Writing “Roots”
In 1976, a couple years after I got started in Genealogy, Alex Haley wrote a book called “Roots.” Soon this book was turned into the first Mini-Series on television. For a week in 1977, millions of viewers glued themselves to their televisions and a bowl of popcorn and watched this slave saga unfold from the jungles of Africa to the plantations of Virginia.
It was a smash hit! It spawned a sequel, it made Alex Haley famous overnight!
And it was all based on a flawed Genealogy, poor research techniques and plagiarism.
It was fiction.
Stunned are you?
Please reference this article http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alex_Haley for specifics on the life of Alex Haley. I have used that article as a source of information for the following two paragraphs of this article.
Well here is the short version of what happened with Roots. Alex Haley was a writer, there is no doubt about that. He was technically the son of Simon Haley and Bertha Palmer, though it was widely reported that an Aunt had come forward and declared that Alex was adopted.
Alex claimed in his book, that he was a direct descendent of Kunta Kinte. Research has determined that much of that was fabricated. On top of that, Haley was sued for using materials from a book called, “The African” for some of the key scenes and events depicted in “Roots.”
When I was first researching, “Roots” was one heck of an inspiration for me. I would declare loudly that my first book was going to be called “White Roots.” By the time I published that first book, much of the scandal around Haley had been made public, and I decided NOT to emulate someone and something that had so much bad associated with it. All that aside, the key word here is inspiration. I knew that I wanted to publish!
It took me until 1995, to self-publish my first book, “The Descendants of Christian and Margaret Sweitzer” and it took that long because I had several road blocks while finding information for the book. Why did I self publish? Because none of the publishers I contacted would even talk to me and those publishers in the Genealogy World who do Vanity style books, wanted far too large of an order for the number of copies I knew I could sell. (50 copies) So, I took my files to the local copy shop, printed everything out on high quality acid free paper and then took those resulting pages to a bindery to have them hard bound. Even at that, the cost was atrocious and I ended up having to charge $50.00 a book to cover my expenses.
My book was not in any way a novel like “Roots.” The base for the novel was a standard book printout from my Genealogy software, imported into Microsoft Word and Indexed. I added pictures, articles, pieces of census and other interesting items and when it was all done, it was 311 pages, included 188 individuals and covered 5 documented generations of my family.
I knew from the beginning I wanted to write and publish. I am a writer and have been a writer since High School. I was determined to be a writer whether anyone liked my “style” or not!
Publishing is not for everyone. It takes a lot of time and effort to compile, organize and make the resulting materials worth reading. Plus you run the risk of making someone mad. When I publish my family books, I include all generations including living individuals. I know that many of you will now scream Privacy!
Well, all I can say is that all births and deaths are public records and so is anything that has been previously published. Obituaries, Weddings, Engagements, et…) On living individuals, I am careful not to publish any embarrassing “private” information, though I probably have it in my files somewhere. In every case where living individuals participate and render data, I make it clear to them that “some day it will probably be published.” They have the right to Opt out. I have NEVER had anyone Opt Out.
I owe a debt to Alex Haley and I wrote him via his publishers and told him so. Whomever your inspiration is or was, I hope you gleen great results from that inspiration. I encourage everyone to write if they feel the urge, even if they end up self-publishing like I did or starting their own web site and blog. Those of you who can write and have that urge know what I mean. The rest of you will never know the thrill of seeing your writing in print and the knowledge that someone somewhere is reading it and hopefully gaining something from it.
My current project besides this new blog, is a “real” novel I hope to write about one of my uncles. The details of that project are written on the home page of Genealogyland. I am in the very early stages of that writing and am still gathering source materials. I’ve never written a “novel” and it is a totally new experience for me. One page at a time the story unfolds………
Leave a reply.
You must be logged in
log in
