Why am I calling my blog “Geneature”? I plan to combine two of my favorite things – books and genealogy (I couldn’t figure out how to work in chocolate!). When you do genealogy, you learn some things about your ancestors. You learn where and when they were born, got married, lived, and died. But the thing that is very difficult to tease from the basic documents, is, what did they do the rest of the time? What did they eat, what did they wear, what did they do for fun? How were they impacted by everything going on around them? The books I will discuss in this blog will be ones that will help give some insight into our ancestor’s lives. I plan to review some old favorites, some classics, and also some more recent publications. Some will be autobiography or biography, some will be historical fiction. There will also be some non-fiction thrown in occasionally. I will try to make sure that these books are easily available, and let you know if they seem to be hard to find. I will let you know what region and era the book is set in. The ultimate goal would be for someone to come to this blog and find a book that tells them what life might have been like for their ancestor that lived in 1800 in Pennsylvania, for example.
That being said, I’m not even sure there is a book that will tell you that. There will be some regions and some eras that will have more written about them, and some will have less.
These will not be book reviews in the usual sense. I am not going to discuss the literary merits of these books. In addition to time and place, I will indicate if a book discusses the economy of the time, living conditions, medical treatments, technical advances, and anything else I can think of. I will try not to spoil the plot, but I will let you know if it might be a good book for school-aged children to read. I will look for books that cover as wide a variety as possible of social and economic classes, occupations, religions, and nationalities. However, I currently only plan to review books that take place in the United States, or what will be the future United States, before WWII. If there has been a movie/TV show made based on the book, I will let you know. Personally, I usually prefer the book to the movie, but there are some advantages to both.
One other thing I want to do with these books is to use them for ideas on where to find information on our real-life ancestors. In other words, if a specific book was actually about my 3rd Great-Grandmother, what does the story tell me that I could research? I plan to publish a post every two weeks, so I have a lot of reading ahead of me! Please let me know if you have suggestions for future books to review. It may take me awhile, but fortunately, I love to read!