How to Write a Book About Your Family History 

For the past few years, my friend (and coeval) HB has been thinking about writing down his family’s story.

His parents and many of his uncles and aunts were holocaust survivors. He began collecting information and photos and clippings about them several decades ago. I’ve seen a smattering of his collection. It’s impressive. Daunting. Inspiring.

Several years after he began his research, I started digging into my (and K’s) family history. My sister D did much of the initial research, interviewing some of the relatives. I hired a young writer to follow up on D’s work. I even traveled to Ireland to meet some of my cousins on my mother’s side.

Worth noting if you do this: Your European (or whatever) family has probably NOT been breathlessly waiting for their American cousins to visit them all these years. You may get the chilly reception I got from my second cousin (once removed) when I tracked him down.

Act One, Scene One: Hero is knocking on a thick wooden door, the front entrance of a thatched-roof house on a hill overlooking the bogs.

Hero: Hi! Are you John Curran?

John Curran (eyebrows furrowed): Yes, that would be me.

Hero (huge smile): Fantastic! I’m Mark Ford, your long-lost cousin from America!

John Curran: So?

The Ford/ Fitzgerald family history is rich with names, birth dates, marriage certificates, and death notices of hundreds of descendants. There are some details as to locations and occupations. Even some wonderful stories. But those stories don’t compare to what HB has compiled. So I wasn’t surprised to get an email from him recently, telling me that he was determined to put all that he’s gathered into a book of some kind.

“I’ve decided I should go ahead write it down,” he said. “But I have this tremendous blockage of even starting to put it into words. My wife tells me I shouldn’t try to think it through before I begin. She says I should just start writing one story or profile and go from there. But I lack the confidence to do justice to the information. I also know that it will be lost if I do not. Any suggestions?”

I told him that I thought his wife’s advice was very good. “Since you are not an experienced writer and/ or biographer,” I said, “it’s best NOT to try to plan it all out in the beginning, however tempting that might feel. That’s just a subconscious tactic for putting it off until it’s too late. It’s better to do exactly what she says. Start with one person or one story, write it down, and then move on from there. However, if I were in your shoes (no writing experience and still busy with my life), I’d begin by hiring a genealogist to help put together the family tree. It’s not difficult if you have enough information, which I think you do. And when that’s complete, I would hire a professional biographer/ ghostwriter and work with him or her to turn that tree into a family history.”

For anyone reading this who would like to do some genealogical research on their own, here’s some information to get you started:

The difference between genealogy and family history 

Genealogy is the study of family ancestors with pertinent data such as birth, marriage, and death dates. Family history is an in-depth study of a family lineage with greater emphasize on and clarification of each ancestor’s life story.

The basic process  

Start by going back to your grandparents (four individuals), your great grandparents (eight individuals), and then your great, great grandparents (16 individuals). Going back to your great, great grandparents would place their birth lineage to the 1820 to1830 timeframe. Go back another hundred years to the 1730s and you have your great-great-great-great great grandparents. And they alone number 128 people. Which means there are many individuals to track and locate information about to create a full family history.

The role of DNA testing 

From the NYT: “In America, the question of ‘Where am I from?’ usually means, ‘Where did my family live before they arrived/ were forcibly shipped to America?’ Recently, there’s been a push to answer that question through DNA tests, which claim they can tell us exactly what percentage Norwegian or Nigerian we are. But there are catches. The tests can compromise our privacy, with the possibility that our genetic information could be sold to third parties without our knowledge. And they don’t truly reveal our origins so much as reveal who has similar DNA right now. Also, and perhaps more important: Culture does not come from DNA. It comes from lived experience, traditions, and stories passed down from actual people who shape our perceptions of the world.” To read the full NYT article, click here.

New resources, services, and options are added regularly on popular genealogy sites, including FamilySearch.org, a very large and very helpful free site. Also check out Ancestry.com and Archives.com.

