Genealogy: Ideas For Fiction

#fiction #writers #fictionwriters #foster #fostercare #family

A family mystery can do more than answer questions, it can hand you an entire novel. After a long break, I’m back to talk about why genealogy has become my most surprising tool for fiction writing, and how digging through records can turn half-remembered oral history into a living, research-backed story world.

I share what I’m working on now: Stay Outside, an Australian foster story set around 1900, inspired by the oral history passed down about my maternal grandfather, Frank Cohen. He and his siblings were abandoned by their birth parents and placed into foster care, and that early trauma shaped everything that came after. I avoid spoilers about what I’ve learned, but I explain how genealogy websites like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Geni.com help me build a factual backbone while still writing a novel rather than a memoir.

From there, the research widens into the bigger forces that shape character choices and family conflict. I talk through studying Ballarat, Victoria, the aftershocks of the Victorian Gold Rush, and the Victorian Depression of the 1890s, and how those economic and social pressures can become plot, not just background. I also touch on the practical ethics of writing from real roots: changing names and some dates for privacy, using the “cobweb of reality” approach when details are incomplete, and leaning on the genuine sense of community that appears when relatives contribute their own discoveries.

If you’re interested in genealogy for writers, historical fiction research, or building character backstory from real documents, this is a focused listen with plenty to spark your own project. Subscribe, share the show with a writer friend, and leave a review telling me what piece of your family history you’d be tempted to fictionalize.

• While you are waiting for this novel to be published, please check out my two fiction novels, “The Overlife: A Tale of Schizophrenia” and “Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies. I live with schizophrenia, and I am a survivor of sibling abuse, the theme of the second novel. Here are my Amazon Affiliate Links to the two novels. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. For “The Overlife,” click on https://amzn.to/3Q3ReDZ, and for “Three Kidnapped,” click on https://amzn.to/48EdLNS. More information is available on my website: https://dianadirkbywrites.com/
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Transcript

Genealogy As A Writing Tool

New Novel About Foster Care

Researching Ballarat And The 1890s

Discoveries From Genealogy Communities

Trauma, Privacy, And Closing Notes

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hello, I hope that you're all doing well. Um it's been a while since I've done an episode of this podcast, and I apologize about that. Uh uh life just got in the way. Uh but I'm back again and uh hope to uh do do the podcast more regularly, so yeah, about once a week, which was my original intention. So the title of today's podcast is Genealogy as a Source of Ideas. And just to remind you that my uh pen name for the fiction novels I write is Diana Dirkby, and my real name is Paula Tretkov. So I was a mathematician for many years and published a lot and uh under the name Paula Tretkov. So I wanted to avoid confusion, which is why I adopted a pen name for uh my fiction novels. So again, that pen name is Diana Durkby. So uh if it's your first time here, hello and welcome to my podcast. It's entitled Fractured Ink, Writing in Life's Chaos. It's been a while since I added a new episode to this podcast, and the main reason is that I'm writing a new novel, as I have mentioned before. My two previous novels, The Overlife, A Tale of Schizophrenia, and Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies, were closely based on my life experiences. I live with schizophrenia and am a survivor of abuse within my family, particularly sibling abuse. I will give uh links to these two novels at the end of the episode uh description, uh uh, so you can uh see them on Amazon. So, my what has been keeping me busy uh is that I've started a third novel. And of course, when you start a new novel, there's always a lot to do at the beginning, and uh uh that's essentially why I uh dropped almost everything else. So my third novel uh is entitled Stay Outside, an Australian Foster Story, circa 1900. It's based on the family oral history passed down by my mother and aunts about my maternal grandfather Frank Cohen, who died a few months after I was born. Frank was abandoned by both his birth parents and as a result placed in foster care around 1903 when he was eight or nine years old. His siblings were also placed in foster care at the same time. Frank's sister was six, and his brother was three. In his lifetime, my grandfather tracked down his siblings, but he and other family members who tried never found out what happened to Frank's parents. The abandonment by their parents severely traumatized Frank and his two siblings. To solve the riddle, some of my family members began exploring genealogy websites, particularly ancestry.com, myheritage.com, and genie.com. In writing this third novel, I have begun using uh these websites myself to gather as much factual background as possible for my current novel. It would be a spoiler alert to tell you what happened uh to Frank's parents, so I want to talk more generally about what these genealogy sites have contributed to my ongoing novel. Because my grandfather's parents immigrated to Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, in the late 1980s or early 1890s, I am researching foster care during that period as well as the Victorian Gold Rush, roughly 1851 to the late 1860s, and the Victorian Depression of the 1890s. Although the gold rush preceded Frank's parents' decision to immigrate to Victoria, it had created a prosperous period in Ballarat, where they first settled. And that prospering uh period was what attracted them. They didn't know the details, they only learned them after they got there, that things were not as straightforward as they thought. The depression, in particular, affected Frank's family as well as the family into which Frank would eventually marry. And that that is part of uh the plot of the novel. The genealogy websites have enabled me to put together a background cobweb for Frank's family and for his wife Elizabeth. I don't have enough specific facts to write a good memoir, but I have enough to write a novel closely based on fact, just like my first two novels mentioned already. I am deriving a lot of pleasure from discovering, via genealogy sites, the outlines of stories about Frank, his wife Elizabeth, and their ancestors. To protect privacy, I am changing the names of the people in my novel and some of the dates. The further I go into my heritage, the more ideas for stories based on my ancestors accumulate, building a cobweb of reality. It's an exciting and fruitful experience in fiction writing. It's a pity my grandfather did not have access to such information before he died in 1957. His bitterness at being abandoned, in quotation marks, by his birth parents would have been eased by just knowing some more facts. There is a sense of community on the genealogy sites. My maternal grandfather's father was from a large family, and so was my maternal grandmother. Many of their descendants use these genealogy sites. So I benefit from what my relatives have already discovered. My grandfather Frank was fostered at age eight by a kind foster mother, but an abusive foster father, which added to his trauma at being abandoned by his birth parents. While you are waiting for this novel to be published, please check out my two fiction novels that are already available: The Overlife, A Total of Schizophrenia, and Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies. I live with schizophrenia and I am a survivor of sibling abuse, as I've said already. And sibling abuse is the theme of the second novel. So that's all I really have today. I will put in uh links to my novels uh in the episode description and also my social media. So thank you for joining me uh in this short uh uh podcast, which is uh kicking it off again uh after a long break. I appreciate you listening. Don't forget to subscribe, like, and comment. Have a great day.