Question of the Week: If you wrote a novel about your family history, what would the title be? [closed]

Question

If you wrote a novel about your family history, what would the title be?

Please tell us with an answer below. You could also answer on Facebook or upload the question image to any social media site. If you share it you may get family members talking.

Watch the WikiTree Saturday LiveCast to see more about your answers!

Comments

Why is this post in the tech forum?

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Family glitch? Hi Jillaine, hope you are doing well!

Answer 1

My Dad wrote about his family and called it, “Times Were Hard, but These People We’re Tough”

Answer 2

I think I would like to write about how my Loyalist ancestor, Gaspar Clubb, continued to live in his community after the Revolutionary War. There were lots of Loyalists in his area who remained and did not go into voluntary exile. Did they depend on each other for support? Did Gaspar have any residual difficulties after the war with his neighbors, many of whom were Patriot militia veterans? How did he respond to the charge against him in the county court by which he could have lost his lands?

Comments

Sounds interesting. I'd probably read it if the title was "Not in the Clubb".

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Touché! 

Answer 3

WikiTree has inspired me to use the Biographies I am assembling in a book to share with my family. The title of the book so far is "A Life Well Lived"

Answer 4

I am currently writing about my Murch ancestry.  The book is called "Faith and Silk" (they were silk weavers and Protestant Dissenters).  Inside I have included the quote by Thomas Fuller:

“We are all Adam’s children, but silk makes the difference.”

Answer 5

Alas Atlas Peaceful Abounds , To Be , Eternity's, New Genealogy Glows 

Answer 6

I would name it after my blog, "All Roads Lead to Haverhill". Original, I know. But, it works because everyone eventually settled in the "Queen Slipper City" on both sides of the tree. Plus, I'd get people to pronounce it right. =P It's pronounced "Hay'vrill". =)

Gotta love the names of cities and towns in Massachusetts.

Answer 7

"Honor your mother", because often mothers have even lost their names. and aunts too

Answer 8

1893, The Largest Land Run in History, A Story of Oklahoma Families  

Both of my maternal great grandparents made the land run for the Cherokee Outlet, and they later married. I have a great deal of material, since my great grandmother Phoebe Palestine Morris; her siblings; and her father Evangel Luveous Morris, who had been wounded in the Civil War, made the run with her. This would be the cover, an 1898 photo that most members of my family have. It shows my great grandparents with their first sod house in the background, and the house on the left where they raised twelve children. My grandmother Nellie Long is in the highchair. 

Comments

Alexis:

     I love it. Is that a sod cabin in the background?

                            Roger

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Yes Roger, it is a sod cabin. They must have only lived there a short time before they built the house on the left. I was in the house on the left about 60 years ago. It had been abandoned for several years before it just collapsed. Phoebe and her younger sister rode together in a wagon to get this--160 acres.

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I thought it was.  It is quintessential western Oklahoma.

I love the story about the wagon (My family has a similar one - wagon from El Reno up to Supply, where they settled in a sod house).

Hope you miss the worst of the weather over the next few days.

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Roger, thank you. I have noticed that in the land run photos that I never see just two women in a wagon. Phoebe did have her father and brothers to help her with the land, but our ancestors have to been tough folks.

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Another amazing And interesting photo Alexis

What a interesting story about your great grandparents the live in Cherokee outlet

You have so many amazing photos and I always enjoy looking at your photos

Thank you for sharing

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Susan, this is where I went last May. When I got to western Oklahoma, I had my mother’s cousin’s husband in the car with me. He is 90 and has the land his grandparents got in the land run, and he knows where everything is.

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Alexis that is amazing your mother cousin most have love every moment when he remembers the area

I always love have people with me that can tell about the area

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Alexis, what an amazing photo and story.  Thanks for sharing that piece of your family story.  I imagine the trip to western Oklahoma last May must have been like a dream come true.

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Robert, thank you for your comment.  Yes, I slept in my mother’s deceased cousin’s room—her husband has kept it exactly as she left it. He was younger than she was, and he feel in love with her when he was in the second grade. My second cousin, Patty, and I went through a box of photos that belonged to her mother. I took twenty to the drugstore and had duplicates made for Patty and me. Sometimes they say that you can never go back, but I did.

Answer 9

Live a great story.

Answer 10

"Missing Pieces - Where art Thou?"

Answer 11

There actually is a novel written about my paternal family.  My first cousin, four times removed, Phil Stong wrote a novel about the settlement of Iowa called Buckskin Breeches (1937) that is based on family history.

https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Buckskin-Breeches-STONG-Phil-Farrar-Rinehart/2924125569/bd

The book is based mostly on the memoirs of his maternal grandfather Philip Duffield, but there are characters based on the Stong side of the family, too, including a merchant of German descent that is based on our common ancestor.

There are also novels based on my mother's side, but I have always loved this one.  I have the numbered first editions.

Comments

Roger, that is wonderful that you actually have these editions. What a treasure!

Oh yes, and I am likely to show up at your office one of these days to see the eagle.

Answer 12

We Are, Because They Were

Answer 13

Mine would be titled "One random box of mixed nuts"

Comments

Mine too!

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Love the name!

Answer 14

I wrote a summary of family history for my children, I called it "Meet the ancestors."

Answer 15

“It’s Never A Dull Moment”. A story of courage, persistence, and flexibility. 

Answer 16

For My Answer to this week's Question - Check Out My Video 

https://youtu.be/HcSSJRmi4J8

Answer 17

“The Puritan Run-in With Native Americans: How Two Eighth Great-Grandmothers Were Slaughtered, and Two Great-Grandfathers Slaughtered First….”

Answer 18

"Spindle City" because so many of my ancestors worked in the cotton mills in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Comments

Here is an interesting video from 1917, about the cotton mills in Adams, Mass. Here is a story about Sylva Marcil, who worked in that mill. Photographer Lewis Hines took many pictures of children at work; writer Joe Manning has researched the stories of many of those children. (Here's that link.)

Answer 19

Surf and Turf,
The story of a family of mariners who married a farmers daughter.
The Spear side of my family started out in the Royal marines, then in the Coastguard service being posted to stationed all along the north Kent coast, before settling down as fishermen.  The Distaff side were all farm workers or farmers starting out in Lincolnshire, and ending up in N W£ Kent.

Answer 20

The Opressesd.

On my maternal side there have been black slaves. Indians during the British empire. Romanies oppressed since the 1500s. On my father´s side I have the Irish famine which wasnt helped when the British made the starving Irish export all of their grain to England. I also have the 1916 Irish rebellion when my grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the black and tans., I actually am thinking of righting a book as I have a lot of written documents  confirming all of this

Comments

I forgot to mention my Ashkenazi distant cousins, some who were taken and died in concentration camps. I discovered this by DNA matches and family trees. I had no idea until I started investigating my DNA from Eastern Europe . Ukraine and Russia. I,m what you call a bit of a mixed bag!

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Sorry for some strange reason I wrote righting instead of writing. Oops

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I would think a title like ".. and yet we persist" would describe a family with that much painful history that survived.