My Three Favorite Pleasures

There was a time, when I was young, that I thought the only sensible objective in life should be to get the best ratio possible between pleasure and pain. Put more simply: to avoid everything that was difficult or even uncomfortable, while spending the maximum amount of time having “fun.”

But when boys become men, as St. Paul famously said, they must put away childish things. In my case, it was the pursuit of hedonism.

Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. Over many years, I gradually recognized that those things I thought would give me maximum pleasure (more money, more TV time, newer toys, nicer things) had surprisingly short shelf lives. And as I grew older and fell into doing – under mandates – those things that, as a child, I was trying to avoid (work and school, mostly), I discovered activities that gave me better and longer lasting pleasure.

In my twenties and thirties, I indulged in the working and learning experiences I enjoyed, while also seeking the more standard pleasures. But I noticed that if I spent too much time indulging in those (mostly social) pleasures, the good I got from them lessened – i.e., there was a point of diminishing returns.

Sometime in my forties, I began to become aware of the many ironies of life, including the fact that it is almost impossible to have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure. The more you chase after it, the farther it moves ahead of you.

I’m not making an argument for asceticism. I still believe that it makes good sense to strive for a life that is more pleasurable than painful. I’m merely saying that once I realized that (a) I couldn’t have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure, and (b) lots of things that I used to think of as difficult and/or painful could be very pleasurable indeed, I was able to look at this ratio from the perspective of my actual experience, rather than the images of pleasure manufactured to sell things.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. At least 20 years. I’ve written about it, too, in books and essays, in which I sometimes tried to categorize the types of pleasure in terms of quality, durability, and so on. And that’s all been helpful – to me, if not to my readers.

Then, about a year ago, I was looking over some of those books and essays, trying to find a common thread. And I think I did. For me, there have always been three – and only three – good and worthy pleasures. They are:

* Working towards an objective I value.

* Learning about a subject I think is important.

* Sharing my knowledge and the fruits of my labor.

That’s it. Three. Working. Learning. And sharing.

Working 

“We were created for meaningful work, and one of life’s greatest pleasures is the satisfaction of a job well done.” – John C. Maxwell

I discovered the pleasure I get from working before I understood that what I was doing was working. As a boy and through my teenage years, I enjoyed the normal boyish pastimes like playing sandlot football and sneaking into movie theaters. But my greatest pleasure came from working alone in the basement of my house, building miniature towns, choreographing war scenes with little plastic soldiers, and building real structures out of plywood to serve as forts and hideaways or as hospitals for injured birds and frogs and insects.

I also loved to start clubs. As an 11-year-old, I created the He-Man-Women-Haters club. In high school, I was president of a group of troublemakers in the guise of a fraternity.

Looking back on those activities, and comparing them to the things I did “for fun,” I see now that I preferred the building and organizing because they mattered to me in a way that playing sandlot football never could.

That’s still true today. I tried to retire three times in the last 30 years, and went back to work each time because I missed the deep and lasting pleasure of working on the many things I used to do that I truly cared about.

Working on things that I value. That was and still is key. (That’s why I write this blog.)

Learning 

“The greatest pleasure is obtained by improving.” – Ben Hogan

 I enjoyed school through fourth grade, but not again until I was in college. And even then, I didn’t always enjoy my classes. In retrospect, I can see that my favorites were those that I felt would somehow make me a more valuable person. And by valuable, I don’t mean financially valuable – knowing things or having skills that would earn me big money sometime in the future. Literature, anthropology, history, etc. were the kind of subjects that were valued in the house I grew up in. I think that’s why I got so much pleasure out of studying them.

I recognize how helpful it would be if I knew more about technical things. Like how to reset my watch. Or how to increase the bandwidth (or whatever it is) of my WiFi when I’m on important Zoom calls. And I’ve tried. I really have. But I just can’t persuade the judge in the corner of my brain that knowing these sorts of things will make me a more valuable person.

