Hail Grandma: A Clock's Chimes Evoke Devotion to Family

This post is the third in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.

Close-up of the clock that hangs in Megan St. Marie’s office at Modern Memoirs

In her book The Writing Life,[i] Annie Dillard writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I’ve recalled these deceptively simple lines many times over the years in what has sometimes felt like a failing struggle to devote enough time to family, while also working outside the home and following creative pursuits.

This struggle was more difficult when I worked in academia than it is now. When I was teaching, the blur of days moving from one to the next often made me feel like I was missing out on the very life I’d built, especially as I saw my children growing up all too fast. Where did the time go? was a near-constant refrain running just under the surface of my Sisyphean to-do list.

It took me far too long to admit that the strain I was under was unsustainable because I was terrified of losing the stability of steady contracts and reliable benefits for my family. I also truly loved teaching, and even though I was overloaded, I felt appreciation from my students and from the university itself. Midway through my faculty years, I was invited to select a gift from a catalog to mark a milestone year of service to the university. Thinking that a timekeeping device was a good symbolic choice to mark an anniversary, I selected a wall clock with a pendulum. I didn’t, however, consider where I would actually put the clock, and so it sat in its box in my home office for several years.

In fact, I didn’t unbox the clock until the summer after I concluded my final semester of teaching to focus on my work with Modern Memoirs. My husband, Sean, and I had purchased the company from founder Kitty Axelson-Berry in July 2019, at which point I’d scaled back to a part-time contract for the 2019/2020 academic year. While we were optimistic about our new business’s prospects, we had taken a big risk by drawing on retirement savings for the purchase, and I was initially leery of abandoning the security of my teaching career. Honestly? I never would have made the leap if it weren’t for Sean’s faith in me. “It’s a big investment,” he told me during one of our many conversations leading up to the closing date on the business. “But if I’m going to invest in anything, it’s you.”

How could I resist such an encouraging sentiment? I will forever be glad I did not. My work at Modern Memoirs is extraordinarily fulfilling, and perhaps because lockdowns during the pandemic inspired many people to take the time to write their memoirs and research their family trees, 2020 proved to be the most successful year in the company’s history. This achievement gave me the confidence to leave academia for good and to move Modern Memoirs to larger offices with plans for continued growth. It was this move that prompted me to bring my clock from the university to my new office, where I thought it could serve both as a memento of the many good experiences I had in academia, and as a tangible reminder to be deliberate in how I spend this hour, and that one, my days, my life. I was determined that my change in career would mean more time with my family.

When I opened the box and looked at the instruction manual, I discovered a way that the clock would not just encourage my resolve to protect family time, but prompt time spent in communion with my ancestors. The manual noted several options for the chimes the clock could play on the hour, among them the song “Ave Maria.” The choice was easy. Not only did “Ave Maria” evoke the surname I took when Sean and I married, St. Marie, it was also a favorite song of my paternal grandmother, Lucienne Marie Laroche Lambert (1915–1986). I very much liked the idea of hearing its melody throughout the day in a space where I had set about surrounding myself with heirlooms and other objects connected to my heritage to inform and inspire my efforts to guide others in their memoirs and family-history work.

The eldest of thirteen children who survived to adulthood (two more siblings died as infants), Grandma Lambert was born in the border town of Highgate, Vermont to parents who emigrated from Québec. She left school after the sixth grade to help her family at home, married at twenty-one, and had thirteen children with my grandfather, Homer Raymond Lambert (1908–1974). She died when I was ten years old, and I am fortunate to have many memories of time spent at her house with our extended Franco American family. Some of my most vivid memories are simple ones of Grandma greeting us upon our arrival at the homestead. On Thanksgiving Day 1982, when I was six years old, she proudly welcomed everyone wearing the red velvet dress from her 1936 wedding day. The article of clothing I most closely associate with her, however, is an apron. It seemed that whenever my family walked into the house through the kitchen door, she would be standing at the sink doing dishes with her back to us. Hearing us, she’d turn and walk over, calling, “Alloo! Alloo! Alloo!” in French-accented English while wiping her hands on her apron before wrapping us up in warm hugs.

