Earlier this week, I got together with fellow authors Sandra McHugh and Claire Lindell to go over the (almost) final draft of Beads in a Necklace: Family Stories from Genealogy Ensemble. This collection of 49 short stories, written by myself and eight other family historians, will soon be a beautiful, 250-page hold-in-your-hands paperback book.
Some of these stories were first published on Writing Up the Ancestors and/or our collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com. Genealogy Ensemble – recently named by Feedspot.com as one of the 100 top genealogy blogs – has been online since 2014. Things were going so well with it that we decided to choose some of our favourite stories and put them together for posterity.
For the book, I chose Montreal-based stories, including two about merchant, tavern-keeper and canal-builder Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), one about Irish-born hardware merchant Henry Mulholland (1809-1887) and one about his daughter Jane (1847-1938), my great-grandmother who lived in her own world in a big house on the slope of Mount Royal. I also included two new stories. One explained why my family remained in Montreal throughout the difficult years of the referendums on Quebec sovereignty, and the other described how I grew up surrounded by the portraits of my ancestors. I knew very little about them, but eventually they inspired me to start researching my family’s history.
The launch of the limited edition print copy of Beads in a Necklace is scheduled for Nov. 15. We’re all super excited about sharing this achievement with friends and family members. I’ll let you know soon how to obtain a digital or print copy of the book, so check out this blog, or Genealogy Ensemble, for further details.