Sharing 

“A writer’s greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too.” – Andy Rooney

I was talking to a friend last week about this little theory. He understood the pleasure I get from working on and learning about things I value. But he questioned me about the sharing. Sharing, he felt, is really just an obligation. A responsibility. Something you do out of a sense of duty, not as a potential source of pleasure.

“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that sharing what I have, whether it’s my house, my toys, or my money, is probably the truest pleasure I get. And it can be expressed in so many ways. In fact, when I first sat down to write this essay, I had a fourth activity on my list of good and worthy pleasures: teaching. But after thinking about it for five minutes, I realized that the reason I like teaching is because it is a form of sharing.”

I don’t know how to categorize what I’ve just written. Is it a manifesto? A sermon?

It doesn’t feel like that to me. I swear. It feels like sharing!

The August 23 Debate: Two Perspectives

I didn’t get to watch the debate, but I watched several dozen clips and a half-dozen retrospective reviews. This one from The Dispatch highlighted something that so many people on both sides of the aisle don’t want to accept:

On Trump’s Indictments, There Was No Debate 

“When the Fox News broadcast returned from commercial, co-anchor Bret Baier asked for a show of hands: Who onstage would still support Trump as the GOP nominee if he is convicted of a crime? All the candidates, save former Govs. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, raised their hands.

“Most, when given the opportunity to explain themselves, went after the ‘weaponization’ of the Justice Department and ‘political’ prosecutions. None of the remaining candidates made any arguments that the charges against Trump in any of the four jurisdictions where he’s been indicted disqualify the former president, and Vivek Ramaswamy even challenged his rivals to follow his lead and commit to pardoning Trump if elected president. (Mike Pence was not amused.)

“It was a remarkable collective decision by the field not to use the frontrunner’s chief vulnerability against him. It reflects the broad conventional wisdom, which GOP strategists working for these campaigns espouse, that loyalty to Trump is itself a litmus test for primary voters.”

You can read the full review here.

And for another perspective, there’s this from Olivia Reingold in The Free Press.

I think both pieces made good points. But the elephant in the room – the fact that none of Trump’s adversaries (Republicans and Democrats) don’ t want to acknowledge – is that the indictments haven’t worked as planned. If anything, they have expanded Trump’s lead, and nobody knows what to do about that.

The Growing Problem of Homelessness in the US

The US experienced an astonishingly large increase in homelessness in 2022. It went up a record-breaking 11%, That’s the highest it’s been since 2019, when the increase was a comparatively modest 2.7%.

Some politicians and government officials are blaming it on the rising cost of housing and increase in evictions. That could be a factor, but it can’t possibly be the main cause. All the research I’ve seen indicates that somewhere between 60% and 80% of the homeless are drug-addicted and/or mentally disturbed. Moving them into shelters is at best a temporary solution because so many of them prefer to live in the streets. (And say so, when asked.)

My view: The homeless problem will never be solved until two things happen.

1. We recognize that homelessness is not an economic problem but a mental health and addiction problem.
2. We understand that homelessness is a very substantial, very profitable, multibillion-dollar industry, and that few people in that industry want to see the problem solved.

Click here.

The Economics of Illegal Immigration

Since Trump first promised to build a wall, immigration into the US via our southern border has become a costly and amazingly stupid political slugfest.

First, there were Trump’s “kids in cages.”

After Biden took over, it was “even more kids in cages.”

Then it was Biden’s overnight deliveries of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens to towns and cities (especially Republican-run cities) all over the country.

Then it was border-state governors shipping tens of thousands of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard and other “sanctuary” cities.

Then it was the good people of the Vineyard quickly rounding up and incarcerating the immigrants.

Then it was the mayors of “sanctuary” cities publicly complaining about the cost of taking care of the sanctuary seekers flooding into their jurisdictions.

And now we have the Biden administration, apparently in response to complaints from

Democrat mayors, claiming to have drastically slowed the inflow by reinstating some of the programs initiated under Trump.

If this has worked – if there has been a significant drop in the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US – it hasn’t yet shown up in the published data.

