Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client D. Patrick Winburn

D. Patrick Winburn published his book entitled William Wenbourne: Puritan Ancestor of Wenbourne, Winborne and Winburn in America with Modern Memoirs in 2020. This family history took seven months from the day he contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep. We asked Winburn to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.

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1. Your book discusses the life of William Wenbourne (c. 1610–1687), who came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1635. He is said to be the ancestor of most Wenbournes (of various spellings) in America today. Can you define your precise relationship to William? How have you researched your genealogy to confirm your connection to him?

Patrick Winburn: William Wenbourne was my 9th great-grandfather. My father was always interested in Winburn genealogy and had spoken to several relatives throughout his lifetime. One, Uncle Alfred Winburn, had a family Bible that went back to the early 1800s. That was the basis for the research I began to conduct. Before computers, I researched through various public libraries to find anything I could. In the National Archives I was able to find a book with some very good information by one of my distant ancestors, Judge Benjamin Brodie Winborne, about the Winbornes who lived in North Carolina, mostly in the 1800s. As online research became more accessible, I was able to reconstruct the remainder of the ancestry line.

2. What challenges or obstacles did you encounter in your research for the book? How did you overcome them?

Patrick Winburn: The greatest challenge to overcome was the fact that many of the rural places my ancestors lived didn’t seem to conduct safe recordkeeping, so many of the records I sought were missing. However, once I was able to connect back to New England of the 1600s, I found that lots of information exists on all of my relatives since the Puritans were incredibly good recordkeepers.

3. You are a lawyer by profession. How has your training and experience in your career helped you explore your ancestry?

Patrick Winburn: I found my legal training to be very helpful since I am used to looking at official documents and deciphering death records, for example. Modern Memoirs even used a scan of The Exeter Combination of 1639 as the frontispiece for my book. My ancestor signed this document, which is similar to the earlier Mayflower Compact and other significant colonial documents that established local government in America, so this was a crucial piece to include. In another nice design touch, we then decided to use William Wenbourne’s signature as a custom foil stamp on the book’s cover. Today, I am considering an expanded edition of the book, so that I can include more such documents in a reprinted volume.

The Exeter Combination of 1639, which has been compared and is similar to the earlier Mayflower Compact and other significant colonial documents that established local government in America. William Wenbourne’s signature is in the lefthand column, second from the bottom.

4. How long did it take you to write this volume, and how did you approach the process of winnowing down your research to create a succinct volume?

Patrick Winburn: The research felt like it involved several lifetimes, but writing the book only took a few months. I wanted the book to be like a legal brief with citations to official records to make it clear for future generations that what they were reading is factually true and provable. These were the original American Winburns—hopefully the book will provide a good starting point for others to research their family lines dating back to the 17th century.

5. You dedicated your book to people “who carry on the good name of Winburn.” Why do you think it is important to write about family history?

Patrick Winburn: It is something that I have always been interested in and presume other family members are or will be at some point in their lives. I wanted to preserve, through documents, that connection to the past as a means of situating our particular family history within the broader narrative of American history. My family of Winburns started out in the early 1600s in New England, but the next generation and those afterwards were almost all from the South. The book explains how that regional shift happened and became the prelude for the rest of the family history.

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Seeking the True Story

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I’ve recently completed researching and writing a 460-page commissioned genealogy for a client. It was a massive undertaking, involving fascinating characters and contexts, and it’s almost hard to believe I finished it! The manuscript is now out of my hands and moving on to publication, but I haven’t quite let go of it in my mind. After devoting the bulk of my professional energies to this book for the past year, I find myself reflecting on the basic genealogy standards that allowed me to complete this big project and that will be essential to all future ones that come my way.

Genealogy Standards, published by the Board for Certification of Genealogists, was a central text assigned during my studies for a Certificate in Genealogical Research at Boston University. The first sentence in the first chapter reads:

“All genealogists strive to reconstruct family histories or achieve genealogical goals that reflect historical reality as closely as possible.”

It seems unnecessary to state. After consideration, however, this statement strikes me as the single most important guiding principle of genealogists’ work. After all, we seek to discover the truth, or “reality,” of an ancestor’s life and the context in which they lived. We may start with a family’s memories and traditional stories, but then we must find evidence to verify the facts that underlie them.

