There are complex things going on in life but the historical record only shows the main events, births, deaths and marriages being the key resources that are tracked by family historians. When compiling my family history I didn’t understand why they changed their name from Stone to Radford. It was a puzzle that didn’t seem to have a resolution until I noticed that one of the siblings didn’t change their name but had spent his childhood in Victoria, only returning once he became an adult. This was the trigger event for the remaining siblings to change their name back to Radford.

I only discovered this by lining up all the events that I’d found for each sibling next to each other. In most family histories and even history articles the author writes about one person and tackles their life sequentially. It can be harder to see the connections between things this way. Certainly it was for me. It wasn’t until I put all the siblings in a spreadsheet with a column for each one and then listed the events down the rows in date order that the comparison of what was going on at the same time for each of them became clear. Charlie switching to using Radford on the birth certificates of his daughters suddenly lined up with Henry turning 21 and returning from the goldfields.

I didn’t intend to write a novel of this family history at that time but once I could see what was happening to all of them each year in an easy format it was a lot more possible to write a novel. Events in novels don’t just happen to one person, they happen to a whole family so for me, an analysis of events for multiple people that can be compared easily is an excellent first step to really understanding how historical people and events interacted with each other.