[ SECRET POST #2321 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2321 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________




















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 100 secrets from Secret Submission Post #332.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

I'm so exhausted.

Part of my novel hinges on my main character tracing the descendants of a ghost from the 1860s, and I don't even know if it's possible anymore. She needs to find out that the ghost's daughter got married in like 1900, but I realize those records are by the husband's name, and her subsequent kid's birth record will be under the husband's name, and how on earth can she find out the girl's married name...? And I'm just so sad and tired.

Waaah.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what the setting of the story is but couldn't she find some record of the marriage somewhere? In, I don't know, some old village church, or some small-town town hall, or maybe in some kind of family heirloom record book, or something. Doesn't seem impossible, anyway. And once you have the record of the marriage so you know the name, the rest seems fairly straightforward.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

I know, it seems like it should be. But it's so important because the ghost thought his daughter died when he did, so there's no family heirloom stuff whatsoever, and it's set in Richmond, so it's not a small town - otherwise it would have been clear earlier that she survived and had kids. A lot of marriage records seem to only list the husband's name, period. Census records from 1900 list the names of everyone in the the household and their relationship, but again, under the husband's name. I just don't know.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

So the story takes place in modern times?

You could have the protagonist go through several dead ends. I'm thinking perhaps they and the ghost find some info on a certain married couple that contains a detail the ghost may think relates to his daughter and they follow that hunch. (depending, of course, on how old the daughter was when he died). If that doesn't work, I'd need more info and the circumstances.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

I didn't really set it up easily for myself. The ghost knows absolutely nothing, his daughter was less than a year old when he died. When I figured these plot points out a couple months back, I don't think I considered the maiden name issue for old records.

The story takes place in 2010, when my main character moves into this old house in a small town and finds out there are ghosts in it. This particular ghost was supposed to inherit the house back in the 1860s, but he was cheated out of it and it fell out of his family's hands. He moved to Richmond to get away, married and had this daughter (wife died in childbirth). The next year he died in a house fire and became a ghost back jn his family's house (now in different hands) and always assumed his daughter died in the fire too. All he really wants is for the house to belong to his family again, and I wanted my main character to stumble across the knowledge that his daughter survived (got that part - no death record) and then track her descendants to, in fact, the main character herself. It's important that the ghost isn't aware of what she's doing until she gets to that end point.

Ugh, sorry, that's a lot.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[tyger66]

You could change it to a son instead of a daughter that survived the fire, so there might be a family name to identify.

Edit: Or even that the daughter kept her maiden name, as a remembrance for her parents or something. I imagine it was rare back then, but probably not completely unheard of, right?

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

It crossed my mind, but both for his character and for another part of the plot it's really important that it's a daughter :(

Keeping her maiden name hadn't even occurred to me...I suppose it might not have been unheard of, but the key is that she had children, and there's no way their birth records would be listed under her maiden name, unless she wasn't married. ...And I suppose she could have not been married, but I'm not sure how they filed records of illegitimate children back then...hmm.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[akacat]

How about something like...

The main character runs across a census record of the daughter, aged somewhere between 16-25, occupation teacher. This establishes that the daughter survived.

School board records show that the teacher resigned when she married Mr Whomever. (The family of the head of the school board may have given the hand-written records to either the local historical society, or the local library.)

Or if you're trying to trace backwards -- maybe the daughter's maiden name became a traditional first or middle name among her descendants. There may even be some male descendants who are named after her father that way -- his first name, his last name, current family last name.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[caecilia]

Take a break. Do some just-for-fun reading, or just daydream a little bit. Your subconscious will be working on it.

I don't think it's impossible--my mother is really into genealogy and she's tracked down all kinds of obscure shit about ancestors way older than that--but I'm not sure exactly how. Though, since it's a novel, you probably want something more dramatic than "she spent hours on google and read a ton of books". Maybe after spending hours on google and reading a ton of books something happens and the answer falls into her lap? Another character divulges it without realizing how important it is?

But yeah, take a break for a bit.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

Yeah, I just plopped myself in front of the tv. Hehhhh. Thank you for your confidence.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know how the US keeps track of its records, but in my country, your character would be able to find the birth certificate of the daughter, with her name and the names of her parents. Provided that the town she married in and was born in were the same, the records also have a list of all of the marriages/births/deaths that occurred every ten-year period. Your character would have to look into that, find the name of the girl on the list of marriages, alongside her husband's, and then, the kid's birth record.

