28 February 2012

Boring Ancestors?

I read a post by a well-known author that opined about ways to write about "boring ancestors." How one could inject interest, humor, etc. into dead people who are apparently banal as all get out.

Funny, I don't have any boring ancestors. I don't have any famous or well-known ones either. They all have stories.

Oh, I know that people say farmers are boring ancestors or that factory worker or day laborers are boring ancestors. My children both have plenty of those--ancestors who never left the farm, who lived a hardscrabble existence their entire life, etc.

And not any of them are boring. If you research them completely and learn about the location in which they lived, the kinds of work they did, and document them in every record you can there is a story there. Even if they left few records, there's likely a story and I've never found one to be boring.

Personally I don't think there's any such thing as boring ancestors.

Only boring descendants.