Books on family history

Glenn began to think about his family history when his mother turned 90. He suddenly felt the need to know about his parents’ early lives (his father had died when he was only sixteen), and who their siblings were. And he knew nothing about his grandparents.

It began as a modest quest. He was not envisaging an extended exploration back to when the ancestors came here from England and Scotland (presumably). However, it was not long before he discovered a truth about exploring family history – you don’t understand a person fully until you know something about their parents. And thus the quest is, by default, ongoing. He comforted himself with the thought that at some point the sources of information would peter out.

Over a period of several years he broke through numerous barriers and began to accumulate the names and life details of people in many branches of the family, and stepped back more and more generations. His family tree grew, and he migrated from an Excel file to an online program, My Heritage. His methods became more refined, and he was rigorous about avoiding false trails.

In parallel, Glenn began to realise that he had to find ways of opening this knowledge up to his own family and others, or it would remain locked in files in his computer forever. He had to write the stories of individuals and families and show how all these lives were woven together. He began to realise that there was a spirit of family, and this is expressed in the image of the family tree.

Glenn has written six books about his family’s history:

• The Sailor, the Baron and the Dressmaker (2024)

• All the Rivers Come Together: Tracing Family (2022)

• No Gold in Melbourne: A Scottish Family in Australia (2021)

• They Went to Australia (2019)

• The Search for Edward Lewis (2018)

• A Modest Quest (2017).

The idea that knowing your family’s history might make a difference to your life emerged gradually. It was fuelled by a quote from Susan Griffin (A Chorus of Stones, 1992): “The history of our family is part of us, and when we hear any secret revealed, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us.”

Glenn began to conceptualise the family across time as forming an arc. Each of the books forms part of “the arc of the family”.

How does Glenn describe this arc? Our lives have a trajectory, from start to finish. We are not the masters of that trajectory, but we have some say in it, and what we do, and our reasons for it, are all of interest. Our actions and circumstances elicit feelings in others.

Likewise, families have a trajectory, and the same truths apply to them. We wonder at the choices that family members made, the vagaries of circumstance, and the qualities that they showed themselves to have in the living of their lives. Moreover, these people are not strangers; they are people bound to us by blood and marriage.

We inherit, not merely the shape of our nose and the colour of our eyes, but vast stores of memory, the bulk of it beneath the level of our awareness – defeats, losses, achievements and intentions. But what we inherit more than this is potential, which is ever-new, inventive and inexhaustible. Just as the arc of the family is planted in the past, so too it extends into the future.

Availability of books: The links near each book take you to my Spotlight page on the Lulu.com website, from where my books may be purchased. They are print-on-demand, and wherever you are globally, they are printed and posted in or near your country. Enjoy.