Eureka!

[elmwood]

It was the right cousin and he passed my e-mail over to his sister-in-law who was visiting him in South Africa. She has been researching the Flaherty family for some years and once she is home and has access to her notes, she will e-mail me. I have so many questions about my mother's family - some about my mother and some more mundane ones such as

Comments

[quiller77]

I'm so glad you made progress in uncovering your mother's family story, Gillian. (I'm very late getting to this due to an insane amount of running around, but this morning I'm lazing in my B&B room waiting for my daughter to return from a late night and staying with friends to avoid travelling alone on TO night streets. How's that for a run-on sentence?)

[elmwood]

How was PYI, Karen? It's just as well we didn't arrange to meet yesterday as the whole family has come down with the lurgy. Golfboy is the sickest, so is being taken to the doctor today.

I spent most of my week at the cottage researching the family and came up with some very interesting stuff, not least of which is that my mother fabricated quite a bit!

[quiller77]

PYI was good overall. The first session was aimed at beginning writers so wasn't very useful for me, but the talks by Art Slade and Norah McClintock were stellar. I took notes like a crazy woman. And the keynote was good, too - not informative but interesting and uplifting.

So which is more interesting with your mother's stories: the fabricated bits or what really happened? Maybe that's where you get your fiction writing genes. :-) But it does make you wonder how many people reinvent themselves, or embellish for effect, or just outright change their history to something that appeals more to them.