A devout Catholic, my grandmother’s faith was the very core of her life. Like countless other Catholic women before her and since, she drew strength from Mary as a paragon of motherhood, which explains why “Ave Maria,” its lyrics the Latin version of the prayer “Hail Mary,” was so special to her.

Lucienne Marie Laroche Lambert, Thanksgiving 1982, when she greeted her family wearing the dress from her 1936 wedding day. Her hand is touching her wedding photo, and the wedding photo of her parents hangs above on the wall.

Ave Maria, gratia plena
(Hail Mary, full of grace)
Dominus tecum.
(the Lord is with you.)
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
(Blessed are you among women,)
et benedictus fructus ventris tui,
Iesus.
(and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.)
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
(Holy Mary, Mother of God,)
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
(pray for us sinners,)
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
(now and at the hour of our death.)
Amen.
(Amen.)

My grandmother’s thirteen children were with her at the hour of her death, and her greatest legacy is how close-knit the family remains to this day. In my experience, it is a family full of grace in how it welcomes newcomers, sets aside differences, and lovingly affirms the individuality of its members. Cousins, aunts, and uncles keep in touch with phone calls, visits, letters, and private social media groups, and we gather annually at the family homestead for a reunion each summer. Last year’s gathering was especially joyous since the pandemic had prevented our reunion in 2020. As I caught up with one of my aunts about the success of our business and how well Sean and the kids and I were doing, she said, “You’re in a sweet spot now, aren’t you? Savor it!”

This was good advice. I count myself lucky to have both a full family life and a rewarding career; but even though my life’s pace is much less hectic now, it is still too easy to let the days blur into each other without savoring the sweetness of the hours. I know that in the midst of her busy life managing her full household, my grandmother regularly prayed the rosary, a practice that arose from her devotion to Mary and that I imagine gave her precious contemplative moments. My own relationship to Catholicism has lapsed in a formal sense—perhaps a topic for another piece of writing—but my clock’s chiming of “Ave Maria” never fails to ground me in that part of my heritage by connecting me to the blessed memory of this woman who spent her days, spent her life, caring for her family. I hear the melody, and I pause for just a moment in my workday, sometimes more, to think of her devotion to family, grateful for how it inspires mine.

[i] Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Reflections from Stephen Rostand

Dr. Stephen Rostand is a repeat client with Modern Memoirs. His photography book entitled Mostly Paris was his first project, and it came out in 2007. The second book, a department history entitled The Division of Nephrology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1958–2008, Fifty Years of Excellence, was published in 2014 and reprinted in 2019. The third book, a family history book entitled Photographs and Memories: Our Family History, was published in 2020.

We asked the author to reflect on what the publication process was like for him for these three very different books, and what it has meant to share them with others.

1.  While you are an M.D. by profession, your hobby/passion is photography. What prompted you to have a sampling of original 8x10 glossy prints transformed into a book? Do you have a favorite photo or two in this collection?

Stephen Rostand: I have been actively photographing for at least 50 years. During that time, I have accumulated thousands of photographs and have reduced the number to those that I think are exceptional. At one point I started considering what to do with them and how to preserve them for family and friends who seemed to like them. I had been to many photo exhibitions and had also seen the works of well-known photographers in books. I felt that many of my photographs were as good as theirs, and that gave me the idea for a book in which I could preserve the best of them. However, because I am a private person, I had to overcome my initial reluctance to expose my inner self to others. After all, what is the photograph but a projection of the photographer, his/her vision, viewpoint, and attitude towards the subject? The photographer is the photograph and vice-versa. It took me about a year to further winnow the photographs, select or write commentary to accompany those photographs, and find someone to produce the book. I was fortunate to find Modern Memoirs through their small ad in The New Yorker. They produced a magnificent book that is, in itself, a work of art. I have distributed the books as gifts to family and friends in the United States and Europe. It’s hard to answer which photo is my favorite because, truthfully, all of them are. Each one represents something different, and I cannot select one over another. It’s like asking who your favorite child is.

