Tag: Wendy Nikel

Fantastic History #43: A Time Traveler’s Guide to Genealogy by Wendy Nikel

In today’s digital era, researching family history is easier than ever before. We can now access vital records, military records, and censuses from centuries past with a click of a button. We can find distant relations through analysis of our DNA. Through resources like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, Heritage Quest, and others, we can connect with others working to solve the same puzzles of our shared family trees. And with advances in technology and increased record digitization, finding out about your ancestors is likely to get even easier as time goes by.

Until someone invents time travel and messes it all up, that is.

One of my readers, upon hearing that my Place in Time series was getting a fourth book on October 29, suggested I put together a family tree to help them keep the characters straight, and I agreed that might be a useful diagram, considering the previous three time travel books spanned eight generations over a course of 222 years… and not necessarily in chronological order.

So, I started looking at different diagrams genealogists use to keep track of family history. My family has already done some research of our own lines (discovering among our ancestors a professional boxer, a convicted witch, a countess, a mayor, and two brothers who died in the Lady Elgin disaster), so I looked first to some of the trees we’ve used.

One common genealogical diagram is an ancestor chart, or pedigree. Whether presented horizontally or vertically, it starts with one person (usually the researcher themselves) and works backwards, showing their direct ancestors (parents, then grandparents, then great-grandparents, etc). Fan charts and circle charts are also other version of this type of tree, with the starting person in the center and their ancestors expanding outward. Sometimes, you’ll even see these in a bow tie shape, with a married couple in the center and the husband’s ancestors branching out on one side and the wife’s on the other. The advantage of these charts is that someone in the present-day can look back and see very clearly their direct ancestors. They’re usually quite clean, simple, and easy to read.

Another common type of genealogical diagram works from the top down, selecting one ancestor and then branching downward from them to show all their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc – one generation per line. This is generally called a descendants chart. They can be trickier than ancestor charts, because they include all the children of each person, which could be a lot of names, especially when you include remarriages and stepchildren. If each person in a generation marries and gives birth to even just three children, by the time you reach the fifth generation, you could be needing to make room for the names of 81 children and their spouses on a single line. As nice as it is to include siblings (who then become aunts and uncles and bear cousins to later generations), it’s easy to see how a chart like this could become unwieldy.

Both these basic chart types have one thing in common, though: it’s easy to tell the passage of time. Ancestor charts start at the present day and work backward into the past. Descendant charts start in the past and work toward the present. This is where it gets tricky for a time traveler… or those who choose to write about them.

In the case of the Place in Time series, for instance, the bottom generation belongs to Dr. Wells, despite him being older than the other characters in the books. Cassandra, despite being born in the 22nd century, gives birth to a child in the early 20th century. For this situation, a regular genealogical chart simply wouldn’t do.

I decided, therefore, to make use of the x-axis. While the y-axis still shows the generations as normal genealogical charts do, the x-axis shows the centuries that each of the characters lived in. (I did have to fudge the chart a bit to include Dodge, who is adopted into the family.) The blue box roughly shows their life span prior to time travel, with the lines continuing downward to the next generation at approximately the point in time when that child was born.

Someday in the future, if jumping up and down the timeline really becomes a feasible option, I imagine there will be many other people calling for these sorts of genealogical charts, and family trees will include much more complicated, tangled branches. (Just think of tree you’d have to make for the song “I’m My Own Grandpa”!) But for the time being, we’ll stick with our ancestor charts and descendant charts and be grateful that they only move chronologically in one simple, orderly direction.

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Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Nature: Futures, Podcastle, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with THE CONTINUUM, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit her website.

Fantastic History #31: A Time Traveler’s Guide to Train Travel by Wendy Nikel

From the first wooden-railed, horse-drawn tramroads built in England in 1594 to the futuristic bullet trains that speed past at over 160 miles per hour, train travel has played an important role in transportation throughout modern history.

While writing THE CASSANDRA COMPLEX, the third novella in my Place in Time series, I positioned my main character, Cass, on a train headed west, and I knew I’d have to do quite a bit of research into the train travel of the early 20th century in order to get those scenes right.

Fortunately, I live in a place where history was built on trains.

In 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met up at Promontory Summit, Utah, which today is a National Historic Park near where I live. The same year, a train station was built in Ogden, Utah, which is now the Utah State Railroad Museum. These two sites served well as starting points for my research into the history of train travel.

The Golden Spike National Historic Park, where the two pieces of the transcontinental railroad met, gives visitors a glimpse into the building of these railroad lines. In an era before the invention of heavy machinery that could lay hundreds of rails a day, each tie and rail had to be placed by hand and each spike manually hammered into place. During the construction of this railroad, a new record was set: 10 miles of track laid in one day. The vast, desolate landscape near Promontory really emphasizes what a huge effort it was to lay track after track across all the empty and undeveloped places of the late 19th century West.

Although my characters would be traveling to California by a different route nearly fifty years later, they’d still be passing through a lot of undeveloped wilderness on rails built, piece-by-piece, by human hands.

At the Utah State Railroad Museum, I was able to see up-close some of the train engines like those steam and diesel ones which would have pulled the California Limited, which was featured in my story. In 1914, this luxury train ran between Chicago and California, crossing Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona on the way to Los Angeles before traveling northward to San Francisco. It had luxury accommodations, including deluxe sleeping cars, drawing rooms, a smoking room, and a dining car run by the Fred Harvey Company, who had been serving train passengers in their roadhouses since 1876.

In addition to checking out these historical sites and museums, I was also fortunate enough to find a copy of the California Limited’s 1913-1914 brochure in the public domain, digitized by Google. Through this, I was able to not only see the setup and descriptions of the train cars but also the schedule of its route.

With specific details like this, along with what I’d observed myself at the museums and historical sites, I felt like I was traveling back to that time and place – a time when trains were not only the fastest, but also the most fashionable mode of transportation.