According to figures compiled at Syracuse University, about 670,000 immigrants were let into the US in the first six months of this year. If the Biden administration has indeed slowed the inflow, we will be able to measure that by looking at year-end numbers. (How much less than 1.3 million undocumented aliens had been let in.)

NYC’s Mayor Adams isn’t happy. About 67,000 (10%) of the 670,000 undocumented aliens that came into the country in the first six months of 2023 ended up in his city. Its population, at 8.2 million, is only about 2.5% of America’s total population. And Adams doesn’t think it’s fair for them to have to take 10% of the burden.

About 90,000 migrants have settled in NYC since 2022, according to the Mayor’s Office, with 57,200 of them living in about 200 shelters. So, Adams is asking for help. Specifically, he’s asked for $300 million from FEMA to help cover the full cost of the crisis, which is projected to be $4.2 billion.

$4.2 billion? That sounds like a lot. But is it really? For a city with 8.2 million inhabitants, half of whom are taxpayers?

Let’s see: $4.2 billion divided by about 60,000 is about $70,000 per immigrant. And $4.2 billion divided by 4.1 million is about $1,100 per taxpayer. Did I do that right? Only $1,100 per taxpayer? What is Adams complaining about?

In any case, the whole mess is a good thing from Mexico’s perspective. Dollars sent to Mexican citizens from Mexicans living in the US have been an important part of Mexico’s GDP for a long time. And thanks to the two years of easy entry on the border, revenues from Mexicans in the US to friends and family members in Mexico increased from $33.5 billion in 2018 to $60 billion in 2023. Anyone want to call immigration a new industry? Click here.

Shameless Self-Promotion!

K and I are spending a quiet week at our place in Rancho Santana after a very busy week in Cancun with 40+ members of our extended family. I mentioned on Aug. 11 that we call these biannual events Cousin Camps because, when we started them, about 30 years ago, they were meant less to reunite our coevals but to give our children and nieces and nephews the chance to develop close bonds – something my childhood lacked.

Cancun was a blast, a party. Rancho Santana is a recovery zone – quiet, peaceful, luxurious.

J, my editor, is growing impatient with my continued pieces about Rancho Santana. She sees them as shameless plugs, and perhaps they are. But I have no personal ambition to sell any more property here. I write about this place because when I come down here, I continue to be blown away by it.

This is especially relevant for me now because a small group of property owners have objected to the resort’s increased fees. They are doing their best to get us to lower fees across the board or make exemptions for them. That’s not going to happen. Not only because the increase was correctly done, but because the higher fees are still much lower than they would be in any other resort of this quality anywhere in the world.

About ten years ago, when I was running Rancho Santana, it was, at best, a 3-star resort. But then two of my partners took over the management and initiated a master plan to turn it into what it is today: an award-winning 5-star resort.

It cost the development partners tens of millions more dollars than the tens of millions we had already invested. And while the investment hasn’t been paid back yet, we are more than happy with the result. We now have one of the 100 best resort hotels in the world, and probably the number one resort in Central America.

Here are a few reasons why:

* The property is vast at 2,800 acres. (It takes about 20 minutes to drive through.) And it is beautiful, consisting of hills and valleys, cliffs and beaches, forests and flatland, and two rivers, one on either end.

* The property has five beaches, including a tree-shaded cove, a beach that stretches out from a 30-foot sand dune, two long beaches that are perfect for surfing, and one, perhaps the prettiest one, that you cannot find without a guide. It’s called Escondido (Hidden) Beach.

* Rancho Santana offers visitors a range of housing options – from 18 ocean-view rooms in an elegant seaside inn at the heart of the community, to 60 luxury apartments, also looking at the sea, to several dozen beautifully decorated private residences with million-dollar views.

* The resort offers every sort of recreational activity one could hope for, including horseback, hiking, and mountain bike trails; tennis and pickleball courts; ocean swimming, surfing, and snorkeling; boating and fishing; nature walks; yoga on top of a hill overlooking a forest and onto the beach; a 5-star spa; bocce ball, horseshoe, and cornhole courts by the main pool and outdoor bar.

