Mining for Stories Among Family Legends and Artifacts

A chat with Lisa Maguire, of ancestory

From @ancestory, c. 1928. Unknown photographer

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Hi everyone,

I’m delighted to welcome

ancestory

’s Lisa Maguire to MFA Lore for this week’s Writers in Conversation about family stories.

Lisa is a professional historian and amateur genealogist who documents family journeys through history. Her Substack traces her fascinating heritage through generational “ancestories” of Irish relatives in French Canada. These literary gems remind me, in their period atmosphere, tone, and empathy, of Michael Ondaatje’s portraits of Canada, especially his marvelous novel In the Skin of a Lion, which I highly recommend. But Lisa embellishes her tales with a wealth of photographic imagery, which gives them extra warmth, dimension, and emotional power. I’m in awe of her achievement and, so, was eager to find out how she approaches the obvious abundance of family legacy and lore in order to fashion her ancestories.

Before we begin, I invite you to read some of Lisa’s family tales. Here’s one fave:

Ogdensburg 1929: Edna Smith's bitter homecoming

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In Conversation with Lisa Maguire

Aimee:

Let's start with your background, Lisa. What led you to become a historian?

Lisa:

I grew up in Montreal. My family left Canada when I was a young teenager. All that nostalgia and homesickness for French Canada was expressed in our home through francophilia, which involved enjoying French language books and movies, cooking French food, and even driving vacations in France. It seemed natural that I would want to study French history. I grew disenchanted with academia during the slog of graduate school and ended up pursuing a different professional career after earning the degree. But I still love history.

Aimee:

I’m fascinated by the degrees of separation/connection that result from colonialism and migration. Sometimes people – especially Americans, it seems– simply turn their back on their ancestral motherlands. This was the case in my husband’s Jewish family after they arrived from Russia and also, for most of my father’s family, in the cold shoulder they turned against China. But you’ve described a connection to France that transcended two stages of migration and multiple generations! It sounds like neither Canada nor America could compete. Who in the family stoked this nostalgia? How did it affect your own cultural identity?

Lisa:

Funny you mention colonialism. Where I come from, it’s not clear who is the colonizer and who is the colonized. It’s a house of mirrors.

Both my parents were from Irish families. It may seem odd that they would be such francophiles, but in Quebec this was, and is, entirely commonplace. English speaking people from Quebec love the French language and are proud of being bilingual. It’s sad that this love is frequently unrequited, but I understand why. English speakers, including the Irish, are seen as colonizers of a sort by many French Quebecois, even though many francophones have Irish heritage, and there are so many mixed language households. More and more English speakers in Quebec are immigrants from the developing world and colonized people themselves. And there are indigenous people in Quebec who were first colonized by the French. Aboriginal identity is twice as prevalent among English speakers than French… The politics of all this can make your head hurt. When writing the history of this place I never feel like I am capturing it in all its complexity.

Both my parents were deeply distressed by the militant ethnic nationalism in Quebec that culminated in the election of the Separatist government in 1977. This was the event that triggered our departure to the US. My family preserved their love of French culture and language by switching their allegiance from Quebec to France.

I like to think that we have identities we are born with and allegiances we embrace. Both are worth celebrating!

Aimee:

Wow! Irish Francophiles! House of mirrors, indeed. And an added challenge for you as a genealogist, to make sense of this cultural shifting. How did you get into genealogy?

Lisa:

No one in my family was interested in ancestry. Thank God for the internet or my questions from the little scraps I gleaned would have gone unanswered.

My father disliked his relatives and did not share much about them. When he was a little boy he despised his self-made Irish immigrant grandfather, who ruled the family. I think that if my father had known more about this man’s hard childhood he would have softened his view.

My mother’s mother was a francophone Quebecoise who had grown up very poor and would have rolled her eyes at the idea of Quebecois “heritage.” She hadn’t seen much culture worth preserving in the upstate New York lumber camps where she was raised. Getting up and out, forgetting the past, believing where you come from is not as good as where you are now is such a strong force for people who worked their way out of poverty. She had no interest in her family history. But it turns out my grandmother had Acadian ancestry dating back to some of the first white people in North America. My mother unfortunately absorbed some of her mother’s disdain for her Quebecois heritage, but she loved learning about her father’s Irish forebears. She even accompanied her grandfather back to his home village in Tipperary in 1950. I treasure the stories she told about her summer in that village.

I think many people become interested in genealogy in the same season of life–around the time we lose our elders, and see the world of our childhood gone. We want to preserve the memories and the stories. For immigrants it is also about preserving our cultural history and heritage. In my case, I feel the added urgency to document the history of Quebec’s Irish community, which is fast disappearing.

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Aimee:

Your “ancestories” do an amazing job of getting into the minds and attitudes of your forebears. How did you come up with this approach?

Lisa:

When I became interested in researching and writing the history of my family, I felt freed from the constraints of academic history. I could tell a story. Of course the best genealogy is the same as “micro history” in that it contextualizes and illuminates the larger world around the family story.

But the story remains the most important element. It can be found in any scrap of information from the historical record that brings the person to life. There is a surprising amount that can be gleaned from the smallest detail. Sometimes it feels like panning for gold.