2.  Your department history is shared with students, colleagues, and residents of the Division of Nephrology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. What sort of feedback have you received from your book’s readers? How does providing them with this institutional knowledge enhance their studies and their practice?

Stephen Rostand: When I retired after nearly 40 years on the faculty, my director asked me if I would write a history of our division. I had been one of the original members of the division and had participated in its growth and subsequent importance. Having majored in history in college and having read many historical works, I was flattered and eager to do it. More than a chronology or collection of anecdotes, I decided to write a historical narrative that spanned 50 years, from the beginning of our division to the arrival of the chief who asked me to write the story. I used the university archives, interviewed past and present colleagues, discussed some of the university politics affecting our division, and dealt with some very sensitive issues involving people who were still on the faculty. It took nearly three years to research and writing. To say the least, it was very well received and has been distributed to all our past trainees, the dean, university president, visiting faculty, and each trainee at the time of their graduation. It also serves a public relations function for our division. Although the book is not meant to help our graduates in their medical practice, many of our graduates are bench researchers. It describes the evolution of our field, the growth and development of our division, its faculty, and how the division was managed through a variety of difficult problems and gained its national prominence. It is instructive about how to grow a successful group and it should give our graduates a sense of pride for having been associated with the program.

3.  Your third book, Photographs and Memories, is a lovely blend of genealogy, historical context, and personal story. It includes genealogy charts, many photographs, and an appendix of “legendary” anecdotes. What did you learn about gathering a family’s history into one book, and what advice do you have for others who may be considering a similar project?

Stephen Rostand: Writing a family history requires time, attention to detail, persistence, objectivity, tact, understanding of what kind of history you wish to write, and what its goal is. Will it be an attempt to find and catalog every member of your immediate and distant family? Or will it be a more personal, intimate look at who and what kind of people your first-degree relatives were? You will need to determine if there are any existing documents and photographs of past and present family. If there are living parents and grandparents, try to interview them. Include aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, and anyone who knew them well. Draw on your own memories as well. Also remember that your childhood impressions of your parents, grandparents, and other family members may well be different from your opinions as an adult. Thus, make sure that what you write is objective or else you may create friction and enemies in the family. If necessary, you may need to get help with your genealogical research.

4.  After previously completing two very different books, why did you add this third book to the collection? Why was it important to you that you record your family history?

Stephen Rostand: As I wrote in the preface to my family history, “Our worst fear may not be death but rather the loss of memory. Life is short, memory fleeting, and the nuclear family temporary and centrifugal. Over time we disperse.” After several generations we become strangers. I wanted to make sure my children and grandchildren and cousins knew something about their origins so they would not be orphans in history. After all, our past is part of all of us and knowing who we are should help guide us in the future. As I am nearing the end of my life, I thought this history would be an important gift to pass on. I was fortunate to have all the notes my father took when he interviewed his family when he was a young man and to have various documents and the family photo album that contains photos going back to 1898. Because these important items are not in the best condition, I felt they should be preserved. It was for these reasons that I wrote the family history.

5.  How did the writing process itself help you reflect upon or uncover insights into the people and events you wrote about?

Stephen Rostand: In writing the family history I was able to reassess my parents’, grandparents’, aunts’, and uncles’ lives by placing them in historical context and seeing their growth and development through photographs. It gave me an adult perspective of my forbears, an opportunity, for the first time, to understand the complex relationships between our families, and to understand myself and my relationships better. It also brought me in contact with more distant family members whose history I could only touch on peripherally and superficially. These relatives provided me with additional details of our genealogical tree and sent me the personal memoirs of at least one family member whose experiences living in Europe from 1910 until 1949 were fascinating. Unfortunately, it arrived in my hands well after my history was published. Thus, a written family history is part of a continuum and is never really completed. Mine was written in the hope that one of my children would continue the story.

Evangeline and Anne, L'Acadie and Me

This post is the second in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.

