Dialogue reveals the interaction

Dialogue makes a story come alive. It shows interaction between characters, is more realistic and gives the characters a personality.

Of course I wasn’t present when my ancestors spoke to each other. So how I can I know what they said to each other? I’ve got letters and postcards which give me a clue, or even a “direct quote”.

I also use ‘fictional quotes’ which I put in single quotation marks rather than double ones. My fictional quotes are based on what I thought they may have said given the situation and the social settings of the time.

The story “Jack and Glad are expecting…” is an example I’ve just written.

My tutor, Lynn Palermo, writes: “In family history writing, you are sanctioned to employ a certain amount of assumptions and conjecture for re-creating dialogue. Keep your dialogue simple when your knowledge of the conversation is narrow.  Keep your dialogue within the framework of the known facts of the event and the ancestors it involved.”