That’s why the second sentence in Genealogy Standards says:

“They [genealogists] meet this goal by applying the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) to measure the credibility of conclusions about ancestral identities, relationships, and life events.”

The board’s standard requires exhaustive research, source citations, analysis and correlation, resolution of conflicting evidence, and soundly written conclusions. The process involves a lot of hard work, but genealogists shoulder it because the last thing we want to do is perpetuate falsehoods.

This arduous pursuit is also incredibly interesting and rewarding. Many of you know exactly what I mean because the genealogy bug has bitten you, too. Perhaps no one describes the type of person who answers the call to research one’s ancestry better than Ethel W. Williams in her book Know Your Ancestors: A Guide to Genealogical Research. She acknowledges our “duty to search out and record the truth,” and then she lists common attributes of a genealogist:

“He [or she] becomes, first of all, a full-time detective, a thorough historian, an inveterate snoop, and at the same time, a confirmed diplomat, a keen observer, a hardened skeptic, and apt biographer, a qualified linguist, a part-time lawyer combined with quite a lot of district attorney, a studious sociologist, and above all, an accurate reporter.”

We draw on our skills to solve mysteries, place our family’s story in historical context, uncover secrets, find missing records, scrutinize sources and information, confirm or debunk mythologies, and communicate the results of our research clearly and factually.

When I focus on the last part of Williams’ description, “accurate reporter,” I think about my undergraduate years in journalism school, when I learned three truisms that serve me well as a professional genealogist today.

“Even bad notes are better than a good memory.”

First, “Journalists [genealogists] are not expected to know everything, they are expected to know where to find it.” To me, there are two parts to this maxim—locating information and organizing it. None of us goes into a research project as an expert on all of the challenges and questions it will pose—that’s why we must research. We hone our skills and broaden our knowledge with every person we meet on the family tree. But at the outset, a good genealogist formulates a solid research plan by framing precise research questions and hunting down sources to answer them. Then, as we gather information, we organize it for easy retrievability. Research plans and recordkeeping systems keep us working as efficiently as possible.

Second, “Even bad notes are better than a good memory.” How many times have you looked back over notes and seen something that you didn’t even remember writing—and thanked your lucky stars that you did? How many times have you kicked yourself for not listing who said something, where they said it, or when? How many times have you downloaded a record and then not recalled where you found it? A good genealogist keeps a written (or electronic) record of details like these because we cannot store all of them in our heads.

Third, and most important, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. Great stories are only stories until we verify them. Easy answers found on cemetery websites and online family trees need to be documented and confirmed before we accept them. A good genealogist is methodical, working from the known to the unknown and applying the Genealogical Proof Standard every step of the way.

In our quest for “reality” or the truth, the discovery of additional sources and the revision of interpretations may affect previous conclusions, but then we adjust. Bit by bit, research then gives way to evidence-based writing, and possibly, to the sharing of our knowledge with others on a website, in a presentation, or maybe even in a 460-page book. By keeping fundamental genealogical standards in mind, we know that we journey on solid ground toward such goals.

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Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client James A. Heffernan

James A. Heffernan is a repeat client of Modern Memoirs. His first book, entitled The Reality of Hunter-Gatherers, was published in 2016, and came out as an eBook in 2018. His most recent project, Many Worlds: A Collection of Poems, was published with Modern Memoirs in 2019 with eBook conversion, POD (print-on-demand) service, and global distribution through online retailers. This book took just two months from the day he first contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep. In honor of April as National Poetry Month, we asked Heffernan to reflect on the second book: what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his poetry with others.

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1. You studied physics and anthropology at the University of Utah, and your first book with Modern Memoirs was a narrative examination of state and class through the lens of hunter-gatherer societies. Many Worlds is a poetic philosophical exploration of such concepts as time, freedom, truth, and nature. How did you come to choose poetry as your means of expression for the second project?

James Heffernan: Well, I had never released a book of poems before then, and I had been writing poetry for years. It was simply a matter of finding my favorite pieces on the computer, taking a few weeks to edit, and then delivering the file to you guys. As you point out, the process was swift and painless. I worked primarily with Ali, and her help was professional, excellent, and indispensable. My first foray into poetry could not have been more positive.