An 1893 edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie on display in Megan St. Marie’s office at Modern Memoirs

While I trace most of my ancestry to Québec, I also descend from French-speaking people called the Acadians. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they emigrated from France and settled in what are now known as the Canadian Maritime Provinces—Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick—as well as in northern Maine. Known as “the neutral French,” the Acadians refused allegiance to France and England as those European nations struggled for dominance over the strategically positioned Maritimes during the French and Indian War (the North American phase of the Seven Years War battled in Europe). The Acadians also formed strong alliances with the Indigenous Mi’kmaq nation, alliances fortified by a high rate of intermarriage and by what historian John Mack Faragher calls a “spirit of mutual accommodation,” in his book A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland.[i]

Faragher’s subtitle references the forcible removal of the Acadians from their homeland during Le Grand Dérangement (the Great Expulsion) as a strategic element of the British war effort. Between 1755 and 1765, roughly 80% of the Acadian population was rounded up, detained in camps, and shipped off to the British colonies, Québec, France, and England. A small portion of those exiled managed to resettle and maintain their francophone culture in present-day Louisiana, where they became knowns as Cajuns, but most died or were widely dispersed and acculturated in what Faragher and other historians regard as a tragic incidence of ethnic cleansing. Families were torn apart, thousands perished, and because of the outright devastation of Acadian villages, high rates of illiteracy, and bias in British colonial record-keeping, this history was long suppressed.

Megan St. Marie’s 1893 copy of Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, open to the frontispiece illustration (with facing vellum overlay) depicting the fictional Acadians Evangeline and Gabriel before they are separated during Le Grand Dérangement

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,[ii] was written roughly a century after Le Grand Dérangement and tells the story of a fictional young Acadian woman, Evangeline Bellefontaine, who is separated from her fiancé, Gabriel Lajeunesse, when the British expel them from Grand Pré (in present-day Nova Scotia). I have an old copy of this book on display in my office at Modern Memoirs, given to me by my father-in-law, Terry St. Marie, who shares my Franco-American heritage. It’s a beautiful, small 1893 edition, with a cover made to look like birchbark (perhaps evoking the poem’s opening lines, “This is the forest primeval”) and a frontispiece showing Evangeline and Gabriel before their separation. It stands both as a tribute to this part of my heritage and as an inspirational piece of bookmaking.

While Evangeline’s publication revived interest in Acadian history and culture in 19th-century Canada and the United States, my reading of Faragher illuminated how the poem erroneously romanticizes colonial America as a place of sanctuary for the Acadians. In truth, they were unwelcomed throughout the colonies, with anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment leading colonial governors and the general citizenry to persecute, reject, and fail them. Death by exposure, disease, and starvation was widespread, as scores of Acadians were forced to camp out in the bitter cold on the Boston Common, others were repelled from ports of entry, and children were separated from their parents and sent to live with British colonial families as laborers.

A quick review of my own paternal genealogical record shows well over a dozen Acadian ancestors directly caught up in Le Grand Dérangement, including:

·       An eight-times great-grandfather Jean Baptiste Bernard, who was born in New Brunswick, expelled in the early years of Le Grand Dérangement, and died in Québec in 1757, just two years after the start of the expulsion.

·       An eight-times great-grandmother Madeleine Boudreau, who was born in Acadie, expelled in Le Grand Dérangement, and died in Connecticut in 1768, just three years after the end of the expulsion.

·       A seven-times great-grandmother Marie Comeau, who was born in 1708 in Acadie, expelled during Le Grand Dérangement, and died in France in 1779. Her husband, Joseph Honoré Landry, also died in France in 1764, so it appears they were not separated. Their son, Simon Landry, was born in 1740 in Acadie, and he was separated from his parents. He married a Marie Rose Cyr (born in 1745 in Acadie) and they were expelled to Québec, where they died in the early 19th century.

