The Book

I haven’t posted anything in a few weeks, so thought I would take this opportunity to explain why. I’ve started writing a book, so I’ve been devoting all of my time to that project.

The book is an offshoot of Our Casbon Journey. It’s the story of the two Casbon brothers, Thomas and James, who migrated to the United States from England at different times (1846 and 1870, respectively) and ended up in Porter County, Indiana. The book starts with a description of their home country—Cambridgeshire, England—and their ancestry as far as I’ve been able to trace it. After the introductory material it will be organized in a traditional generation-by-generation format, starting with Isaac Casbon, the father of Thomas and James, and ending with the most recent living generation.

By traditional format, I mean that I’ll be using what is known as “Register style.” This refers to the style used in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, a widely recognized format for presenting genealogical information. In Register style, you begin in the past and go forward in time with each generation. Family members are assigned sequential numbers according to their generation and birth order. Information is presented in the form of family “sketches,” written in a standard format, beginning with birth, death, and marriage information about an individual, then one or more paragraphs containing additional biographical information, and then a list of that individual’s children. Those children who have children of their own will have their own sketches in subsequent chapters.

For example, the sketch (and chapter) about Isaac Casbon will look something like this:

The numeral “1” before Isaac’s name denotes that he is the starting point for the numbering system. The superscript “0” (zero) after his name denotes his generation. The numerals “2” and “3” before Thomas’s and James’s names indicates that they will be carried forward and have sketches of their own in the next chapter, while nothing more will be said about William and Joseph. The superscript “1” after Thomas’s name shows that he is the first generation after Isaac.

Individual sketches will vary in length, depending on how much information I have. There will also be illustrations and photographs, similar to what you’re used to seeing in Our Casbon Journey. There will be appendices, containing additional information or copies of important documents. Although not shown in the sample above, facts will be documented with abundant endnotes. These will provide the information for future researchers to see where the information came from and be able to evaluate the evidence for themselves, if desired. Most readers will not want to dig that deep, which is the reason I’ll be using endnotes (so they don’t clutter the pages).

The people in my target audience are the living descendants of Thomas and James. With Thomas and James as generation number one, their have been eight generations of descendants (I’m in generation six). Hopefully many of them will have an interest in their ancestry. Perhaps someone in the younger generations will be motivated to pick up wherever my research leaves off. I plan to donate a few copies to genealogy libraries, especially the Porter County Public Library in Valparaiso, Indiana.

I’ve spent a lot of time the last few months trying to locate and contact as many living descendants of Thomas and Joseph as possible. This has been a major challenge. I’ve been using every means available to me: my known contacts, facebook, Google, email, regular mail, and the telephone. This has been an ongoing endeavor because I keep learning about new descendants from those I’m able to reach. I’m sending each of them two forms to complete: a blank “family unit chart” to record information about their immediate families (births, marriages, deaths, etc.) and a permission form. The latter is important in these days of concern about privacy and identity theft. I’m reluctant to print information about living people without their knowledge and consent. Unfortunately, this means that even though I know who they are through my research, many entries for living people in the book will only say “Private” instead of showing names and birth dates. The permission form also gives people an opportunity to let me know if there is any specific information they would like kept private about themselves or their family members.

It’s a very steep learning curve. While I’ve been waiting for people to return their information to me, I’ve been researching and writing the narrative vignettes that will appear in personal sketches. Once the writing is done, there will be a tremendous amount of editing and formatting to get the manuscript ready for publishing. I plan to use a publish-on-demand service, which means individual copies of the book will be printed as they are ordered. Copies will be available through the website of the publisher, and possibly on Amazon—these are things I’ll be learning about as I go on.

So, dear readers, I hope you’ll understand why you won’t be seeing many blog posts for a while. At this point I haven’t set a deadline for publishing the book. I will be doing some traveling, and that will slow down the pace a bit. I’ll keep you posted and let you know when the book is finished. After than, Our Casbon Journey will be back to business as usual.