March 15, 2026
This is the fifth post in “The Research Behind the Story,” a six-part series exploring how award-winning historical fiction writers use travel and on-location research to create the novels we love.
Not every historical novelist walks into a famous archive and emerges with a Pulitzer Prize. Some of them start in a much more personal place — the stories their grandmothers told, the towns their families came from, the records that were never meant to be literature but that carry the weight of lived experience.
These writers face a particular kind of pressure. When your research isn’t ten banker’s boxes of academic notes but a handful of family stories and a few courthouse records, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing it wrong. Like you don’t have enough. Like the real historical fiction writers are the ones with fellowships and archival access, and you’re just someone with a story about your grandmother.
That feeling is worth pushing back against. Because some of the most powerful historical fiction being written today comes from exactly this kind of research — and it makes a compelling case for why heritage and genealogy travel is one of the most meaningful forms of research travel a writer can undertake.
In a 2024 essay for Esquire, Malaysian author Rani Manicka described the anxiety she felt as her debut historical novel, The Storm We Made, approached publication. Set in 1930s and 1940s colonized Malaysia, the novel tells the story of an unlikely female spy and the impact of her actions on her three children.
When readers and fellow writers asked about her research process, Manicka found herself terrified to answer honestly. “Did I scour old Malaysian newspapers, stain my fingers black?” she wrote. “Did I lock myself up studying ancient and fragile tapes to understand what people wore at the time? Did I interview thousands of survivors?”
The answer was no. Her research came primarily from family memory — from stories passed down through generations, from the kind of knowledge that doesn’t come with a bibliography. And she felt like an imposter for it, “crushed by the specificity of their questions, terrified to confront the very simple truth.”
Manicka’s essay argues, beautifully, that family memory is a legitimate form of historical research — that “beyond the textbooks, there’s a whole world of family stories that have not yet become history. They deserve their place in fiction, too.”
She’s right. And she’s not alone.
Mary Ruth Barnes’s novel Where Birds Land began not in a library but at the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma, where she found folders of loose documents about her ancestors — transcripts of interviews conducted by the Dawes Commissioners, who determined who qualified as Indian for land allotment purposes.
The documents were powerful, but they weren’t enough. So Barnes traveled. She and her husband drove to Hickory Creek, found Mountain Lake, walked the land that had been allotted to her ancestors. “It was definitely a piece of land that could not take care of crops or feed cattle and horses,” she wrote. That physical understanding — the reality of what the land could and couldn’t support — told her something no transcript could.
Then she went to the court clerk’s office in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and discovered something that changed the direction of her novel: records showing that when her ancestor Ella sold her allotment, a middleman purchased it and resold it within days to another man for one dollar. The fraud was obvious. “From that moment,” Barnes wrote, “my writing flourished with a grit of anger.”
That’s a sequence worth paying attention to: family stories led to documents, documents led to travel, travel led to discovery, and discovery led to the emotional core of the novel. Each step was necessary. None of them alone would have been enough.
I understand this kind of research intimately, because it’s the research I’m doing for my own novel.
My grandmother grew up in the mill villages of 1930s Knoxville, Tennessee. I’ve spent years reading about the textile industry, studying census records, combing through newspaper archives, and collecting oral histories. I thought I understood her world.
Then I went to Knoxville.
The streets were narrower than I’d imagined. The hills were steeper. The creek that ran through the village wasn’t the gentle stream I’d been picturing — it was a ditch between houses that were closer together than any map had suggested. The scale of everything was different. The closeness of the houses explained something about community and surveillance and solidarity that I’d been trying to write but hadn’t fully grasped. The steepness of the hills explained something about exhaustion, about the physical toll of a life spent walking between a mill and a house on a grade.
I rewrote three chapters when I got home. Not because the facts were wrong, but because the feeling was. I’d been writing a place I’d imagined. After the visit, I was writing a place I knew.
The things I found there weren’t in any archive. They were in the light, the terrain, the distance between things. They were the unmappable details — the ones you can only collect in person.
The writers in this series — Doerr, Chevalier, Gregory, Brooks — are all, in a sense, heritage travelers. They’re going to places that belong to other people’s pasts, trying to understand what life felt like in a time and place they didn’t experience firsthand.
Heritage and genealogy travelers are doing the same thing, but with a more personal stake. The places they visit aren’t abstract historical settings — they’re the towns their grandparents left, the churches where their families worshipped, the landscapes that shaped the people who shaped them.
This kind of travel serves writers in the same way that Doerr’s visit to Saint-Malo served him, or that Brooks’s discovery of Eyam served her. It provides the sensory, emotional, and spatial understanding that turns research into story. But it also does something additional: it connects the writer to a lineage of experience that gives the fiction its moral weight.
When Barnes stood on that land in Oklahoma and understood that it couldn’t support crops, she wasn’t just collecting a scenic detail. She was understanding, in her body, what had been done to her family. When I walked the streets of my grandmother’s mill village, I wasn’t just noting the architecture. I was feeling the weight of a life I’d only known through stories.
This is what heritage travel gives a writer that no other kind of research can: a personal reckoning with the past. And that reckoning, when it makes it onto the page, is what makes historical fiction feel not just accurate but true.
Heritage research travel looks different from the kind of literary pilgrimage we discussed in earlier posts. You’re not visiting a famous cathedral or a Pulitzer Prize-winning setting. You might be visiting a small town that no one outside your family has heard of, looking for records in a county courthouse, walking streets that have changed beyond recognition.
This kind of travel benefits enormously from advance planning. A few things that make the difference:
Know what you’re looking for before you go. Census records, land deeds, church registers, newspaper archives — identify which records exist and where they’re held. Some are digitized; many aren’t. A wasted day at a closed archive is a day you can’t get back.
Build local contacts. County historians, genealogical societies, local librarians, and church offices are often the gatekeepers to information that isn’t online. Reaching out before your trip can open doors that would otherwise stay closed.
Leave room for surprise. Barnes didn’t know she’d find evidence of fraud in the Ardmore court records. I didn’t know the streets would be narrower than I’d imagined. The most important discoveries on a heritage trip are often the ones you didn’t plan for. Build unstructured time into your itinerary.
Document everything. Photographs, voice memos, handwritten notes — capture as much as you can while you’re there. The details that seem obvious in the moment are the ones you’ll struggle to recall six months later when you’re writing.
Don’t underestimate domestic destinations. Heritage research travel doesn’t require a passport. Some of the most meaningful research trips are drives to the next state — to the town your family left, the cemetery where your great-grandparents are buried, the courthouse where the records are kept. The proximity of a place doesn’t diminish its power.
Next in the series: “What Research Travel Actually Looks Like (And How to Plan Yours)” — the synthesis of everything we’ve learned, and a practical guide to planning a research trip that serves your writing.
Stacy Earl is the founder of Early & Away Travel Company, where she plans research travel for writers, book clubs, and heritage travelers. She is currently writing a novel set in the mill villages of 1930s Knoxville, Tennessee — a project that has taken her from archives to ancestral landscapes and back again.
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