Close-up of Green Gables counted cross-stich made by Megan St. Marie, which now hangs in her Modern Memoirs office

Reading Faragher’s book and connecting it to my genealogical record made that remote history feel closer. It also forced a reckoning with not just Evangeline’s romanticization of history, but with the anti-French sentiment in another beloved book set in the Maritimes, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Anne captured my heart as a child because I saw myself reflected in and validated by her loquacious, ambitious, sentimental, sensitive, bookish self. It wasn’t until I was an adult teaching the novel in courses at Simmons University that I recognized how her story marginalizes and disparages the francophone population of Prince Edward Island (PEI), descendants of those very Acadians who actually brought me into being. In his essay “L.M. Montgomery and the French,”[iii] Gavin White quotes Montgomery and writes,

“There's never anybody to be had but those stupid, half-grown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he's up and off to the lobster canneries or the States,” (AGG 7). On this sentence hangs the whole story of Anne of Green Gables, for Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert would not have sent for an orphan from Nova Scotia had hired help been reliable. But it was not reliable, it was French. And French meant half-grown and little, for the remaining French of Prince Edward Island had been pushed off their lands and into the bush when the colony was ceded to Britain in 1763, and they had not eaten well since. And French meant stupid, for the English-speakers of the Island only saw the French as servants, and they thought of them as the politically dominant races have all too often thought of dominated races.

White’s essay highlights other instances in the text that cast PEI’s francophone population as stupid and inferior, and I can’t argue with his critique. Instead, I argue with the novel itself, weighing my love for all it has given me against feelings of disloyalty to the ancestors who gave me my very existence.

Anne of Green Gables suncatcher created by artist Olive Barber, Catch the Sun Designs, a Christmas 2020 gift to Megan St. Marie from her husband, Sean St. Marie, that hangs in her Modern Memoirs office window

Several years ago, I traveled to the Maritimes with my husband, Sean, and we visited various sites that memorialize Le Grand Dérangement and preserve Acadian culture and history. We also visited the Green Gables Heritage Place, where I bought an embroidery kit of Green Gables. The finished piece now hangs on the wall of my Modern Memoirs office. A suncatcher Sean later gifted me shows Anne skipping past Green Gables and hangs in the window opposite that wall. Both pieces connect me to this cherished book of my childhood, while they also serve as useful inspiration for me to engage clients with work that challenges them to examine the stories they tell about their lives and their family history from many angles. After all, sometimes we are so close to a text we love—whether it’s one we’ve read or one we’ve written—that we can’t see “the forest primeval” for the trees; and just as reading new texts can shed light on those we’ve read in the past (as Faragher’s book and White’s essay prompted my new reflections on Evangeline and Anne), good editing can help writers see their own work in new ways, prompting revisions to make it stronger, accessible to more readers, and truer to their intent.

In a rather stunning bit of coincidence, I carry out my editorial work with clients in a town named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, the army commander who captured Canada for Great Britain during the very war that prompted the persecution and expulsion of my Acadian ancestors. I am because they were, and this reminder of the inescapability of history affords me a small feeling of triumph as I lay claim to my Acadian heritage and draw inspiration from it in my work.

[i] Faragher, John M. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland. WW Norton & Co., 2005.

[ii] Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Notes by Nathan Haskell Dole. Thomas Y. Crowell & Company Publishers, 1893.

[iii] White, Gavin. “L. M. Montgomery And The French”. Canadian Children's Literature/Littérature Canadienne pour la Jeunesse 78.21 (1995): 65–68.

Reflections from Hilde Adler

Hilde Adler is a repeat client with Modern Memoirs. Her first book, a memoir entitled The Way It Was: not so long ago in a country not so far away, came out in 2011 and underwent several subsequent editions and reprints. It took eight months from the day Adler first contacted us to the day the books arrived on her doorstep.

The second book, entitled I Am Not Old Enough: The Twenty-seven Stages of Adjustment to Living in a Retirement Community, was published in 2019. It took only two and a half months to publish, and Adler opted for print-on-demand service with global distribution, which has allowed her to personally sell many copies. (Interested readers can purchase copies at this link.) We asked the author to reflect on what the publication process was like for her, and what it has meant to share her books with others.

1.  Your first book is an account of your family’s life in Germany before you came, as refugees, to the United States at the start of World War II. It features descriptions of your home in Nürnberg, your family members, holidays, school, and some of the events leading up to the war. It briefly covers your family’s departure from Germany and resettlement in the United States, and it includes photographs. In the introduction to the book, you note that hundreds of books have been dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, but that “hardly anyone thinks about the life of Germany’s Jews before Hitler.” What inspired you to write this memoir, to do this sort of remembering? For whom did you write it?

