As you know, this month's Create Challenge is about ancestors. What family stories do you know that you want to get off your chest? Are they funny, exciting, tragic, even inspiring? There's a lot to know and tell. But before you do, there might be a few things to consider.

When talking to Europeans about ancestry, I find that, unlike people from other parts of the world, they are often averse to tackling the subject. They are also, sometimes, suspicious of people's motives for doing genealogical research. 'Why do you want to know that?' they ask. I suspect I know the reason for this: it's history.

In lots of European countries, particularly the UK, France, and Germany, ancestry is often associated with privilege. Who inherited property, titles, the line of descent from thrones and palaces. Fair enough. Europeans could be forgiven for harbouring the thought that genealogy researchers are just looking for bragging rights. 'Oh, hey, guess what? I'm descended from Slovenian royalty.' Say what?

It isn't that way in most of the rest of the planet. People all over the world keep track of where their ancestors have been, who they're related to, and…most important of all…what their stories are. It's something we owe to the people who came before: to let the tales of their challenges and struggles live through us. Not to obligate us to relive them, but to allow us to benefit from their experiences. It's both an interesting thing to be doing, and a kind one.

Do you remember the saga of how Alex Haley wrote Roots? This dedicated journalist was able to trace his ancestry – a near-heroic feat for an African American of his generation – because his family kept the stories alive. You know those stories, because you've probably seen them on film, or read about them in Haley's books. The greatest milestone for the author, though, must have been the day when, after tracking these people all the way back to Africa, he sat down with a village storyteller. This oral historian was telling the tales of his tribe. And suddenly, he began to recite the story of how Kunta Kinte, Alex Haley's ancestor, had been kidnapped one day…

That, my friends, is a thrilling moment of research. It's an even more thrilling moment of connectedness…do you realise just how related we all are? From Lucy on down, around the world, from the Palaeolithic through the ages and ages of humankind, we're all part of the same planetary story. This is pretty good stuff, and it's at the bottom of what writers want to write about.

The ancestor-hunting trick is just a way to put tags on our migratory forebears. It gives us a horse in the race, so to speak. We can use our insider knowledge to follow these humans through their lives, from one generation to the next. We can learn their stories. And here's the part I wanted to talk about.

We can get their stories right for a change.

What do I mean by that? Have you seen the BBC series Broadchurch? I just have, and I was truly impressed. Not just by the breathtaking scenery – that Jurassic Coast is mind-expanding – nor by the acting, which was top-flight, once I gave myself a crash tutorial in understanding spoken Dorset. (David Tennant was easy, conversing in a perfectly comprehensible Scots.) No, what impressed me about Broadchurch was the point the series got across:

People's real stories aren't the ones the newspapers make up.

If you've seen that series, go back in your mind and count the number of characters whose lives have been ruined by bad reporting. There's at least one suicide, and one serious illness, directly attributable to newspaper persecution. As a writer, would you ever want that on your conscience? And don't dare say 'freedom of the press' at this point. Don't even think it. The freedom of the press that people have died to protect is not the freedom to be sloppy, lazy, greedy, and cavalier with the facts. It's not the licence to make up fictions and invent instant memes. It's the freedom to tell the truth, even if it isn't a popular truth. But it's also the responsibility to find out the truth before you try to tell it.

And that's where our ancestor research comes in. You see, we've all got these preconceptions.

• In the 19th Century, the man was always the head of the household, and women had no say at all. Oh, yeah? Take that stereotype and throw it out the window. My great-great-grandmother, a Mrs Kelly, ran a boarding house on the Mississippi River. Her daughter, a strongminded young woman, divorced her useless, drunken husband, and moved back in with her mother. The useless drunk went off to Texas and was never heard from again. The baby he'd left behind got a new dad, a nice German commercial traveller who stayed at the boarding house, and then just stayed. My grandmother grew up to be an independent woman who took no nonsense from anyone in all her 96 years.
• In the US War of Independence, it was united Patriots against a handful of Brits and cowardly Tories. No, sir. Shifting allegiances and 'battles for hearts and minds' made the whole thing so complicated that its dangers would probably best be appreciated by a citizen of modern-day Baghdad. Why, a sort of 10x-greatuncle of mine, a corn merchant and a friend of George Washington's, had to be rescued from a Philadelphia mob, because they thought he was a dirty pacifist like all the Quakers…
• The role of religion has always been the same. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. For example, my, let's see, counts on fingers, oh, shucks, 3-or-4-times great-grandfather was a Baptist preacher. Now, first of all, that was a dangerous thing to be in Virginia in the very early 1800s. Rowdy Anglican 'gentlemen' on horseback used to disrupt meetings, often nearly drowning preachers and flock in a drunken parody of baptism. See, Baptists in Virginia were destructive to the social order back then. Why? They said African Americans were people, too, and had souls and rights. And planters weren't a better class of human, either. My 3-or-4-times great-grandfather ended up in Tennessee. My family is kind of proud of him, but I deeply suspect that it's never occurred to them that his form of religion wasn't at all the one they usually hear in the pulpit. For one thing, he might have disagreed with their politics. For another, he would have insisted they wash each other's feet. In church.

Getting to the Real Story

Digging for the truth is as much work as labouring in a coal mine, only it uses different muscles. You can't be lazy and do this. Your garden won't grow if you don't water, weed, and tend it. Your knowledge won't grow if you don't develop the skill set you need to winnow out the facts.

But oh, think of the rewards. It's actually possible to free our common human heritage from the burden of misrepresentation it's been groaning under for so long. We can find these people's real stories, and tell them. Then they can speak to us all, from way back in the past.

Who knows? They might even have something to say that we haven't heard before.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

02.02.15 Front Page

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