“To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfill a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning.” – Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road
Ever since I was bitten by the genealogy bug over ten years ago, I’ve been enamored by family history books. Some of these tomes are beautiful; laden with pictures and maps, overflowing with dates and stories. I’ve perused them randomly in libraries just to imagine what it would be like for one to exist for my own family; a relic to revel in and an heirloom to pass on. Every now and then, I’ve discovered one for a very distant branch of the family tree and have felt gratitude towards its author, but, intermingled with this gratefulness, is also an intense jealousy.
I’ve long wished that someone had already written a Chastain Family book. I could simply kick up my feet, grab a hot cup of tea, and dive in; getting lost looking at maps and ruminating on the lives of my ancestors. Realizing that if wishes were horses and all that, an awareness (a sinking feeling, really) steadily grew. If I wanted a Chastain Family History book, I would have to write it myself.
A few problems arise from this. First, I’m nowhere near qualified. I’m neither a professional genealogist nor a professional writer. If a Chastain Family book is going to exist, I want it to be complete and beautiful. In a word — perfect. Based on those standards, I will most certainly fall short.
There are undoubtedly sources I’ve missed in my research. There are also sources I know of but haven’t had time to thoroughly and meticulously investigate. There are troves of family history documents sitting in archives in Germany and France. There they will languish since I can’t read either language nor can I decipher the centuries old handwriting of the notaries and other scribes (not to mention the months that would be needed in Europe to do that work). These and other factors make me well aware how much better the book could be in more capable hands.
A second problem is that the experience and struggle of writing pales in comparison with the excitement of discovery and uncovering new information. I know without a doubt which activity I’d rather be doing. I could research for the rest of my life and never write a sentence about it quite contentedly. But, at some point, if I want to bring this book into existence (and I do), I will have to stop researching and actually put in the hard work of organizing it and fashioning it into a coherent whole. I will have to put virtual pen to virtual page. What is the point of all of the research anyway if it’s never shared?
One final difficulty is that I’ve struggled to know where or how to begin the tale. Discussing this struggle with a friend, I once joked that every family history should start with the creation of the world and then go from there. Easy enough. But I’ve agonized too long over this. Despite all of these concerns, I’m going to write anyway. I still hope some day to publish an actual, physical book, but, in the meantime, I’m going to experiment with (very) slowly writing it out a bit at a time right here. Stay tuned.