They say one should write what one knows. I’d known my family history stories since I was a child, so naturally, these stories have found their way into my writing. My Irish ancestor, Thomas Connolly, did go to the Alaskan Gold Rush in the Klondike with his brother, Cornelius, in 1895. Alas, they didn’t strike it rich, as Thomas Connolly in We Are Shadows did, but they did bring home enough to pay off their mortgages. Also, as far as I know, there was no family feud to estrange the family branches.

You’ll find even more family history stories in The Body In Brú na Bóinne, though those are even closer to home, generationally speaking.

Father Feen’s prompting to bring the baptismal register into the house, (in chapter eleven of We Are Shadows) is based on an incident I experienced while in the military with my husband in Belgium. I had just been given a new calling or job in the church to teach children. The bishop, laying his hands upon my head to give me a blessing and “setting apart” for that calling, stopped in his typical message of advice and counsel. He paused a moment then began again, “soon you will be receiving information on your family history that will bring you great joy.” I thought, “that’s interesting,” but then forgot about it until two weeks later when I received a letter in the mail.

It was from a parish priest in Quebec, whom I had written to earlier asking for information on my great-great-grandfather, his two wives and the nine children he had by each wife. Or so the family story went. He had written back that after a search of the parish registers, he could find nine children by the first wife, but only eight by the second. I chalked it up to inflated oral family history and thought no more about it. Then a short time after the bishop’s blessing, I got a second letter from this same parish priest. He had “felt prompted” to take another look at the register and was able to find a ninth child by the second wife. The information on that baptism followed.

So many pearls are in this story! First of all, for me was the awe that Heavenly Father knew this information was coming (for he had given the priest that prompting, after all), and wanted to share with me the excitement and joy which that news would bring. Second, the gratitude that my bishop was in tune with the Spirit and heard and spoke those words which were given to him. And third, that the parish priest followed the prompting and went back into the records for a more thorough search for that one entry.