Jan 10, 2023 – This is a novel about my womens’ matrilineal line. I traced it as far back as I could following the clues as to who was whose mother. I was able to trace back as far as the late 900s, and that alone was amazing. Thankfully, my family was very supportive to the Roman Catholic church as the clergy were excellent record keepers. Before that time period, the mother’s or wife’s name was not included. From that point further back, since in those days most people rarely travelled further than about 36 miles from their place of birth, I decided to claim that land as my xx-grandmother. This is a story about how my mother, my grandmother, her mother, and her mother, and so on, lived and what shaped them. It also shows how mothers influenced the next generation with the choices made.

Why did I start this novel? Because I was so broken-hearted by one of my children I swore that I died for a moment in grief. Now I know that one can truly die of a broken heart, but at the same moment I decided to live. I forced my next breath and held my head high. I wanted to know if such matrilineal rejection was hereditary. I want to break the cycle as I now recognize I most likely did the same to my mother. I do not want this happening to my grandchildren and their children. Did we do this to each other because it was modelled for us? I wanted to discover the psychology behind it, if it was a curse only my family suffered as each of us had our difficult stories about our mothers, or was it a natural part of the human condition? I decided to discover what my mother and her mother and my grandmother and her mother and so on suffered and were challenged with. I then discovered that their stories were buried deeper than anticipated. If I was lucky I got a line or two about their lives digging between dusty pages or catching a glimpse of their name among one million google pages as a drop of reference which was included when mentioning their husbands. My intentions were not to be realized easily. Admittedly, I delighted in the fact that my women ancestors were occasionally mentioned in movies and books, not just genealogy family trees as a dangling leaf – so and so; wife to…mother of…. My women folk were so much more in my eyes.

Still, I researched my ancestor’s country, time, culture, global events that affected them, societal rules, and everything else that could affect them. In some cases there were stories about their husbands or other men kin so I was able to piece together something that was probable. What I will claim is that this is historical fiction. There are many facts, but where the facts fail to support my ancestors, I fill in with workable imaginative glue.

I am sharing this chapter by chapter so that you may be my editors and my beta readers. I also realize that I may not be writing this according to the traditional view of novel writing, especially where the end of the chapter is supposed to leave you with a cliff hanger as to how that person wiggled out of a dilemma. Instead, each chapter is about a generation of my then matrilineal xx-grandmother. I am starting with as far back in the past as possible, out of respect to those living today. There are so many generations but be warned this book will not end with my current daughters adult lives or my mother – they are still alive and deserve privacy. This is a work in progress – I don’t know where it will end. But, hopefully, my readers will ask themselves, “So how did the next generation turn out?” or for my fellow genealogists who share my family links, “Oh, this is a story about my xx-grandmother!” lf you think we are related, look up some of the facts that I share. You’d be amazed! And for those who are a friendly reader – I thank you (as I do all of you) for your time, your comments, and mostly your support.

Susan A. M. Grant-Suttie