Residents and guests can also use the sports center at FunLimón, which includes a soccer field, a baseball field, a full court basketball facility, a fully equipped gym, and a martial arts dojo.

* The maintenance of the resort is full-service, fast, and invisible. Everything is taken care of automatically and discreetly. You rarely run into workers, and yet they are working day and night. (In this respect, Rancho Santana remind me of Disneyland!)

* Rancho Santana has three restaurants – formal dining at the Club House, a tapas restaurant atop a beautiful small cove, and a taqueria on the family-oriented beach at its southern border. If you prefer to eat at home, you can order meals from the main restaurant, or you can purchase food and drinks at the “tienda,” which is also stocked with everything else you could possibly need.

All of these amenities are of a quality you’d expect from a Four Seasons Resort in Switzerland or Paris. In addition, Rancho Santana offers something in abundance that is not as prevalent in other 5-star resorts. I’m talking about the demeanor of the staff. Nicaraguans are, by nature and/or culture, warm and welcoming.

What else?

Did I mention that Rancho Santana is safe? Very safe. It is located in the midst of a string of small beachside towns and hamlets that are as safe as any small town in the US. Plus, the resort has a sophisticated electronic security system, as well as dozens of guards and security personnel that, like the maintenance folks that keep everything functioning smoothly, seem to do their jobs invisibly.

K and I have been to dozens of 5-star vacation resorts all over the world, but I think Rancho Santana must be the best. As I said, every time I come here, I am blown away by how great this place is. How big. How beautiful. How easy, friendly, luxurious, and safe. And the cost – whether you are a guest or a property owner – is cheap compared to any resort that is remotely as good.

For more information about Rancho Santana, click here.

Cousin Camp, 2023

I’m writing this at Club Med in Cancun, Mexico, where our extended family of 46 (including spouses) has gathered for our latest once-every-two-years “Cousin Camp.”

Here’s a photo of some of us climbing a nearby ruin:

We’ve been holding these family reunions for 30 years. Our first Cousin Camp was in Martha’s Vineyard. We (K’s and my siblings) were in our late 30s/ early 40s and our children were quite young. Today, it is our children that are in their late 30s/ early 40s and our grandchildren that are the young ones.

The original idea of having periodic family reunions was suggested to me by my brother-in-law. I liked it immediately because I had always rued the fact that I never knew my cousins. They all lived in Colorado, and traveling to Colorado was very much out of my parents’ budget (with 10 mouths to feed on an income of $14,000). So, my hope was that our kids and their cousins could grow up knowing one another, even if they lived in different locations.

The usual time slot for Cousin Camp is the second week of August. Since the first one on Martha’s Vineyard, it’s been held at a Club Med in Colorado, on a cruise ship to Alaska, in one of the Disney villages in Orlando, on a boat in Croatia, and at Rancho Santana in Nicaragua (twice). We’ve also been on two adventure trips – one in Canada and another in the Rocky Mountains.

The trips themselves have been interesting and enjoyable. But the best thing about these reunions is the fulfillment of the original idea. Our children have close and comfortable relationships with 15 or so cousins. They have the kind of relaxed and intimate friendships that come only when people are able to grow up together.

I have done all sorts of things in my life. And I’ve accomplished all sorts of personal goals. But there is nothing I’ve done that gives me more satisfaction than watching the casual affection these young people have for one another.

Thinking of Getting Your Book Published? Don’t Ask Me! 

At long last, you’ve finished that book you’ve been meaning to write for the last 15 years. Congratulations! You have accomplished something that only one in a hundred do. You have a right to be proud of yourself. And you are excited about the next step: finding a publisher for it.

It feels like once every month I get a request from a friend, acquaintance, or reader who, knowing I’m in the publishing business, presumes I can help him or her get a manuscript published.

