John C. Montgomery and family ca. 1911; photo copyrighted by www.historicmapworks.com
Family is not an important thing. It’s everything. – Michael J. Fox
As I got deeper and deeper into researching Nameless Indignities, I found it increasingly difficult to sort out all of the principals and how they were related to one another. As a genealogist, I decided to use my Family Tree Maker software to keep track of all the names and relationships that came up in the story. Out of curiosity, I took that a step further by tracing some of the families back an extra generation or two and added some of the collateral family members. This proved to be a wise move as my research progressed and turned up more and more confusing relationships.
The family charts shown here are by no means complete or extensive and may contain minor errors; they were generated using the Family Tree Maker file that I created while I was writing the book (to help me keep track of the characters in the story.) As a genealogist, my goals are naturally a lot higher when I’m working on my own family history; but in this case, I only needed to organize and clarify the many complex relationships that kept cropping up in connection with the Bond case. Putting the names into a FTM database gave me a quick and easy reference while writing. (No need to send me corrections – these are merely presented here as a general guide to sorting out the families who were a part of the story.)
The following reports/charts were created using FTM’s feature for “descendant reports” and most include only 4 generations (note: for later generations, I didn’t bother searching for death dates since that information was not essential to the story.) If you are a genealogist, you should have no trouble reading these reports. If you are not a genealogist, it isn’t hard to figure out. The generations are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 so that everyone with a 2 in front of their names would be a child of the first male (1). Those numbered with 3s would be grandchildren, etc. Some will have more than one spouse (indicated by the + sign in front of spouses' names) and certain people will appear in more than one chart, because of their marriages (a woman, for instance, will show up in her birth family's chart and also show up as a spouse in her husband's family chart.)