2. Describe your writing process as a poet.

James Heffernan: I’m not sure how others do it, but this is how I do it. Typically, I start with a subject. I either think one up, or pick up some clue somewhere, or whatever—I get the idea for a subject. And then I decide upon a rhyme scheme, unless I intend to write a free-verse poem. And once these choices are made, I write the poem. Doing it in reverse order generally doesn’t work for me; I have to have a subject in mind at the outset.

3. Who is your intended reader of the poems? What feedback have you received?

James Heffernan: I’ve received all sorts of positive feedback over the years, and very little negative. I’m what you might call a peculiar person, so my poems often reflect this. They can be rather abstract or abstruse, but I would rather have people interpret the poems as they like and not put myself in the way of that by explaining too much. Therefore, they can sometimes be challenging. I will say that all of my poetry is G-rated, so just about anyone who wants to can approach it.

4. Why did you choose to self-publish instead of publishing your book commercially?

James Heffernan: Well, I’m reminded of the comment in Dr. Zhivago that writing poetry as a profession is like being a botanist as a profession. Some make it work, but it’s rather awkward. My poetry, as I have said, can be abstruse and challenging, and full of supernatural stuff, and whatnot. So I figured there was no point in trying to find a publisher looking to make some money. My books have done pretty well, so there are no regrets.

5. What was it about your first experience with Modern Memoirs that you chose to work with us again?

James Heffernan: The professionalism and competence. The product delivered is flawless. I could not have had a more effective and enjoyable experience than working with Ali and the entire team at Modern Memoirs. Y’all definitely know what you are doing, and I wish you continued success in the future!

Interested in reading more? You can purchase Many Worlds: A Collection Of Poems in the Modern Memoirs online shop, Memory Lane Books & Gifts.

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Titles Are Born

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Our clients, as authors, often come to us saying, “I’m not sure about my book title… what do you think of this title? Or that title?” Or “Can you help me with the title?”

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I could give many tips on how to come up with a title, but you could also look online and find all manner of helpful info.

“I believe titles don’t need to be forced; they are born.”

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What I really want to say here is that I believe titles don’t need to be forced; they are born. And like most babies, they will emerge at the time that is right for them, and you don’t always know when that’s going to be.

It is important to leave time and space to let the title come to you, and it will. 

You probably already know the obvious—a title should reflect the tone of the book (serious, poetic, whimsical, scientific, literary, etc.). Naturally titles are often derived from a theme or a scene in the book. If the title is more obscure or poetic, it’s good to add a subtitle that explains and clarifies the content. Some titles have more punch because they’re commercially published and must jump out at you. 

It’s OK to collaborate on choosing a title, but don’t start asking EVERYone for title suggestions or feedback on your title options. This opens a can of worms and causes confusion and delays. Sit with your own thoughts; go with your gut instinct; maybe even call the midwife, an editor. 

Then, once you’ve chosen it, “google” your title and check that it hasn’t been coined anywhere else (book, video, poem, song, etc.). 

If you’re selling the book, you might ask a commercial editor or publisher their opinions. If you’re not selling the book, I’d say just listen to your intuition.

Some of my favorite (commercial) titles simply say it as it is:

Accordion Crimes

A Grief Observed

Crime and Punishment

No One Can Pronounce My Name

Others are more mysterious:

Ballad of the Sad Café

To Kill a Mockingbird 

100 Years of Solitude

Last Night at the Lobster

Length? A longer title or subtitle might affect the front-cover design (fitting of the words), but that’s another topic. There are plenty of intriguing long titles:

 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again

And short ones:

Passing

Plainsong 

Snow Country

Beloved 

Hopscotch 

Some of my favorite Modern Memoirs (non-commercial) book titles: 

There’s a Book in Here Somewhere

I Dunno

A Narrative of Certain Events in the Life of Russell B. Newton, Jr. 

Don’t Believe a Word of It

I Said I’d Retire…

For my part, the title that was born to the tribute book I wrote for my late mother is Learning to Speak. How did it come to me? When I was almost done with the writing and happened to be on a 3-hour car trip, I said to myself,  “I need a title!” Drive, drive, drive. The title came to me as I crested the Bourne Bridge on Cape Cod, close to my arrival point. I said it out loud: “Learning to Speak.” For me, it came at the perfect time. Trust yourself. 

