fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2321 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2321 ⌋

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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.

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?

Edited 2013-05-11 22:30 (UTC)

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.

I mean, some married women keep their maiden name. I don't know about the 1800's, but I've known couples whose children had different last names; the sons had the father's last name, and the daughters had the mother's.

Probably a little too ~progressive~ though...

Oh! And you talked about the census records earlier. Perhaps the main character could find a census record from shortly before the daughter got married! It would still have the name, and she could go forward from there.

But it's the going forward that I'm not sure about. It's not hard to show that she survived, because my character knows when she's supposed to have died, and there's no death record. It's after that that things get tricky. Even with a census record, there's nothing to go forward with if her name changes after that.

What about newspapers? That's how I've tracked down various people in the late nineteenth century for my academic research. The internet has brought us the joy of full-text searches of thousands of papers. If the daughter had some public talent there's even more likelihood of there being information, photographs (perhaps where she looks like her mother) and the announcement of her engagement/the publication of her marriage banns.

She needn't even keep her maiden name to still be trackable through the press. Off the top of my head, I can think of female musicians, minor authors, and tons of mediums/spiritualists who are frequently referenced in the press by their married and maiden names for the benefit of readers. Also, once you get into the '80s and '90s journalists become quite taken with writing about the private lives and histories of people in even the peripheral public eye. I don't know if any of it helps with your particular set of tangles, but never forget how massive and thriving the periodical press is in the latter half of the nineteenth century. (I once managed to trace a woman because her sister mentioned her nick-name in passing in a short speech she made while dedicating a fountain to a local animal charity, which was recorded in tiny notes at the back of a provincial newspaper. Hurray for full-text searches)

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.

Wow, that school board stuff might actually work. I've had my character at the library to find the lack of death record. The 1900 census would work for that, showing occupation teacher. The problem has been that I'm trying to trace forward, not backward. But that could work.

I wanted two changes in last name from ghost to main character, but if the second change happened around 1926, I just found a site where you can search for brides from that time (as I hoped I would find), so it's conceivable that I could have my main character do that. It was the original one that I wasn't finding any kind of "search by maiden name" option.

[ SECRET POST #2321 ]

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