Hilde Adler: Because of my own history, I’ve done a lot of reading about the 2,000-year history of the Jews in Europe, and have come to understand how remarkable Jewish life was in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My family inherited this life; they felt totally German, totally integrated into the society and completely immersed in the German culture. I wrote this book because I wanted my friends and my very scattered-around-the-world family not only to honor and remember the tragedies and lives lost in the Holocaust, but also to understand something about the amazing, productive life that Germany’s Jews created and lived, and that came to end because of the Nazis. I wanted to honor my parents and their whole generation.

2.  People often talk about the role of objects in memory. In The Way It Was, you describe how your family lost most of their possessions and heirlooms when they were either destroyed during Kristallnacht, stolen by the Nazis, or sunken on a ship that was bombed. How has writing your memoir helped you think about your relationship with objects, and family mementos in particular?

Hilde Adler: Interesting that you should ask this, because for some years now, I’ve been trying to finish a manuscript about how things that once belonged to our parents or grandparents, or others in those generations, connect us to our family history! I do have some mementos, courtesy of my grandmother, who left Germany earlier than we did and managed to get some things out. And for the last 83 years, a little black toy dog, which my parents gave me the day we left to replace my real little black dog who had to stay behind, has lived on my bedroom dresser no matter where I’ve lived! The connection of these things to the past is palpable.

3.  Your second book is completely different from the first. It’s a humorous look at the evolution of your feelings about moving into a retirement community, documenting how you hated leaving your old home, yet came to love your new one. This book is written in two voices, one you call “normal blathering me” and the other, your “reality check” voice, and it includes cartoon drawings. Besides wanting to describe what life is like in a retirement community, why was it important to you to write this book?

Hilde Adler: After we moved to the retirement community, our former neighbors and other friends constantly wanted to talk about our move. I was always trying to convey that this move was not as tragic as they perceived it. The conversation happened so often that eventually I made a list, and the book grew out of that. The stages as well as the voices are real and universal. We’d all rather deny that we’re old enough for this adventure, but at the same time we all know better. I thought if I was honest, people could relate and would believe me.

4.  As widely different as these two books are, they share some surprising themes. One is the meaning of home. How has writing helped you come to a better understanding of the meaning and creation of home?

Hilde Adler: I’m actually fairly obsessed with the concept of home, probably because I don’t have one. I bring it up in conversations when I can, trying to understand how others perceive “home.” At age 10, I lost what I thought was home (although it wasn’t! They would have killed me!). Writing revives some memories. But I’ve never found “home.”

5.  Another related theme is the question of belonging. In fact, in both books you repeat the same question, noting that even “in the midst of beloved people” and even when you were enveloped in perfectly enjoyable surroundings, you sometimes found yourself asking, “What am I doing here?” How has writing helped you reflect on these complicated feelings about community and belonging?

Hilde Adler: This is not related to writing for me. It has to do with the immigrant experience, which is different for those who come to another place for a better life than for those who are fleeing persecution. Even though I seem to have lived a “perfect, typical American girl” sort of life, I think subconsciously I’ve always been a displaced person! A realization that there is no shared history with anyone around surfaces at unexpected times and can cause a feeling of profound isolation. You “wanna go home now,” but there’s no place to go! It is what it is.

Interested in reading more? Readers can purchase Hilde Adler’s second book at the link below:

The Write Stuff: The Value of Transcription in Genealogical Research

Just as drawing can help someone truly see an object, transcribing a handwritten document into typed text can help a person truly read it. That is why I encourage clients to take the time to key in the text of handwritten genealogical records they gather in their research. Whether it’s a census record, passenger list, or deed, transcribing documents into word processing software or a spreadsheet not only puts research on solid footing, it just might also provide leads for further exploration.

Don’t let the task intimidate you! Handwriting from centuries ago can be very difficult to read, with letter shapes, punctuation, and turns of phrase that may be unfamiliar. Messy handwriting and poor image quality often make the work that much harder. But with a little bit of study and the mastery of certain tricks (such as finding the same or similar letters in other parts of the document, looking up guessed-at words and names online, and recognizing templated text), you can soon decipher more than you thought you could.