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Papa Bob's House

A blog post by Publishing Intern Charlie Mark

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Modern Memoirs Publishing Intern Charlie Mark, 2023

I didn’t know my paternal grandfather, whom my siblings and I called “Papa Bob,” very well. We didn’t see him much beyond Christmas and an annual visit to help him rake the leaves from his lawn. From those visits I knew that my grandpa had a horse he never rode, a dog he never trained, and a house full of all manner of things. After he passed away in the summer of 2021, I helped my dad clear out Papa Bob’s house. Sorting through his belongings and packing them all away made me think about all I didn’t know about Papa Bob, everything I would never get to ask him. It was a strange way to get to know a person and a last step in our relationship that I am now grateful to have had.

His entire house, including the breezeway leading from the house to the garage, had an unmistakable smell of old cigarettes and musty dog. It was also incredibly cluttered. To put it lightly, my grandfather was a great collector of little things. I can understand the appeal, as I am prone to building nests of little objects, arranging them about me like some brooding magpie. Yet some of the things Papa Bob clung onto seemed bizarre, even to me. For one, he had the most astonishing collection of broken-down boxes I had ever seen. The stairwell up to the second floor was completely filled to the point that attempting to climb over them was a futile endeavor. One bay of his garage was also filled to bursting, the cardboard set in precarious stacks that leaked out around the corners.

Indoor windchimes from Papa Bob’s house, now hanging in my home

Under the cardboard were the trappings of his later life: his beloved books about magical gardens, his crystals on windowsills, and the windchimes he hung inside the house. There were pictures of the horses and dogs he had over the years, and of his second wife, Carol, who passed away when I was only a little kid. Hitting me hardest of all were his dishes still in the sink. All of it his, and everything covered in a film of dust. It felt strange to decide what was worth keeping, strange to open up his closet and empty it of his perfectly folded and perfectly hung clothing. His house was full of things he loved and took care of. My sister and I stood over the crystals on his windowsill and wondered if they were for some sort of spell, and if we broke them or moved them they might disturb the restful dead. In the end we got rid of many of Papa Bob’s things, but we kept some, too. I took his indoor windchimes.

The house is emptied of Papa Bob’s things now, and someone else lives there with their own things. I wish I could go back and look around those rooms again, even just one more time. As I packed up their contents, I somehow didn’t really consider that I would never see those rooms again.

We didn’t have a funeral for Papa Bob until months after we’d cleaned out his house. Once we did, it was not your run-of-the-mill somber affair, but a celebration of life held at the local soup kitchen he had donated to and volunteered at for years. There, I got to know my grandfather even more as the people who had known him best spoke about him. Listening to them made me think of my own earliest memories of him:

I remember once staying at his house overnight and eating pancakes in the morning, Carol leaning over to ask if I wanted syrup.

I remember he used to take me to visit his horse, Marbles. He would unwrap a mint candy, the kind you see in the doorway to restaurants, and place it in my palm. “Now keep your fingers open,” he’d say as he picked me up and walked over to the stall. I remember thinking it was funny that the horse liked the exact same candy that I did.

I remember a time when I was young enough to think that sitting under the table was still an excellent place to be, though I hadn’t counted on sharing the space with my grandpa’s new dog. “A service dog,” Papa Bob said of his black lab, Morgan. “I’m training her to be a service dog.” I remember thinking that this idea was a bit of a stretch as I silently watched Morgan chew through her leash and then go rooting through the trash.

I remember the stones he used to give me and my siblings. He used to say that if we felt bad we could close our eyes. “Breathe in,” he would say, “and breathe out. When you do, let all the bad go away into that stone. That way you can be full of everything else.” Even all these years later, I never let anybody else touch those stones, for a reason I can’t quite articulate.

Growing up in an age where cellphones are a staple of any outfit, whether you are old or young, I’ve had my fair share of pictures taken of me, and I’ve taken many, too. It’s easy to swipe to your camera and take a selfie or a picture of a stunning view. It’s such an easy thing to do, in fact, that it seems there is no reason not to. But, recently, every time I pull out my phone to take a picture, I ask myself, Why? Why do I need to remember this exact moment? A simple picture, held in static pixels on the cracked screen of my phone isn’t enough to capture what I see, what I feel, what I think. I’m not saying that pictures aren’t wonderful, but sometimes I find myself getting so caught up at looking at everything through the lens of my camera that I forget to just look.