She could also look for professional genealogists who specialise in looking for descendants when there's something to inherit but no direct line. Mormons also keep track of genealogy and would perhaps be a way for your character to find more information.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

Yeah, the problem is finding her name in the list of marriages when the marriage wouldn't be alphabetical by her name. My character would have to read every marriage record for the city for every year beginning with the year the girl first might have gotten married until she stumbled across her name. And considering that my character doesn't even know for sure that the girl got married...that just doesn't seem feasible.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

So have her stumble across it by chance somehow. It's not necessarily the most realistic thing, but this is fiction after all. Maybe that bothers you more than it would me, though.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

I did think of a way that she could come across it, but then I realized I had another daughter in the line of descendants. So I could do that, but then I'd have to find out if it's possible to search mid-20th century marriage records by maiden name or else change that later descendant to a son, which would mean that the first girl's maiden name would be the same as the main character's mother's maiden name, which is...fine, but I'd rather there were another name in between them.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

If the second one is that recently, just have her to talk to an extremely aged relative or something. Go to her great-aunt's house or something. I love that kind of thing.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

So, is the ghost talking to the woman? Communicating somehow? Because you could always have the ghost have a feeling about a certain name as the lady's going through the books, and it would fit with ghost ~ness

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

The ghost talks, actually, but the records are all on microfilm in the library, so he's not there when she's looking them up. I also wanted to keep him unaware of what she's doing, though I could reconsider that.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps your character could look for newspaper information? If the family home is in a small town, there are often news clippings for achievements by citizens who have ties to the town, especially if the house was something of an old, Victorian-style house. Something like: "daughter of (man's name) from XXX village wins Best Garden at Country State Fair" with an article mentioning her (future) husband's name and plans, or her husband's name if she's already married.

But that would imply that people know in the village that she even existed. This reminds me of a book/film, perhaps you know it, Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources. Long story short: there was a girl who fled her village and had a boy. The boy came back after his mother's death to try and live on her land, which had its own spring. Someone else had an eye on that land and clogged the spring with the help of his uncle so that he couldn't use it anymore, and the poor man worked himself to death.

No one knew who the father was (I won't tell you who it is if you don't want to be spoiled) except a friend of the mother. Now your ghost lived in the 1860s so that rules out surviving friends, but what about letters? If your character knows where the daughter lived, perhaps there are letters, photos, kept in the orphanage she went to (assuming she went to one). Perhaps she made friends there, with descendants who have kept her letters. Perhaps there's a photo of her in the orphanage with clues about a wedding, or records mentioning when they left and what employment they have found, which could be the beginning of a trail. Perhaps she had links with friends of her parents who took her in and kept tabs on her, perhaps their descendants have photos of the girl and of the friends at the wedding...

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[inkdust]

Haha, Jean de Florette! We actually had to watch that back in high school French, and unfortunately all I took away from it was rabbits :D

Those are some possible ideas...I had figured the daughter was raised by neighbors or friends or something, because she was just an infant when she was orphaned. My character doesn't know any of that, and I'm not sure how she would find it out. I really thought of this discovery as being faceless names and records, more factual than emotional, but maybe that won't work.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

Poor rabbits! :D

Manon des Sources was about his daughter, and the very end reveals who Jean's father was. I cry rivers every time.

Good luck with your book!

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[akacat]

Old records are constantly being transcribed to make them searchable. The only wrinkle is that the person doing the searching might need to watch for misspelling, as hand-written records can be hard to decipher.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[fadeinthewash]

Or the original documents contain misspellings...oi.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

Marriage announcements in the newspaper usually included the woman's parents' names, but I'm not sure how early those took off/whether they're probable given the family's socioeconomic position.

This... is kind of a cheat. But you could say the office with the marriage certificates has converted all their old records to computers! And it's searchable!

Or, hmm, main character is unable to get at the records for weeks because that entire area is being totally monopolized by this class of college students, who eventually turn out to be computerizing everything as a project?

Thank you all so much!!

[inkdust]

Your ideas have got me thinking, and I'm pretty sure I know how I can work it out. Fingers crossed!

You guys rock.

Re: Research is making me want to cry.

[(Anonymous)]

Some records will list a female's name like so: Married surname (maiden surname), first name

For example, this digital copy from original record manuscripts of, well it's a touch racist, hybrid stock in the bass strait islands
http://www.cifhs.com/tasrecords/growthofapeople.html