I have extensive experience with transcribing genealogical records and other historical documents. This work includes a three-year batch of letters from a Civil War soldier, and a series of courtship letters from a 19th-century widower to his future second wife. If you feel daunted by tackling transcription on your own, consider getting started by engaging Modern Memoirs’ transcription services. We can help you advance your research by bringing important details into focus, which may uncover something entirely new.

Transcribing documents is valuable because it (literally) spells out the key information needed to study the events of an ancestor’s life: their name in all its variations; age; birthplace; occupation; and nuclear family members. Transcription highlights the consistencies between documents that confirm that the same (correct) individual or family group is studied over time, while also revealing any inconsistencies that need to be investigated and explained. Additionally, transcription prompts the organization of findings to formulate a timeline of an ancestor’s life while putting research findings into a format that can be searched by you and shared with others. But what’s more, transcribing documents may end up illuminating additional, helpful pieces of information held in the original documents.

For example, a census listing might reveal the name of a boarder who turns out to be one of your ancestor’s previously “lost” nephews. Or perhaps a marriage record will reveal a witness who turns up as the caretaker of the couple’s orphaned children later in life. Or maybe a deed names an abutting neighbor who migrated with your ancestor from one section of the country to another.

In other words, transcription may assist you with direct ancestry research while also providing information about extended family, friends, and associates that can indirectly take research to a whole new level. I am eager to help Modern Memoirs clients with this rewarding work, whether or not it leads to a larger book-publishing project.

1900 U.S. census for Lamotte, Jackson County, Iowa. This section shows Henry, Mary, Emma, and Frederich Ahlers. Henry and Mary are two of my maternal great-great grandparents and Frederich was their son (my great-grandfather). I transcribed Frederich’s name with an “h” at the end, even though Ancestry.com indexed it with a “k.” That’s because, elsewhere on the page, I noticed that the census taker wrote the letter “k” very distinctly in the word “clerk” and it doesn’t look like the ending of “Frederich.” See below.

Reflections from Kevin Albert

Kevin Albert’s wife, Mary Albert, commissioned a memoir for him as a birthday gift the year that he retired. He published his book entitled Work Hard, Get Lucky: A Memoir with Modern Memoirs in 2021. This Commissioned Memoir included genealogical research and took 18 months from the day Mary first contacted us to the day books arrived on their doorstep. We asked Kevin and Mary to reflect on what the publication process was like for them, and what it has meant to share his books with others.

1.  The opportunity to write a memoir was a birthday gift to you from your wife, Mary. In the opening pages of the book, you say that memoir-writing was not something you ever thought you would want to do. In fact, you say it even seemed a little “pretentious.” What made you change your mind? 

Kevin Albert: I still believe it’s a little pretentious to think that anybody outside of my family and close circle of friends would want to read it. I wasn’t Paul Volcker, or Bill Clinton, or another famous person who contributed a lot to society overall. I’ve been successful, but I’ve been successful in a way that hasn’t necessarily been super meaningful for the rest of the world. So I decided to embrace a finite view of who might be interested in reading the memoir and thought about it in terms of the impact it could have on close associates, my family, and particularly my grandchildren, who are still young enough to learn lessons or get motivated about being successful in this world.

Then, by expanding the project to include genealogical research, I hoped the book would become more interesting for cousins and people who aren’t in the inner circle but are in the same family. Take, for example, my cousin in Texas, who actually helped provide documentation for the family history section. We got together with her at a family reunion in Wisconsin last August, and I finally gave a copy of the book to her in person. She really appreciates it.

2. Once you decided to do it, what were the main objectives you intended to accomplish in writing a memoir?

Kevin Albert: Initially and most importantly, I decided to try and elicit from the aspects of my life that were successful the reasons why they were successful, so that readers (particularly my grandkids) could benefit from this and be inspired by it. The second thing that came out of the whole process was that it made me remember people from much earlier in my life when I was growing up in Wisconsin and then when I went to college and graduate school in California. I hadn’t really maintained relationships with them, and talking about them in the interviews reminded me of the good times we had and the ways in which they helped me. I’m resolved to reach out to those people and try to reconnect. Finally, adding on the genealogy research was a great decision. I had never done any family history research before, and I think that anybody who does a memoir should include family history because it really makes it a complete package for subsequent generations.

