Missing Links

Writing books and digging up (not literally) dead relatives have a surprising amount in common.

For one thing, the characters -- and the dead relatives -- are not often much active help. As a writer -- and as a genealogist -- I propose things; I theorize -- and then I have to see if it works, if it flows in my fiction, and in my genealogical research, I have to find the documents, the evidence to back it up.

You know you're on the right track in writing, if things start to move easily, if one thing leads quickly to another. Then you know you've hit a vein (writing appears to have a lot in common with mining, too. Great-grandpa would be pleased). In genealogy, a theory opens up a notion to be explored and you move from there.

Ideally, of course, you just go straight back. Your mother leads to your grandmother who leads to her mother who leads to hers, and so on. But at some point there is a "brick wall." There is a mother who was, presumably, found under a rock. She has no discernible parents. She has no siblings. She just is . . . er, was.

Then what? You move sideways. In family -- looking for cousins, looking for possible aunts and uncles. You move sideways in terms of parishes. If there aren't any Hockens in this parish, well, how about the one over there? Then, of course, you will find five. All called Mary. Been there, done that. And then your brick wall turns into a bog and you spend the next few months figuring out which, if any, is your Mary.

And if that doesn't work you do what I'm currently embarking on right now -- both in my writing and in my genealogy. I'm skipping ahead.

I'm jumping over a generation and trying to find out if the Thomas Hocken who had a bunch of kids in the 1750s is the grandfather of the one born 30 years later. I should be looking for the younger Thomas's father -- and believe me, I have. But I can't identify him yet. From the looks of the names of the elder Thomas's kids, he could definitely be grandpa -- which would make one of those kids the father of my Thomas.

The question is: which? (if any, goes without saying).

I need to start looking at parish registers that haven't been transcribed. I need to read the fine print -- or in this case, the crabbed faded, mouldering, white-on-black filmed handwriting that makes my eyes hurt. I need to figure out if one of those kids could have left son or nephew Thomas some pittance in a will. I need to look at deeds and indentures and heaven knows what else to see if I can make that connection.

It's much the same thing I'm doing with Spence. He stood around in the park so long I finally kicked him out. I took away his scotch bottle and I said, "Let's go."

He said, "Where?"

I said, "There." And pointed several thousand miles away.

"How --?" he began.

But I cut him off. "I don't know. Clearly you don't know. But we can't stay here forever. We have a deadline to meet. So we're just going to skip ahead a little bit. I see something out there that I know is solid. So we're going there and start again. We'll figure out the missing bits later on."

"We will?"

"One way or another," I assure him.

Sometimes you just need to do something, even if it's wrong. Disproving is as useful as proving. Writing stuff you throw out invariably leads to stuff you keep. If the solid ground sinks this time, at least I won't try going there again. And if it holds us, we just might be able to look back and see the bridge we've been missing up til now.

So we're moving on now, all of us -- me and Spence and 4th g-grandpa Thomas -- jumping into the unknown, trusting that we'll land on something solid and can work out way back and make the connections.

We've got to do something -- then we'll figure out how it works.