I’ve been working with Green-Wood on their World War II Project for a year now. It involves researching and writing the biographies of those who served in World War II and are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I went into it with the intention of practicing research and writing skills in a useful way. I found I was good at the research part; digging for clues and information on a person from a time when records were sparse to begin with, cross referencing data and getting the story out of the names and numbers. What I hadn’t expected though was that I would end up learning a new kind of writing style.
I quickly found that I had to unlearn the academic approach of overstating and lets be honest, rather dry style of writing I had spent all this time learning. Even though I was still working with facts, and the organizational skills I’d practiced in research reports were extremely useful, I had to adapt to storytelling in historical narratives, to writing about a person rather than a collection of data.
Writing in a different genre got me to think and write in a different way. The stories are full of information from census data, enlistment records, travel documents and phone conversations with family members. And turning all this data into a biographical story has been really good for the writing brain. Bonus: I’ve been discovering a lot about the history of people in New York City going back a hundred years with each person’s story revealing something new.
These stories are the product of many, many writers and researchers working with Jeff Richman, Green-Wood Historian and are published here.
Mariam Sultan 