Friday, May 17, 2019

Marcia Talley's Family Vault

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always such a treat for me to host my dear friend Marcia Talley! And I  have to admit that I've read an advanced copy of her newest Hannah Ives novel, TANGLED ROOTS, and I LOVED it. 

I've always said that reading a Hannah novel is as much fun as sitting across the table with Marcia for a nice long visit, and I love learning what leads to the plots in Marcia's books. I well remember discussing this one when it was just a gleam in Marcia's eye!



Here's Marcia to fill you in!



MARCIA: Last year about this time, after I delivered Hannah’s sixteenth adventure, Mile High Murder, to my editor, and while I awaited her feedback, I began visiting my relatives … the dead ones, that is.

My sister, Debbie, started me off on what is turning out to be an addiction by entering our family details into Ancestry.com and sharing editorial responsibility with me, the oldest of our siblings. Just like the ads on television, a leaf pops up, you click on the leaf, head off on an adventure of discovery to a new family fact, click on another leaf and so on and so on until four hours have flown by and your husband is wondering what on earth has happened to dinner.


Fortunately, there's already a lot we know.  We had a great-great uncle on our father’s side who was deep into genealogy and wrote a book about it. Then there’s our Mormon cousin who provided a family tree that takes our family back – I kid you not – to Ragnhild “Hilda” Hrolfsdatter, born in 1836 in Maer, Norway.

Most of the Duttons came over with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, it appears . I confirmed family legend that I'm directly related to John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence through his daughter, Susanna, and to John and Priscilla Alden of Mayflower fame. But we knew all that.

Fast-forward to the secrets?  Before he married my mother-in-law, my father-in-law had been married before. Who knew? And that first cousin once removed we know never married? Well, apparently he did, during WW2, in Iowa.

It’s the deaths that fascinate me.  Sometimes their tombstones tell the tale. In November 1910, baby Robert Culver, my second cousin once removed, lived only 6 hours. His mother, Helen, died a day later.

But, the real treasure trove are the death certificates you discover online. My second great grandmother Helen Drew lost four of her children, ages 15, 17, 20 and 25 in a single year during a typhoid epidemic. I. Can’t. Even. And two of these little angels only lived into their teens, drowning two years apart in separate accidents on Lake Michigan. 


My husband’s step-grandfather, drop–dead handsome James, was caught between train cars and decapitated. 



“Papa Hise,” another relative on his mother’s side, fetched the shotgun out of the attic, killed the family dog before the horrified eyes of his daughter, Odie Grace, then shot himself in the head. It took him two days to die. Then there was the Brelsford great uncle who went West to seek his fortune. When prospecting didn't pan out, he shot his car before turning the gun on himself. Better the car then the dog, I say.  

One relative was murdered at age 21. What's that all about, I wonder?  Another, a Rebel, died of smallpox in a Yankee prisoner of war camp.  My great grandmother, Marcia Jane Drew, for whom I was named, died at age 42 in Lowell Massachusetts during dental surgery, or so my grandfather firmly believed. And yet there’s her death certificate, staring me in the face: ovarian tumor. As a cancer survivor who confidently stated “there’s no history of cancer in my family” that would have been good to know.


About that time, I needed an idea for a novel, so I figured why look any further than my own family’s deeply tangled roots? My 3rd great grandmother, Sarah Drew, died of “suicide by hanging.” Really? At age 84? 


I definitely felt a novel coming on.

My deep research for Tangled Roots began with the obvious first step: I spit into a test tube and sent it off for DNA testing.  I spent the weeks before the results came in constructing my family tree on a popular genealogy website and soon, like Hannah, found myself sucked, head-first, down a rabbit hole.  Now, nearly a year later, I’ve reconnected with a long-lost cousin (Hello, Ellen!), discovered that a first cousin in fact wasn’t, learned that identical twins don’t just run in the family, they run rampant, and visited a cemetery not far from the King Arthur Flour Company in rural Vermont where generations of my family lie buried. Some of these genealogical adventures inevitably wove themselves into the fabric of Tangled Roots.



Hannah Ives’s sister, Georgina, has some astonishing news. A DNA test has revealed she is part Native American, and Hannah’s test has similar results. The link seems to come from their late mother. But how?

As Hannah dives into constructing her family tree, she uncovers a heart-breaking love story and a mysterious death, while DNA matching turns up two second cousins, Mai and Nicholas. Hannah and her niece, Julie, are eager to embrace their new relatives and learn about their surprising ancestry, but Georgina’s husband, Scott, isn’t so keen… Are more revelations about to come to light? And can Hannah untangle her family roots to uncover the truth behind a devastating tragedy?
 
Tangled Roots officially releases in the U.S. on July 1.  What to do in the meantime? I have to admit that genealogy is now a passion.  After building my own family tree, I’m helping friends research theirs.  When an elderly British friend told me she knew her mother had been married before, but she didn’t know anything about the man, not even his name, I immediately volunteered to help.  Several days later, I was able to give her a photograph of his tombstone in Flanders: over 4000 young British soldiers had died in combat on that same day in 1917.


