Michellepedia

Find Your Ancestors: Write a Book

Author's Diary, Day 11: I spent almost four years, asking everybody I ran into to tell me stories about my grandmother, who died in 1992. I heard about how she liked to make peanut butter taffy when she was a girl and about how she  delivered babies when she was a nurse in her small eastern Kentucky town.

The only beau I heard about was the one who turned out to be my grandfather, who rode into town on a Harley in 1937 and rode off with her. But now that my book is published,  new facts are coming to light.

I received this email from Elliott Fraim, who owns a bookstore in Prestonsburg, Kentucky: "As of today we have sold 103 copies of the book. Several people have mentioned having photos etc. to show you when you are here. Just this AM a lady said that she had found a photo of your grandmother with a boyfriend, which she wanted to bring to you."

I can't wait to get to town next month to see it.

How to Write a Bestseller

Author's Diary, Day 2: First, pick a topic that is considered to be universally sexy like, say, Kentucky.

Then, when the book is published, send an email announcement to everyone you know.

After nearly ten years of writing regular columns  for places like Time, Rosie, Lifetime, the Discovery Channel Online, the New York Times and even a now-defunct magazine called Netguide, I know a lot of people.  This week I wrote to some to tell them about my book. In response, I received many nice notes ("Congratulations," "Can't wait to read about Kentucky," etc.), but of course those are not the ones on which I dwell when I lie awake at 2 a.m.

No, what sticks in my mind are ones like "...didn't know you are a writer," "Michelle: You are an spammer" and, perhaps my favorite, "I can't  imagine where you got my mailing address," which came from a person who once had corresponded with me at some length about the time his car was hit by lightning. Clearly what we had shared ("Did you feel a jolt? -- M" "No, no jolt") meant more to me than to him.

Author's Diary

  Day 1: My book is published.
People ask, "Aren't you excited?" 
"Yes," I lie.
Do I sound paranoid? Don't answer that. In fact, don't say anything at all to me this week unless it's some hollow platitude about how nice my book's cover looks or how much you liked the first chapter (you don't actually have to have read the first chapter to say this, by the way).
Or, if you feel too guilty about  discussing the book without having read it, just read one of the excerpts on my website. I'll never know the difference.

How do you find a town that disappeared?

Early votes are in. Feedback from one Kentuckian who looked at two covers I'm considering for my book about Martin, KY noted with satisfaction that  "the flowering dogwood (or is that a 'sarvisberry' tree?) in the foreground of the cover I like is a very common spring sight in the mountains, too. Or it used to be, anyway."

Another  Kentuckian, who ought to know,  questioned the veracity of the image that showed a car traveling along a winding road: "I have reservations about how
accurately the terrain of Eastern Kentucky is portrayed in it.  The
mountains are lower than what we have here and the water is definitely
wider."

And a third reader wrote to say, "Are those two the only ones we have to choose from?" No, Goldilocks, there were other earlier versions, like the one shown here (above left). Do you like it better? If so, please email me to say why.

Choosing a book cover

Unfortunately, a book has only one cover. So how to pick? Sadly my uncle Jack, who would have known the answer without having to think twice, died a couple of weeks ago. I'm left to my own devices to try to do justice to his town. I like the first image (below left) because it makes me think of the day my grandparents eloped to Paintsville, Kentucky in an old jalopy.  The one on the right has a vintage postcard feel that evokes the sort of  lost  hometown we all wish was ours. You have to squint, but if you do, you'll see a little town on the far side of the creek. This is how eastern Kentucky looked a long, long time ago.  The pretty colors of the past are haunting, given the sad fate of the town on Beaver Creek. Opinions?  Please email  me.

Greetings from Martin, KY

Here's a postcard view of my grandmother's hometown of Martin, Kentucky. Tim Reynolds, whose grandfather was the town's first mayor and who owned the  five-and-dime, emailed the image to me a few days ago. After I started writing a book about the town's history, I also started collecting pictures. This one  is  particularly interesting because of its idealized view of a calm, blue Beaver Creek. No hint of the floods that plagued the town for a hundred years and eventually led to its demise.

Martin, KY: Then and Now

This is what my family's hometown of Martin, KY looked like nearly a hundred years ago. Today the town looks different, as the Army Corps of Engineers prepares to demolish it and move residents out of the flood zone near Beaver Creek, a story I wrote about. In the old days, the C&O Cafe served breakfast to passengers waiting to change trains. The woman in the photo is Lora Stephens, who also operated Preston's drugstore, named after her first husband (shot and murdered at a local dance). Near the cafe, a  gunslinger named Bad John Hall was involved in a notorious  shootout in the 1920s. Read about the gunfight here, in the words of one of Hall's descendants.

The Town on Beaver Creek

After my mother moved north and married, she missed her hometown in eastern Kentucky so much that my father decided to reconstruct it in our basement. In the 1960s, he built a scale model of the town of Martin, surrounded by mountains fashioned from  chicken wire and plaster. The results looked like a movie set created for a heartwarming Frank Capra film. In a valley sat a little town, its Main Street dotted with replicas of the places my mother had loved most: the Hob Nob Café, Grigsby’s Five-and-Dime and Mr. Keathley’s motion picture theater.  That town is long gone.

This is how my book starts. 

 The town never should have existed in the first place. Built on the banks of a cantankerous creek, Martin flooded most years, forcing families like mine to stack  furniture to the ceiling before they fled for higher ground.

When the water went down, my family hosed out the mud and put down new linoleum.  But now, after a hundred years of floods, the sad, old houses will be demolished. The federal government is leveling a mountain so the town can be rebuilt on higher ground.

Sometimes a town is past saving. But its history shouldn’t be. Not one memento of my family’s life in Martin will survive, not a pew from the Church of Christ where my mother sat in the back row and swung her legs in time to hymns, not a brick from the high school my Uncle Red helped build in 1938, not a scratchy mohair seat from the Martin Theatre where my grandmother sat through Saturday matinees.

Some things are lost forever. But some things can be found again. I interviewed a hundred people who once lived in Martin to collect their memories and put the stories in my book.  After she left Martin in the 1950s, my grandmother pined for the hills of Kentucky all the rest of her life. I know why. I just made the final changes to the book's galleys.

 

Where I'm From

My grandmother is the little girl in the middle.  The grave she is visiting is her little brothers'. They  died of pneumonia in the   1920s. The little girl on her left is her sister Pauline. The boy is her older brother Red. The woman in the hat is my great grandmother Hesta Mynhier, who always set great store by hats. They lived in  a time and place -- an eastern Kentucky coal mining country in the early part of the twentieth century -- as foreign to me as Mars. Their hometown of Martin, Kentucky flooded every year and my grandmother's  job, as a girl, was to hose down the walls and shovel out the mud so the linoleum in the kitchen could be pulled up and replaced. I just finished writing a book about my grandmother and her town, which will be published this summer, and while  reporting the story I went to the cemetery, in Paintsville, Kentucky, where my grandmother's younger brothers were buried. My Uncle Walter gave me directions about how to find the graves -- start at the entrance, walk a certain number of steps, turn right, walk more steps to find the spot  near a wall beneath a tree. But sometime in the last 80 years the tree came down.  The wall crumbled. In those days, there was no money for headstones.