The Researcher

I am writing this sitting in the grand reading room of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and I am now officially a guest researcher of the library. I even have my own shelf for books I am borrowing – they are not allowed out of the library.

I have been tinkering around with my family tree for a long time, gathering names, dates, and my favorite part – anecdotes that really tell you something about the person and their times. More recently I have played around with the idea of filling out some of these anecdotes and putting them down on paper. I am focused on the stories of four courageous women in my family who immigrated to Africa (or within Africa in one case) all for very different reasons. One was pushed by the desperation of destitution; another felt trapped by the loss of her place in society from the shame of divorce in Edwardian London; a third moved to rural Africa to get to know the mother she could barely remember; and the last because she refused to live in a country that was racially divided by the rules of apartheid.

For the last six months, I have been piecing together scraps of information gathered from family and figuring out how to fill in the gaps. In scouring the internet and in two visits to London where I explored the National Archives and the Library at the National Maritime Museum I have found my great grandmother’s divorce records, my great grandfather’s will, the detailed shipping notes of the 1880 voyage that brought my great-great-grandmother from Scotland to Durban, and the birth record of my great-great-grandmother’s first husband which revealed that he was illegitimate – which might explain why her parents were so unhappy with the marriage that they disowned her.

My research in the Jefferson Reading Room is about understanding better the context in which these events took place. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, which means I have access to such unusual books as:
- Experiences of Rhodesia's pioneer women: being a true account of the adventures of the early white women settlers in Southern Rhodesia from 1890 (ironically, my dad was the author’s veterinarian in Zimbabwe many years ago);
- First steps in civilizing Rhodesia; and,
- Edwardian Stories of Divorce.

Tomorrow my project takes another step forward – I have my first writing class looking at the works of Alice Munroe. Ms. Munroe is an award winning short story writer who has a skill for weaving stories based on family history intertwined with historically accurate threads from her imagination. The course, which is at a local writers’ center, just happened to be offered now that I actually have time to take it. Serendipity.