3. Yours was a Commissioned Memoir, which means that we generated the initial text from a series of interviews with you, and then worked closely with you as we completed each editorial and design step. How did the creation process help you achieve the results you were looking for?

Kevin Albert: If I had just sat down to write a memoir on my own, it would’ve been a much different and less fulsome document. That’s because Modern Memoirs has developed a model for how to start with interviews and then edit the transcripts, and Megan [St. Marie, interviewer and editor] is very good at it. There’s a risk when you write a memoir and talk about all the good things in your life, the things you achieved, and so on, that it could seem a little braggy. It was painstaking to sit with Megan and have her go into every nook and cranny of my life—religion, schooling, siblings—but I probably would’ve skipped over a lot of that stuff on my own. She got a lot of material out of me that wouldn’t have otherwise come out. It was hard to deal with that raw transcript when they first transcribed all the material from the interviews, but then it just had to be molded to achieve the end result. After that initial work-through of the first transcript, it was really very straightforward and almost fun to hone it into the final manuscript.

4. In the foreword of the book, which Mary wrote, she says that you have a reserved demeanor and that her curiosity about you was a main factor motivating her to commission the project. Kevin, was there anything particular about creating a memoir that made it easier to open up and share your stories and insights with others? And Mary, how did the memoir satisfy your curiosity?

Kevin Albert: Well, you don’t really have any choice but to open up, right? Megan interviews you, and if you don’t answer the questions, you’re shooting the entire project in the foot because the process itself forces you to be responsive. Mary hasn’t ever been involved in the business world, particularly finance. I think that the main thing that she has always been trying to figure out is what I did every day for ten hours! I think some of that came through in this project with the specific things I cited, like creating the structure of a business development company for the first time. What readers should get out of the memoir is that I developed something that became a big deal on Wall Street, and that’s probably all they need to know. In a couple of instances, I helped either develop or create something that wasn’t there before and is still used today. I talk about how those things came about and I think that’s helpful. I also think it’s helpful that I included commentary on some of my colleagues who helped me in my career. Mary knew some of these people, and the memoir helped her to see them from a new perspective.

Mary Albert: Kevin and I have been married for 35 years and I have pretty much learned to understand his personality and behavior. He’s a man who keeps his feelings pretty close to his chest and has seemed reluctant to show nostalgia or reminisce. Through the memoir I learned so much about his earlier days and the many happy and interesting events of his life before we met. His genealogy record was fascinating. I just wish I had access to my own!

5. As your interest in learning more about your family history became sparked by the memoir-writing process, you expanded the project to have us conduct genealogical research. We presented the results in an extensive appendix in your memoir, as well as an online family tree. The appendix included a five-generation ancestor chart, a series of research summaries, photos and images of key historical documents, and an introduction that provided historical context. How did the genealogical research enhance the project for you?

Kevin Albert: I had never focused on family history at all, beyond recalling things my parents would drop on a one-off basis that I never pursued. Writing a memoir caused me to have more intellectual curiosity about my heritage and to see this curiosity satisfied. I’ve actually had a few people I don’t know reach out to me because they are linked into the DNA and family tree tools on the online family genealogy site.

Most importantly, however, is that the genealogy is very interesting to, say, a cousin who I haven’t seen in twenty years. It enhances the book for extended family who might read the family history section of the book and then also look to the first part for information or curiosity about me. “This guy that grew up in Wisconsin with us moved to New York—then what happened?” I would assume that if three generations from now, someone got really interested in our family history, it would be much harder to go back to find the information we documented from the 19th century and earlier. There are now enough copies of this book floating around in the family that the information will be there for anyone to use. I’m very happy to have done it and I talk it up whenever I can to people. There are other people in my network who certainly would have a story that is at least as interesting to tell.