Biography By night, I’m a wife and mother, a writer and amateur genealogist. I live with my husband and our two young daughters in Northern Virginia. About My Great Book Poor Relation: Memoir of a Fragmented Family Sometimes to reconcile your past you need to unlock and understand your parents’ secrets. By day, I work as a federal government relations consultant for my own company representing non-profit clients in the education arena. I’ve written legislation that has become law, and my favorite work-related activity is assisting Bob Ballard, the famous oceanographer who discovered R.M.S. Titanic, Bismarck, and PT-109, in meetings with Members of Congress on Capitol Hill. I also have served as a consultant to PBS and local public television stations. I am a registered lobbyist and a licensed attorney, with a B.A. in political science from S.U.N.Y. Fredonia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
My childhood was puzzling to me even as I lived it. My mother was exceptionally smart and from a solidly middle-class, educated family that could document kinship with two signers of the Constitution. So how did she wind up with five children in the span of five years, living on the edge of poverty on a farm in the back-country of western New York State? My father was alternately idealistic and explosive. He was a social worker, a volunteer fireman, and he strived to create a self-sufficient organic farm in the mold of his ancestors who had settled the area some 150 years prior. But he had an angry side that erupted into loud outbursts, and by the time I was 10 years old my relationship with him had dwindled to almost nothing. Why was he so volatile?
The mystery deepened when I was told at age 10 that my mother had been married before and that she had two children from that marriage, my half-brothers, who had been kidnapped by their father, but that she got them back after the kidnapping. Then why didn’t I know them? Who were they and where were they now?
I had many questions, but little time or inclination to explore them as my family’s life dissolved into tragedy and chaos. My father died the following year at age 43. A year later my 16-year-old sister got pregnant. Jobs were hard to come by in rural western New York in the mid-1970’s. My mother was smart but quirky and unconventional. And without a college degree and no experience or training, she worked to barely survive in pink-collar jobs. My father was rarely mentioned, and my guilt and grief over his death and my relationship with him festered.
Poor Relation: Memoir of a Fragmented Family tells my story of reconciling my own history by unraveling the family secrets and tragedies of my parents and generations past. It is the story of a family living on the emotional and financial edge, and of my struggle to emerge from poverty, dysfunction and depression to go on to build a fulfilling life. It is a story of resilience and triumph over circumstance, of the repercussions of class in American life, and of class change between generations of an American family. And it is a story of uncovering family secrets and tragedies, and coming to terms with how they impacted the lives of my parents and, ultimately, me and my siblings.
Read an excerpt here.
When I’m not working on my manuscript I like to:
Research my own and others’ family histories, blog about it at Intersections with History - Janet Hall Werner's Family History Blog, read, cook, and socialize with my family and friends.
Comments