A huge swath of Montreal burned down in the 1850s. My third great grandfather, an immigrant blacksmith, saw his opportunity to become a landlord. He bought several vacant lots and built tenements. (Knowing the urban history explained this part of the story). In 1863, he let one of these flats to his daughter, my great-great grandmother, and her husband. When his daughter was widowed at the age of 23, she moved out of the flat. It’s clear she did not go willingly because she moved to a wretched address across town. Her father had evicted her because, without a breadwinner, she could no longer pay the rent. These few facts tell us everything about him, and their relationship. And the story was right there, in a few old tax rolls and city directories:

Griffintown 1861: Molten Metal

For more recent history, if you are lucky to have grown up with a natural storyteller in the family, there is the opposite problem of sifting through everything you know to write a story using only the most telling details. To distill the essence of a person with the most revelatory fact. There is a small detail that somehow gets remembered, or there is an oft-repeated story. That this detail is remembered, or the story gets repeated, must be revealing some essential truth.

I wrote a piece about my grandparents which included a story my mother told me about the time my grandfather had given my grandmother a beaded evening bag. At the time they were young parents, and money was tight. It was a completely impractical gift. My grandmother returned the bag and used the cash for groceries. Decades later she told my mother she regretted doing this. I must have remembered this little story for a reason. It revealed something essential about their marriage, at least as observed by my mother:

Montreal 1936: October's Child

Aimee:

I love the structure of your pieces, each of which has its own integrity and form. How do you decide where to start a story, and when to end it?

Lisa:

Ah, that is THE question for family stories. I also have a Jewish husband, and when he can’t sleep at night he gets up and reads Talmud at the dining room table. He would say this is a Talmudic question. You finish a passage in which a question appears to be thoroughly dissected and understood, but then it comes up again later in another passage, in another context, and you are left thinking, wait, am I being asked to think about it again, or was all this commentary in between somehow related to the same question?

Each piece is given a date and place, which is a largely artificial construct because we get few, if any, actual turning points in life. But it gives me a starting place, and helps me ground the story by casting backward and forward.

When choosing these dates and places, I am drawn to moments when a person needs to make a life decision. My great uncle, whose domineering father was an Irish nationalist, decided to enlist in 1916, just days before the Easter Uprising. We rarely get such dramatic moments in life. Usually the choice is doing what is expected. But this is often the more interesting fateful choice.

Aimee:

Great example! So, how did you dig into his experience? Did you know he was domineering before you started writing about him? How did you recover the details around and after his fateful choice? And did your sense of him as a person change after writing about him?

Lisa:

I did have some clues from the few facts that were relayed about that family. My great grandfather was a newspaperman without a lot of formal schooling who pushed all his children to excel. He was a sports star in the 1880s, and all his sons were expected to be athletes, too. His only daughter was required to break up with her sweetheart to keep house for him when his wife died. She never married. He was also an Irish nationalist. This was the only family lore I had to go on. I imagined what it must have been like to be the child of such a person. My great uncle would have only enlisted with his father’s approval, so I became fascinated by his father’s and the family’s apparent change of sentiment. Historical research confirmed that the Irish of Montreal did in fact switch tacks and supported going to war to defend the British Empire. They had become Canadians first. Of course the sad story of Canadians in that terrible war proved it was the wrong call.

The Canadian government has digitized every WW I soldier’s file, which was a trove of information. It only tells his story as a physical body–the places he was sent, how he was injured, and how long he recuperated, but the war archives have also digitized “Actions In The Field” which include orders of the day, day by day, for each unit,. These bring to life the insanity of that war–its mixed up plans, uncoordinated decisions, and meaningless goals. Those field diaries really made me understand what he lived through and why his life was so hard when he came home. I didn’t know anything about him before I started writing, and now I feel his presence as a member of my family:

Montreal 1916: Conor Maguire's War

Aimee:

I’ve always felt that my mother’s midwestern family was too ordinary to be interesting, especially in comparison with my Chinese-American father’s. How do you respond to people who think their own families are too boring to be written about?

Lisa:

My family is very ordinary, and they lived very conventional lives. But I find their choices every bit as interesting as if they’d been pirates or circus acrobats— because there is so often sacrifice or self-denial in those conventional choices, which we can have a hard time understanding today. I wrote a piece about my grandmother, the daughter of a migrant family, who had been forced to leave school and work as a teenager. She was on her own, supporting herself, and then her family called her home. She didn’t have to go, she owed them nothing, but her little brothers needed her. It was the right decision. She could not have known that at the time, she just did what was expected of her. Which then sent her life on a completely different trajectory.

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Aimee:

Are there family members you choose not to write about?

Lisa:

I haven’t written about any subject, or any person, that might upset a living person. Either because they would feel their own privacy was invaded, or that a published story would have an uncharitable view of a family member which would be perceived as the final word on that person (I hope it never is). I have written some unflattering portraits of people in my family. The story of my grandmother’s young life reached some distant cousins I had never met, and they loved reading about their family. One had yearned to know about them, and said my story was like finding gold. I was worried they would not appreciate the way I portrayed one particular person, but each one of them told me separately their parents and grandparents had said he was a real stinker!

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