I recently read a wonderful article from Jane Austen’s Niece titled:
“Fact or Fiction: Was Tom Lefroy Really the Love of Jane Austen’s Life?”
And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, not only because it touches on Jane Austen, but because it explores something I’m endlessly drawn to:
the way history lives inside family memory.
The article looks at the long-held story of Tom Lefroy as Jane Austen’s great youthful romance, and it gently asks what we can truly know. What is supported by letters? What has been passed down through family lore? Where does truth end and legend begin?
And that question, the space between what is documented and what is only whispered through generations, is exactly where my heart always goes.
Because this is what genealogy is, in many ways.
It’s names on paper, yes, but it’s also the ache of wondering:
Who were they, really?
What did they love?
What did they lose?
What did they survive?
And as a debut author, I think that’s part of why pieces like this resonate with me so much.
I’ve always believed in the old advice: write what you know.
For me, that doesn’t always mean writing my exact life on the page, but writing from lived emotion.
When I create characters, whether they are entirely fictional or inspired by real history, I try to step into their place. I try to imagine what it felt like to be them. What they feared, hoped for, carried in silence.
That is what draws me to genealogy and historical truth in the first place, not just the facts, but the humanity underneath.
Right now, I’m currently writing my Regency romance series, Vows of the Heart, six vows, six love stories, set in the world of Regency England and inspired by my deep love of Jane Austen.
But at the same time, I’m also researching something very different, and very personal.
I’m doing intense research into my own ancestry, particularly the Cajuns of Louisiana and Le Grand Dérangement, The Great Upheaval, the forced displacement of the Acadian people in the 1700s.
One of my great (many-times) grandmothers was an Acadian woman displaced during that devastation, and her story has been quietly inspiring a future historical romance project of my own.
That work is laying the foundation for a new series called Daughters of Exile, centered on three sisters during Le Grand Dérangement, rooted in what my ancestor and so many women like her may have experienced: separation, endurance, faith, longing, and the fragile hope of building a life again in an unfamiliar land.
Those books may still be a few years away, simply because the research matters so much to me, but reading pieces like this reminds me why I love this work.
Whether it’s Jane Austen’s youthful flirtation or an Acadian grandmother’s forced journey south, history is never just dates.
It is people.
And sometimes the stories we inherit are the ones that shape what we’re called to write.
If you’d like to read the article, I highly recommend it:
Fact or Fiction: Was Tom Lefroy Really the Love of Jane Austen’s Life?
https://open.substack.com/pub/janeaustensniece/p/fact-or-fiction-was-tom-lefroy-really
***Pictured Catherine Skehan my second great grandmother. It is quite a treasured photo because of the broach she is wearing is an image of her late husband my second great grandfather Thomas Archer.