One of the joys of writing comes through the people writers get to meet in the process of research. Many who cross my path are descendants and they share an enthusiasm for the story and carry with them a generosity of spirit unequaled. 

    Last month, Jerry and I made another trip to Washington State researching The Daughter's Walk.  We had a grand lunch with Darryl and Dorothy Bahr and Mary Kay Irwin.  The women are descendants of Helga Estby and her daughter, Clara, about whom I'm writing.  We tramped around property we think Clara owned and later Mary Kay spent hours at the court house discovering things I'd missed on one of my visits there last year, items that put a new slant to the story. These descendants made me feel like I was giving them a gift in telling a version of their family story while all along, they've been giving to me by letting me.

 

    Descendants, cousins, uncles and aunts, are a huge part of the Portrait of a Heart Series including my two most recent titles, A Flickering Light and An Absence so Great since it's my grandmother's story.  But their willingness to let me tell the story without saying "You can't talk about that" has been a treasured gift of confidence.  I certainly didn't write the story to be a voyeur of the past but instead because I loved and admired my grandmother and wanted others to be encouraged by her life.  Reader letters tell me she is.
    Dr. David Wagner and his wife, Dr. Pat Wagner, opened doors for me in telling Emma Giesy's story of the Change and Cherish Series that began with A Clearing in the Wild.  David is a great nephew of Emma and it was his remembering the family story that urged us to find evidence that she re-married after her husband's death.  Irene Westwood, a volunteer for the Aurora Colony Museum, located that evidence verifying that fact.  We wouldn't even have gone looking without that descendant story.  Irene later gave me a beautiful cross stitched piece called "Jane's Garden Square" from a pattern of the 1850s.  She'd done the handwork herself and told me it was a thank you for giving her a meaningful research task during a difficult time in her life.  Writing as healing; handwork as healing.
    Descendants of Marie Dorion located old books that helped define the story beginning with A Name of Her Own.  A great-great-great granddaughter remembered the translation of Marie's Indian name:  Walks Far Woman, and she did coming from St. Charles, MO all the way to the Pacific coast in Astoria.  Another researcher / reader, Nancy Noble, not only provided evidence to link Marie's third husband (she was widowed twice) to the original Astor Expedition, but Nancy offered to make the courthouse run for Irene's document (see above) thus helping in a totally different story.  

    Elfi and Erhard Gross have been my translation specialists for a number of books including The Change and Cherish Series and became friends due to a common love of history.

    Barbara Clements, of Keizer, Or, was so taken with Marie's story that she's raised funds for a kiosk commemorating Marie's life that will be installed in the Keizer Station Park in Keizer, OR on July 10th  near Salem, where Marie spent the last years of her life.  One of the purposes of fiction is to move people; and to be moved to raise money, organize a kiosk, get approval for placing it all to honor a remarkable woman tells me that Marie's story moved Barbara.

    I could go on.  But the truth of researching lies within the people who care and finding them depends on happy circumstance (or what I call divine intervention.) Perhaps it's a result of the initial commitment to tell the story.  Lyrical German poet Goethe reminds us that when we make a commitment to something, "Providence moves" and things begin to happen that you might otherwise never imagine.

    I'm grateful to the lives of readers, relatives, researchers, who have a passion for a piece of the story and who find others who want to share that, blowing on those embers and in the process, illuminating their own lives.  They've certainly given to my life and in the process, I hope, to yours as well.