Sepia Saturday 823 and hopefully a return to more regular blogging.
Today marks twelve years since I launched Molly’s Canopy on April 24, 2014, to begin documenting my ancestors’ and relatives’ stories — and for more than a decade there has been an endless supply!
Endless enough that last year I decided to cut back on new blogging to compile some existing posts into a non-fiction book and use others as inspiration for a novel. So one year later, how is that going?
My Civil War ancestor’s story
The inspiration for my blog was my second great-grandfather Arthur T. Bull, who served in the Union Army’s 6th New York Heavy Artillery during the U.S. Civil War.
During the sesquicentennial of that conflict, I began telling his war story in weekly posts — eventually chronicling how I discovered him through family history research, his back story, his post-war life, and his struggle for an adequate pension.
Over time, I moved on to other ancestors and the years flowed by. Yet I wondered whether blogging was really enough to fully capture Arthur’s story. Wouldn’t a book be a better long-term memorial to his life? One family members could have, hold, and share down the generations?
Through the Capital District Genealogical Society, I signed up for a wonderful Writers Group where other genealogists and family historians in New York State’s capital region are grappling with the same issue — how to capture ancestral stories that last over time.
Their monthly facilitated sessions are helping me edit my years of blog posts about Arthur Bull into a footnoted book — a process that is still ongoing.
Fictionalizing a female ancestor’s story
In the course of blogging about Arthur Bull’s wife, my second great-grandmother Mary Blakeslee, I discovered that her mother Hannah (Hance) Blakeslee had left her father Zebulon in 1858 — and he later divorced her!
This discovery came after I found Hannah living separately from her husband in the 1860 U.S. Census and further research uncovered a Montrose, Penna., newspaper story announcing their 1866 divorce.
Following a trip to the Montrose court house in Susquehanna County, Penna., I obtained their divorce records. Unfortunately, they did not tell Hannah’s side of the story, since she had moved into New York State after leaving Zebulon and was beyond the reach of the court’s subpoena.
In 2019, I blogged about their divorce, but intriguing questions remained. Why did Hannah leave her husband? How could I tell her story without her voice — such an interesting tale of a nineteenth century divorce? Well, perhaps I could fictionalize her experience — and maybe make it a mystery!
Thus I embarked on fiction writing — and genre fiction at that — and a new learning curve unfolded. Thankfully, after taking a course in novel planning, a few of us from the class formed an accountability group and we meet weekly to bolster one another in our creative writing projects.
Where does blogging fit in?
Which brings me back to the Twelfth Blogiversary of Molly’s Canopy’s. It’s a whole new world when you move from careful citations to making stuff up — and I am still adjusting to the transition.
Over the past year — as I toggled between the documented facts of my ancestor Arthur Bull’s story and the creative fiction of Hannah (Hance) Blakeslee’s tale — Molly’s Canopy clearly suffered.
My original plan was to blog monthly instead of weekly to allow time for other writing — but alas, that did not work out as planned. When I sat down to write this post, I was surprised that I had produced only four blog posts in the past year — well below my projected goal!
In last year’s blogiversay post, I wrote, “Molly’s Canopy still has my heart. Without my blog, which connected me to the genealogy blogging community and my beloved blog readers, I might never have gotten this far or been so inspired to move in a new direction.” That remains true — and this year I hope to do better!
Daily word quotas, dedicated writing time, and connecting with communities of writers are techniques that established authors use to move their work forward. Over the past year, I began putting some of this in place.
My hope for this year is to embrace those techniques in a way that allows me to work on my three projects — a non-fiction book, a novel, and regular blogging — in a way that does justice to them all and still let’s me lead my non-writing life.
Wish me luck and stay tuned!
Up next, “Part 3: Where Uncle Fred served during 1942-43.” Meanwhile, please visit the other intrepid bloggers over at Sepia Saturday.
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