As a courtesy and with a sprig of curiosity, I agree to review the manuscript. But even as I make this offer, I’m 99.9% certain I won’t be able to help. That’s because few people understand how traditional book publishing works. And because of that, they have completely unrealistic expectations. Also – and this is something I will say only if I think it will help – the manuscript is probably not good enough for publication.

After reviewing a manuscript last week, I replied with a more definitive than usual “no” – a longer-than-normal explanation of why, and a suggested remedy. I’m reprinting it here for anyone reading this who has a book and is looking for a publisher.

“You have put a fair amount of work into writing this. And I can see from your CV that you are very interested in and engaged with self-improvement strategies. So I don’t want to waste your time by encouraging you to try to get this published by a traditional publisher.

“To understand why, you need to understand how that industry works. Here are some useful facts…

“Publishers aren’t hungry to publish new writers. That’s because they know that 95% of books published by new writers in America will sell, at best, just a few hundred copies.

“Even with the new, less-expensive technology for typesetting and printing books, the investment in producing a new book is usually more than $5,000. If 95 out of 100 new books fail so miserably, that means that each of the five books that do make money must net at least $100,000.

“The first book that I wrote that was published traditionally (by John Wiley & Sons) sold somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 copies. That put it on the NYT bestseller list for a week or two. But it hardly made me a superstar with John Wiley.

“Authors that can sell at those levels are certainly appreciated by conventional publishers. But they are hardly cherished. The combined dollars they bring in every year may be enough to pay for the printing of the 95 books that fail. But they are not enough to pay for the salaries of their employees, among other costs, let alone provide profits for their shareholders.

“All that money is covered by the real bestselling authors. Writers like J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and John Grisham, who have sold 500 million, 450 million, and 300 million books, respectively.

“Think about that. Five hundred million books sold at an average of $15 a book is $7.5 billion!

“What does this mean for an aspiring author like you?

“It means that, even if they like your book, there is a 95% chance that it will be a big, fat money loser. But it will cost the publishing company – even taking advantage of the new printing technology – between $5,000 and $10,000. Because they know this to be true, all the large publishers have dozens of recent college graduates working for them whose sole job is to give such manuscripts a quick scan and then send out a ‘sorry’ note.

“There are some exceptions. If, for example, the author is a celebrity. If the author is a well-known politician. If the author or the subject of the book is temporarily famous for committing mass murder. Or if the author is a social media ‘influencer’ with at least a million subscribers.

“When John Wiley agreed to publish my book, Automatic Wealth, I was writing and publishing a blog (Early to Rise) that had 900,000 subscribers. Today, with considerably fewer (but much higher quality) readers, any manuscript I sent them would be quickly ‘handled’ by one of their recent college grads.

“Which is to say, my advice is to forget about finding a conventional publisher for the moment. You should do what I did to get Automatic Wealth on the bestseller list: Build an audience.

“You can do that by starting a blog or a YouTube channel. Then work very hard on that. Work on improving the content – crafting ideas that are unique and uniquely marketable. Work on perfecting the delivery and the format to get your open-and-read rates to bestselling standards. And work on building your subscriber base until it reaches 10,000 and then 50,000, and eventually… who knows?

“If you hit a million subscribers, you will have a good chance of finding a conventional publisher to publish and promote your book. But don’t expect a huge signing bonus. As an unproven author (notwithstanding your big fan base), you’ll be lucky to get $20,000 plus a conventional royalty of 4% to 7% of sales.

“Or, at that point, you can publish the book yourself and sell it directly to your fans. If you do it that way, you will keep between 60% and 80% of the revenues (depending on whether the book is printed or digital).”

Speaking of selling the books you write, readers of this blog can order a copy of my book, Automatic Wealth, directly from us. List price is $24.95. But for you, the price is $15 (which includes free shipping).

To order your copy:

* Send a check for $15.

* Make the check payable to Cap & Bells Press, LLC. (No cash, please.)

* Include your name and mailing address and mail it to:

Cap & Bells Press

Attn: GKoo

290 SE 2nd Avenue

Delray Beach, FL 33444