Herstories: A Novel Approach to a Sprawling Family Narrative

“I’ve never been an ancestry enthusiast,” writes Priscilla Wilson in the foreword to her newly published novel. Well, you’d never know it. She has penned an evocative and moving family saga covering 12 generations and four centuries in America.

Herstories: Twelve Generations of Women Speak, 1604-1986 is a fascinating book that, while particular to Priscilla’s family that settled in Jamestown, Virginia, from England in the early 1600s, is also an Everyfamily story that will engage any reader.

Priscilla is a longtime friend, artist and fellow writer. I am astonished at the feat she accomplishes here.

As Herstories follows the family’s journey from Virginia west on the Wilderness Road to “Kentuck” and later down the Natchez Trace to Mississippi, its focus is life in the southeastern U.S. across the centuries. Within its wide scope are many of the major events that shaped our nation’s story, from our fight for independence to the move West, from the Civil War to the stock market crash to the Klan’s murder of four little Black girls in Alabama in 1963.

The women’s point of view

What distinguishes Priscilla’s book is that it is told from the point of view of her female ancestors … indeed, some of the real, flesh-and-blood women who helped build our country. In each of 12 successive chapters, one woman from each generation is featured as she writes entries in a fictional journal that, in Priscilla’s clever structure, is passed from one generation to the next.

The structure allows Priscilla to unleash her imagination and weave a novel based on the significant facts she has unearthed about her family’s multiple generations … and the women who gave birth to them.

It’s a skillful way to bring a mass of detail under control … and make it personal.

Here’s one heart-wrenching excerpt by Priscilla’s ancestor Angeline Lewis Waller after her son Alf dies of smallpox in Mississippi as the Civil War comes to an end:

“We wanted to bury Alf with his precious little sisters in the Clinton Cemetery but couldn’t get there for fear of the soldiers. We didn’t know what to do, for smallpox is very contagious and George had no way to build a box. Mr. Patrick was kind and let us have an old walnut wardrobe stored in his shed for a coffin. So he and George took his wagon and got the body and buried our boy there on the Patrick place near the shed where that wardrobe was stored, for it was too heavy to tote any distance.” –June 12, 1863

The approach is nothing new, of course. Historical novelists do it all the time, putting thoughtfully imagined fictional meat on the bare bones of facts. But Herstories is unique in the number of generations it covers–a dozen!–and its singular focus on the women of the story.

Priscilla’s mission is to bring these long-unheard voices to life, and she succeeds beautifully. It’s a joy to experience the variety of voices, too, from the archaic in the early chapters. e.g. “she only spake of her duty to be obedient to John,” to more contemporary speech and polished grammar in the later ones.

Here’s another excerpt, this one by Ann Elizabeth Lynch Atkins, Priscilla’s maternal grandmother, writing in Jacksonville, Florida, about the local impact of the rise of fascism in Germany in the early months of World War II:

“We talked about the war as always and about our Jewish neighbors in these apartments. How awful they must feel. The rumors are getting worse and worse about Hitler’s treatment of Jews. It seems they have been killed over there by the thousands. The man surely is the devil. I try to be Christlike but am filled with hatred.”–April 8, 1942

There is humor and, yes, sex, too. Here’s Angeline again:

“Well, I hope I have a few more babies after this but not too many. But George, he comes on strong and reguler. We done it lots, but he stinks of the tannery and I try to get him to take a bath. Our cabin is near to the tannery thoh and I can smell it anyway.”–August 14, 1834

Even the appendix is readable.

I love how Priscilla includes the basic facts on which each chapter is based in a brief appendix, titled “What Records Indicate about the Real People,” at the end of the book. It’s a testament to her writing skill that the appendix is not only readable, but also fascinating in its own right. And a solid framework for the colorfully detailed story she tells.

Like many of us, Priscilla acquired an interest in her family’s ancestry in her later years, when she began to explore her maternal grandmother’s roots after that stouthearted woman’s death in 1986. That exploration led to a deeper dive into the family story … and the forging of a wise and remarkable book.

Not just a family genealogy.

A story of value to all of us.

Read more about Priscilla’s book and order your copy on Amazon at this link. (I have a little more to say about the book on that page, too.) Also, the White County News in Cleveland, Georgia, recently published a front-page article about Priscilla and the book. Here is the link to that story.

Happy reading!

Note: Priscilla is also the author of Gourd Girls, a 2005 memoir about her and her wife Janice Lymburner’s journey to build a life and a successful business together in rural northeast Georgia. Copies of both books are available at their shop, The Gourd Place, in Sautee, Georgia. Gourd Girls is also available on Amazon here.

Even better, bookshop.org carries both books, with part of the proceeds going to support independent bookstores.