The decorated mantlepiece at Papa Bob’s house

I do have a few pictures of Papa Bob’s house from the day we cleaned it out, but I more strongly cherish the memories I have, undocumented but fixed in my mind like those from my earlier childhood. In looking at my photos from Papa Bob’s house, I know they don't transmit exactly the way rain caught in my eyelashes, or the way the shade in Papa Bob’s backyard fell upon the grass and the little birdbath in the yard. Perhaps it is the writer in me that feels the only way to truly capture a moment is to write it down, to spend as much or as little time as I like teasing out the details of the memory.

Though Papa Bob is gone and much of his life remains a mystery to me, I do remember him fondly. Paradoxically, as I learn more about him, I feel closer to him than I did when he was alive. Each new story I hear of his life adds to the collection of things I know about him, filling up my heart with memories and stories, like a magpie’s nest or an old house filled with one man’s treasures.

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The Goldilocks Effect on a Writer: Sometimes “Just Write” Is “Just Right”

A blog post by Publishing Intern Cori Garrett-Goodyear

Publishing Intern Cori Garrett-Goodyear’s “Writer’s Path” vision board, created for her studies in the Bay Path University MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, fall 2022

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Recently my MFA program tasked me with creating a writer’s self-contract. The goal: to stay invested in, and accountable to, myself and my writing once the externally imposed expectations and deadlines of the program are no longer in place. As the end of my final semester draws ever nearer, I find myself hurtling towards the realm of self-accountability—terrain where I’ve historically stumbled. The familiar tug of being pulled in too many directions all at once looms large. My roles as a wife and mother working a full-time day job on top of caring for two small children and an elderly father with dementia presents the perfect scenario for setting up the safety net of a writer’s contract.

Though still a work in progress as of this writing, much of this contract will be based on a past exercise of developing what my program calls a “Writer’s Path.” This is a vision board of sorts, with sticky notes and images culled from websites and good old-fashioned magazines. When I created it this past fall, I surprised myself by firmly gluing the pieces down on a large, white posterboard to create a tentative map of writing waystations and destinations. Although I knew I could always buy a new posterboard and reprint the images, the process of making this Writer’s Path still felt like a bigger psychological commitment than I expected to make at the time. I found the result visually pleasing, and the project left me with a feeling of accomplishment, but somehow it still felt more like a playful creative activity than a promise to honor.

I’m hopeful that the writer’s self-contract will provide me with a more formal “performance agreement.” Performance agreements are often used to get the best out of people working for us (or for others to get the best out of us), so why not apply the same method to get the best out of ourselves? The elements are straightforward enough: identify goal(s), write out the steps to achieve the goals, set deadlines, build in milestones along with associated rewards or penalties, and include a clause for revisiting/reworking the terms of the contract itself as you move forward.

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

— Jodi Picoult

Of course, the devil is in the details. My Writer’s Path board prompts me to wrangle with lots of lofty wish-list components: logistics for a trip to Ireland for a writing workshop; investing time and emotional energy in finding a new community of writing and reading partners; the heavy work of revisiting my thesis; pursuing publication possibilities; and taking the big leap of faith both to state and to believe “I am a writer.” Without a doubt, though they shift between waystation or destination status depending on the day, all of these are authentic aspirations. But in the interest of keeping things simple, my initial contract will be this: just write—every day. Something. Anything. Long run-on sentences. Short, choppy free-association thoughts. Gibberish. Favorite song lyrics. Retyped inspirational quotes.

With a nod to Goldilocks trying to find the perfect porridge, chair, and bed, I admit I’ve often faltered upon setting the unrealistic expectation that the words on the page should only land when they present themselves as the “just right” words from outset. Rather than try and fail, it sometimes becomes habit simply not to try at all. But in the words of American novelist Jodi Picoult, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

I take inspiration from Modern Memoirs’ clients who have clearly already contracted with themselves to “just write,” and who have then entrusted the staff here to help them publish the beautiful books they’ve envisioned. The range of projects in the company’s library is truly impressive, and I have enjoyed learning about current projects underway during my internship. I hope that readers of this post will be inspired to join these writers, and me, in continuing on the Writer’s Path, wherever it may lead.

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