HALLIE EPHRON: Recently I had the pleasure of meeting New York Times bestselling author Amy Stewart at the wonderful Ladies of Intrigue luncheon, sponsored by the Orange County Sisters in Crime and Mystery Ink bookstore. I was enchanted by her description of her series. The first one, Girl Waits with Gun, introduced her detective hero Constance Kopp, the only female officer in the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department in New Jersey in 1915, and her two sisters. The fourth novel is just out, Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit. Amy is tart and hilarious and takes no prisoners talking about her novels, and I was fascinated hearing her talk about how she based her characters on real ones she researched in Ancestry.com.
AMY STEWART: Has anybody here built their family tree on Ancestry.com? I used it to build the plots of my last four novels.
I stumbled across a newspaper article from the
1910s while I was looking for something else. This happens to writers all the
time, of course, when you do research…you go looking for one thing in an old
newspaper, run across something else far more interesting, and think, “Oh,
there’s a novel in that!” One look at the Kopp sisters’ news coverage told me that I hadn’t found one novel. I’d found several.
Before long, I’d dug up this story of a woman
who defended her sisters against attack, which led to her being offered a job
as deputy sheriff. The lives of her two sisters changed as well, in ways I
don’t want to reveal because it will spoil future books in the series, but
suffice it to say that all three of them went on to work in crime fighting, law
enforcement and detective work..
Once I assembled my collection of newspaper clippings, I took my first deep dive into Ancestry. There they were, in the historical record: I found them growing up in Brooklyn in the late nineteenth century, the daughters of immigrants. I traced them to Wyckoff, NJ, where they lived on a remote farm in the 1910s. I followed them forward in time, discovering how their lives played out long after the conclusion of any book I might write. I went backwards in time, tracing their grandparents back to Vienna and Czechoslovakia in the mid-1800s.
Once I assembled my collection of newspaper clippings, I took my first deep dive into Ancestry. There they were, in the historical record: I found them growing up in Brooklyn in the late nineteenth century, the daughters of immigrants. I traced them to Wyckoff, NJ, where they lived on a remote farm in the 1910s. I followed them forward in time, discovering how their lives played out long after the conclusion of any book I might write. I went backwards in time, tracing their grandparents back to Vienna and Czechoslovakia in the mid-1800s.
Imagine: Your characters’ entire backstory,
all laid out in Census records, immigration documents, and death certificates.
Building that family tree was like a treasure hunt. It was wildly exciting. (1910 U. S. Federal Census, Ancestry.com)
Another extraordinary thing happened because
of Ancestry: I tracked down living family members who were working on the same
family tree. They were surprisingly open to hearing from a complete stranger
who was planning to write a series of novels about their ancestors. They’ve
sent me photographs, and even a letter that Constance wrote. In return, I’ve
given them all of my research, so that they have a much more complete family
tree than they’d ever assembled on their own.
Over time, I started to do the same for
secondary characters, like the sheriff who hired Constance as a deputy, lawyers
she had dealings with (such as this one, below), and some of the young women
who came through the jail while Constance worked there. In many cases, I found
their family members, too! Many of them have shared photos, letters, and their
own memories of family stories passed down from the previous generation. (Photo of John Ward courtesy of
Patricia Mott Meckley Becker)I keep my Kopp family tree private on Ancestry, to respect the privacy of the many family members I’ve met (and also to keep my spoilers safe!), but readers are actually digging into the Kopp
family history on their own, and building their own
trees. It’s weird to go on Ancestry now and see the plots of my novels—past,
present, and future—sketched out in other people’s Ancestry trees.
Any genealogy nerds out there? I’d love to know how you’re using family trees.
And…I would love to give you some
books! I made a
contest just for Jungle Red readers. You can win a set of all four Kopp novels,
signed not just by me, but by my characters! With Ancestry’s help, I tracked
down many of my characters’ signatures on documents and put them on rubber
stamps so that they can sign their books, too. Have you ever had a dead person
autograph a book? Now’s your chance.
GO HERE to enter by November 15
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GO HERE to enter by November 15
