Your Family Has A History — Pass It On

As a young boy growing up in the 1960s, I was privileged to know a few of the great old storytellers.

One was my great-uncle, Henry Shoop. He was born “out in the boonies” as we say here in Missouri, on a farm near the small town of Cherryville. I met him in the sixties when I was very young. By that time he was living in California, and had been sharing his stories for many years. For him, storytelling was less of an art or craft to be practiced, but something that lived inside him, something that had to be shared. With redwood trees of untold age and majesty as a backdrop, Uncle Henry revealed the tales of his youth back in Missouri – fearsome black mountain lions and lost cows, hunting and fishing in the hills of southern Missouri. No one — perhaps not even Uncle Henry –could tell exactly where reality melted into fancy.

Another great storyteller I have known lived his whole life just a bit up the road from where Uncle Henry was born, in the hills and valleys outside Steelville, Missouri. Earl Halbert (pictured) told of the harsh realities of growing up in the backwoods during Prohibition and the Great Depression.

He ran ’shine in Prohibition, and revealed to me the trick of “quick-aging” it to get a better price. As a cattle farmer, a strand of barbed-wire once snapped and nearly sent him Home forever — he drove himself to the hospital to get stitched up. And to top it off, he knew my great-grandfather T.J., whom I had never met, and had a few stories about him, too.

Earl went to T.J.’s flour mill one morning, hat in hand, to work enough to earn a 25-pound bag of flour. He only had 75 cents to his name, a quarter short of the one-dollar price. After sixteen hours of back-breaking work digging out a mill race and hand-mixing cement, Earl was delighted to receive not one, but two 25-pound bags. “Everybody talks about how muchfarther a dollar went in those days,” Earl told me, “but who had the dollar”? Not Earl, that’s for certain.

My native-born Irish friend, Ray, tells me of the rich tradition of storytelling among the Irish, each man adding to the ”true tales” as they’re passed on down the line. It’s a tradition that seems comfortably familiar, having known Uncle Henry and Earl Halbert. It’s a common thread across all cultures.

Now here’s the sad part: of all those stories that were passed down, I remember precious few, because they’re not written down, and I wish I had them to share with my sons. My desire is not t0 lose another single story, and to remember some of the ones that I’ve forgotten. As a software developer, I recently began a website where all of us with the storytelling bug can have a place to meet. What are you doing to keep alive those tales handed down, and to pass them on so they’re not forgotten?

Capturing those stories to pass down to your next of kin is a great thing to do. But think about this — they can also be nourishment to what you’re writing today. Most of what’s passed down comes from people with experiences outside our own. They’re people who have lived through hard times that we haven’t, made a living in ways we haven’t. How many of us who write have first-hand experience with the hazards, tricks, and inside jokes of cattle farming? Go talk to the old-timers and listen to their experiences. Not only is preserving their history socially redeeming, it can enrich your own writing as you weave in the bits of knowledge that you have gained from them into your own work. Suppose that science fiction is your primary interest. Are your characters settling undeveloped planets? Inject what you’ve learned to give more depth to their daily experiences, and your readers will find them richer and more believable.

Don Branson works as a software developer in the St. Louis, Missouri area, and is passionate about developing great software. He also loves to swap stories with people he meets from around the world – Missouri, Brazil, India, Ireland, wherever. He has now combined these two passions to create the web site, PenWag.com, and invites you to come share a story, and help get things started.