If the contents of friend and family closets ever peter out, what with the popularity of Scandinavian Noir these days, maybe I’ll start writing under a family-inspired pseudonym – Hilda Hrolfsdatter has a nice ring to it, don’t you agree?  


You can learn more about Marcia Talley and her books by going to


or follow her on Twitter at

marciatalleybks

Marcia blogs with the Femmes Fatales at
https://femmesfatales.typepad.com/

DEBS: Marcia's family is certainly more interesting than mine--at least as far as I know! REDs and readers, what skeletons have you discovered in YOUR family closets?? 

DEBS PS: Marcia's book is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller!

45 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the new book, Marcia . . . I’m looking forward to reading about Hannah’s new adventure . . . .

    As far as I know, there are no skeletons hiding in the family closet. Genealogy certainly is amazing, isn’t it? I’ve resisted getting too involved in the whole Ancestry.com business because I know it would gobble up my time. But I’m thinking about it . . . .

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    1. If you dive in, you might be surprised at what you find. I know I was. One of my cousins married a gal who was told on the eve of her wedding that her mother was actually her grandmother and her (much) older sister was her mother.

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  2. I don't believe there are any skeletons in my family. Then again, I really haven't looked.

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  3. Pfft! Skeletons? I have skeletons. I haven't done a whole ton of family research, but I have run across a Union Army veteran cousin up in Illinois who was murdered by persons unknown; a great-grandmother who may or may not have been divorced and, on my late husband's side of the family, a grandfather who might have disappeared into a TB sanitarium, or might have actually simply run off with the Boy Scout troop treasury and one of the den mothers. Should I ever get around to retiring, I plan to look into all these mysteries, and whatever else I find in the family closet. People will always be people--full of love and rage and petty jealousies--and some of those people are related to each of us.

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    1. Gigi, that’s fascinating! My sister’s father-in-law was a travelling salesman. She’s still not sure how many wives he had.

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    2. One of the sisters of that great-grandmother who might have gotten divorced married a man who waited until the honeymoon to admit that he already had a wife. None of the siblings in my great-grandmother's generation of the family had happy marriages, but they all blew up in different ways.

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  4. I love all this, Marcia, and good for you for making a book out of it! I'm with Joan - I know how much I would love geneology and simply don't have the time.

    I recently discovered a picture I'd never seen of my mother's mother at about twenty sitting outdoors in the west somewhere with a letter and a rifle on her lap, probably circa 1914. You can bet a story is brewing in my brain!

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  5. Marcia, this is one of my favorite rabbit holes! Can't wait to catch up with Hannah's doings! There's a story that one of my great-great uncles ran off from his family and disappeared. Of course, the other story is that he was a miserable no-good SOB and one of his stepsons decapitated him. His headless body is said to haunt a rockshelter on the old family farm.

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    2. Ooooh ... I’m sure he’s in the rockshelter!!

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    3. Ooooo! Headless ghosts are always good for a story. Have you read some of the recent news stories where a son inherited the family home and decided to see if Mom (in one case) or Dad (in the other) really did run off, or if the missing parent simply wound up buried in the basement? In both cases it turned out the basement/backyard was the winning option.

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    4. Gigi, I have seen those stories. If the old homestead was still in the family, I'd be digging up that rockshelter--purely for archaeological reasons, of course!

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  6. Congratulations, Marcia! This sounds fascinating and I can't wait to read it.

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  7. My sister Debbie recently bought a fancy-dancy gizmo that digitizes slides, photos and even old negatives. She’s just finished scanning the family archives and has turned up photos I’d never seen before, like one of me and my sister Susan, ages 4 and 2 respectively, on a beach in Guam in 1947 with a Jeep in the background.

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    1. I have an attic full of slides, but I'm afraid they are ruined from the heat. Afraid to look...

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  8. Marcia, LOVE the title and concept behind this book. Congratulations! And can I just say, your family history is downright scary. Terrifying even. Accidents, illnesses, oh my. Makes you appreciate what it took to get yourself born.

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    1. Makes one appreciate medical advances. I lost an aunt to whooping cough at age 4 (vaccinate your kids, people!) and so many others perished of infectious we could easily cure today with antibiotics.

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    2. We discovered that my father had sibling (Infant Darden, the records said) that died right after birth, and a brother who died as a teen. I never knew!

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  9. Hi Marcia! Welcome to JR! I have not yet spit into the tube but it's on my list. One of my cousins has been working on our family for decades. I've been afraid to go in just yet because I can't spare the time:). Debs, remind us again when Marcia's book comes out...

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  10. My husband dug up my one and only Irish ancestor before we visited Ireland. Patrick Christian was a Manx, sent by his father to safety in Dublin. Patrick attended TCD and became a Church of Ireland minister. His children/grandchildren went back to the Isle of Man and one intrepid merchant made his way to America. Yes, same extended family as the Mutiny on the Bounty Fletcher Christian.

