

There is something about the idea of artistic creation. While process is important, imagination is too. As I endeavor to capture fleeting moments of insight about our lives in society I eschew automatic writing and everything that means. From my perch near the lake I hope to take flight from time to time and bring back essential materials to make an engaging story. Whatever I write will be my story, crafted by two working hands and centered on a vision of understanding I discovered early on.

Fingers crossed the narratives have broader appeal.

When researching our lives, official publications like my parents’ wedding announcement in the May 23, 1951 Daily Times are never completely accurate.

William used the Polish spelling of his last name, Dziabas, rather than the anglicized version, Jabus, Grandmother did. Why was he in Chicago and Mae in Davenport? Despite Mother writing about it in a partial memoir, we’ll never fully know.

The article omits Father’s step mother, who lived in Rock Island well into my lifetime. I corresponded with her by mail but we never met. She said her marriage to Grandfather was a “business arrangement” in a letter. The business was named the Deaton Diner and she kept his name until she died, burying Grandfather and two subsequent husbands in a row near her eventual grave. She was known by the sexton at the cemetery but not a significant part of my life.

Despite the partial picture official announcements present, they detail biographical information that might otherwise be lost.  Mother talked about graduating from Davenport High School and working for the phone company until her 90th birthday this year. The clipping is evidence. Our family visited Leon High School during a trip to Florida before Father died. I visited his alma mater while working in South Georgia for a logistics company. Father was a welder at George Evans Company according to the story. He seldom talked about his military service although an omitted fact — he was born in Virginia — was a primary influence when I was growing up.

As members of society we publish official notices to mark rites of passage. When I found this clipping by chance on the internet, it made my day. Official notices provide an opportunity to sand off the rough spots in our lives as we pass through milestones. As a biographer one has to ask whether to present the narrative as-is, or to embellish it with additional facts derived from experience outside its context. My answer is to present the artifact with sparing interpretation.

While presenting artifacts, I’m also weaving a narrative, something derived from both artifacts and experiences. The artifact never really stands alone. It becomes part of a narrative reduced to writing or told orally time and again until it becomes part of our world. Where such narratives will go remains uncertain. They have a basis in clippings like this wedding announcement.