As wonderful as it was to stumble across this advert inside a trade directory in Harrogate Library, there is so much more I yearn to discover about Dorothy’s life. Her inner world, in particular, remains a mystery. It’s the perennial frustration of family history research.

I’ve learned that she experienced the death of her only sibling, rebuilt a business from the ashes of bankruptcy and was an unmarried mother in an age when that status was considered a moral affront.

My great aunt - Dorothy’s daughter-in-law - once shared a few intriguing details with me: that she wore red nail polish, smoked Turkish cigarettes and was a rather formidable character.

Now, less than a century after her death, her story has faded from living memory.

I'll sadly never know what she was really like, how she navigated life's challenges or how she felt about them - but how I wish I could.  

I’m sure Dorothy thought her daily life too ordinary to bother recording, but what a wonderful window to the past she could have given us. To modern eyes, her world is exotic, just as my own analogue childhood appears to my own offspring a mere 30 years later.  

My great-grandmother, Dorothy.

My husband is lucky enough to have inherited his beloved grandmother‘s autobiography, which she produced with the help of a ghostwriter. Although I sadly never had the chance to meet Rosalind before she died, her wonderful book has been the next best thing, her voice and stories preserved on the page.

When my daughter was studying the Second World War at school, we took it down from the bookshelf and leafed through to the chapter where Rosalind describes her teenage memories of the war, including an unforgettable description of the day the skies over Kent filled with German bombers flying to RAF Biggin Hill.  

If she had not written it down, that very personal connection to history would have been lost - along with a myriad of details about her life. 

These experiences made me realise I should interview my own parents about their lives before it was too late.

Conducting interviews, writing and editing was a straightforward process - but there was a lot I needed to learn to turn the manuscript into a printed book.

I sorted through a century’s worth of old photographs, scanning and ordering them. I learned how to design books and commissioned a traditional bookbinder to handcraft a set of beautiful clothbound books for each of the grandchildren.  

Recording my parents’ stories gave me a new perspective on their lives. The experience helped me know and appreciate them more deeply. It also helped me to understand how economic, technological and social changes have shaped our family’s fortunes over the past century.

Realising I wanted to help others write their own books, I trained as an instructor in Guided Autobiography, a methodology for writing life stories in small groups, first developed by Professor Jim Birren, a pioneer in the field of gerontological psychology. 

Attic Life Stories brings together all these skills to help other families preserve their stories, driven by the passionate belief in the importance of leaving a record of our lives for those who come after us.

A little more about me…

• I’ve lived in Brighton, Melbourne, East London and San Francisco home. When our daughters were little, my husband and I decided to leave California and put down roots in Cambridge, not far from the Cambridgeshire Fens where we both grew up.

• Like all writers, I find it difficult to walk past a bookshop without popping inside. My bookshelves are stuffed with novels, family histories, biographies, autobiographies and business, travel and self-help memoirs - all of which have contributed to my toolkit of story structures, literary devices and ideas to bring your stories to life.

• I’m passionate about family history and am currently a part-time student at The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies. I’ve researched my ancestors back to the 18th century, but for me, genealogy is about more than collecting names and dates - it’s a quest to discover forgotten stories.

• Pottering in the garden is another great passion. We have a long, narrow townhouse plot, relatively small but crammed with plants, and have just taken on a rather weed-choked allotment. I try to spend time outside each day and it’s where I do my best thinking. Thoughts untangle, ideas ripen and creativity ferments.

• I encountered many interesting people and places during my years as a journalist. Perhaps the strangest was the night I spent camped beside a golden bidet in the bathroom of Saddam Hussein's mock-rococo lakeside palace in Basra, while reporting on an infantry regiment which was barracked there.

• I’m a fourth-generation member of the Women’s Institute. My great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise many of the activities on the programme of my thoroughly modern urban group (there’s neither jam-making nor singing of Jerusalem), but the sense of community and connection endures.

• Yoga and meditation are my antidote to a busy life. I try to escape on retreat for a weekend each year - this year I’m heading to Glastonbury (the town, not the festival!)