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  11. Genealogy is so interesting! According to my sister who has spent a lot more time working on it than I have, has traced our roots back to at least 3 different kings - English, French, and Swedish. But more important, to me at least, are the little details about our ancestors. So far we haven't found out anything that was very surprising or unexpected.

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  12. Hello Marcia. How brave you and the other genealogy hunters are to willing go digging into the family past. If my historical family is anything like my most recent family...nope! Not for me.

    Congratulations of the 16th (!) book. It is now on my summer reads list.

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    1. I'm with you, Lyda! Yet there is a feeling of time-travel in all of this. It's intriguing!

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  13. It’s a never-ending source of entertainment. What’s with the cousin who married in 1926, but started showing up in the “inmate” census of an infamous Long Island mental hospital the following year and lived there until the day she died, in 1947? Ack!

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  14. Well, I’m related to Ed O’Kelley who killed Robert Ford who killed Jesse James. And my husband’s g-g-grandmother was the first woman to be buried in the Nebraska State Penitentiary cemetery, aka Grasshopper Hill, for murdering her husband. A few weeks after being sentenced, she committed suicide by slitting her throat. Long ago, the family tried to cover up the truth by saying they had been massacred by the Indians, but my husband, Dave, found out the real story. We still haven’t learned why she killed him, but maybe having 10 children had something to do with it!

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    1. As in, "You touch me one more time, and you'll be sorry!"

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    2. I’m guessing he touched her one more time...and then she touched him back. 😄

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  15. Marcia's book is out on Kindle in the UK next week, I think, but not in hardcover there until the autumn (?) But it is out here in the US on Kindle and in hardcover on July 1st. Very confusing, so maybe she can clarify when she gets back to us.

    Marcia, by the way, is sailing up the East Coast, after having wintered at their home in the Bahamas. Talk about adventurous! I want her to come back and tell us all about that.

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    1. Perhaps the full voyage report the next time I’m invited? We are on Day 14 now, coming from the Bahamas and just put in to Charleston. Shrimp and grits and a shopping trip to Harris Teeter in my future!

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  16. One interesting thing I learned when my daughter had a free month on Ancestry.com. I'd always been told that my father's mother died when he was a child. Not true! She died the year he married my mother, when he was in his thirties!

    I've done 23 and Me, but when I have time, I'd love to do Ancestry, too, and at least do the limited access to the genealogy records. I know who I can get to help me:-)

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  17. Marcia, congratulations on your new book! I met you at Malice Domestic in 2016! Love the name H..dottir.

    Genealogy is so interesting! Before I spit into a tube, I discovered that I had Dutch ancestors who arrived in what was known as New Amsterdam before it became New York. The Dutch ancestors also included French Huguenot ancestors! Family research was difficult because my paternal grandparents died before I was born. They died when my father was a young child. I discovered that many of my ancestors, on their death certificates, died of heart related diseases.

    However, I am having some difficulties finding out more about my maternal grandmother's family. Her half sister and her family were listed on passenger lists for travels to Europe. I learned that my great aunt lived at Claridge Hotel in London in 1936 and it looks like her husband was born in England. When my great aunt died, she set up a scholarship for graduate students in Anthropology at a university in New Jersey. However, I cannot find any of her marriage certificates! She was supposed to have been married FIVE times!

    We know more through family stories about my maternal grandmother's family than through documents, perhaps because they were born in other countries. Her father was a prisoner of war in Korea and he learned the English language from English missionaries who visited the POW camp. That was before he met and married my great grandmother. My grandmother was their first child together.

    Diana

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    1. So interesting! I hope you keep looking. I subscribe to both the US and foreign databases at Ancestry, as well as newspapers and military records. Not cheap! But so many answers can be found in small town papers. A “Rosetta Stone” for my family was an article in a VT paper about a family Cmas that listed everyone who came by name—4 generations. It also said that although she was 75, my g-g-grandmother did all the cooking, including the cookies.

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    2. That's aweome! There is a family story that the same great aunt had just married a Belgian in Belgium when the Nazis invaded Poland, starting off the second world war and they had to scurry to get their passports and get out of Europe immediately! And another story is that my grandmother's grandmother was born in Spain. My old ancestry dna shows my dna to be 2 percent Iberian then the new "update" removed the Iberian dna! No idea why! Glad I took the ancestry dna ages ago!

      And I will keep on looking!

      Diana

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  18. Those are some fabulously tangled family roots, Marcia! It is fascinating to look into the past at where we’ve come from, isn’t it? My mom is deep into the genealogy and we have quite a few tramps and thieves in the mix! I’m definitely sharing your book with her - she’ll love it!

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  19. Good lord, Marcia! I'd be afraid to go trolling for family after reading about yours! Seriously though, I have trouble grasping the relationships on the trees. Once I get past grandparents I'm not sure who is related by blood and who is related by marriage. It seems like everyone winds up being a relative and I am totally lost.

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  20. Ancestry will tell you the relationship. But you can get down into the weeds with folks who are “wife of stepfather of second great uncle.” I try to concentrate on people to whom I’m related by blood, but sometimes following the thread is just too damn interesting.

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