What to Do When You Don’t Have Enough Information about a Fascinating Letter But Still Want to Use it in a Story

Civil War Letter (source: familytree.com)

When researching family history, you might come across a letter that you find utterly fascinating. But you don’t know much, if anything, about the person who wrote it.

This sends you on a quest to find out more about the letter writer. You do a search. You find out some stuff, but not much. But you’d still like to “do something with it.”

After my talk on writing stories from family history at the National Genealogical Society’s conference, an audience me...