Catching up with Cynthia Raleigh
A wide-ranging conversation on genealogy and telling stories
A welcome and introduction
Welcome, everyone, I’m excited to share my recent sit down with fellow Substacker and genealogy content creator, Cynthia Boatright Raleigh. Cynthia’s Substack is titled, Genealogy Storytelling, and it’s filled with great stories from her own family’s history, as well as fascinating stories she finds along the way.
Here are just a few links to get you started!
The Buckfoot Gang - a serialized retelling of a true crime story involving her ancestor, Robert P. W. Boatwright.
The historic Homestead Inn - one of several vintage postcards Cynthia has rescued, researched and revealed a fascinating story about
What’s in a name? - the first in a series of compelling stories based on an 1882 autograph book and the young women whose names appear in it.
Cynthia is also the author of books in three different genres, Genealogical Mystery, Colonial Supernatural, and True Crime. You can find more about those projects and Cynthia’s other writing endeavors on her website.
Release Date: February 4, 2025
And a thank you
Thanks so much to Cynthia for her generosity of time, knowledge, passion, stories and especially patience in agreeing to be my first video interviewee!
And thanks to each of you for your continued support of this space and of me. It’s hard to believe there are more than 250 of us here now, over half of whom have joined just in the last three months!
If you’re one of those new subscribers and haven’t yet started reading Call Me a Bastard, the compelling true story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker that started this space in June 2024, here’s a link to Chapter 1.
A Transcript of “Catching up with Cynthia Raleigh”
For those of you who would rather read than listen or watch, I’ve included a slightly edited transcript of my conversation with Cynthia. (Slightly edited because, holy cats! There’s a reason I’m a writer and not a presenter!)
LORI
Hi. I'm Lori Olson White, and today I'm talking to Cynthia Boatright Raleigh, and we're going to be talking about her newsletter here on SubStack, Genealogy Storytelling. So Cynthia, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing here?
CYNTHIA
I'm Cynthia, Raleigh, and for most of my career, I worked as an RN, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to do genealogy. I've always been interested in it since I was a little kid, because my dad was curious about it, and so I would ask family members things, and, you know, they're busy, and they're like, “I don't know, Kid,” you know, or, you know, “yeah, that was your grandpa, Frank”, or whatever. I tried to keep notes, but when you're really young and when there's no internet, it's pretty hard to do that kind of work. And we didn't live in the same state as the family.
As I got older and the Internet came about, I gradually have worked into taking advantage more and more of the technology development and the new resources that are available, and now it's a large part of what I do. I did phase out nursing and phased in writing when we made a move to another state. And I write in three different genres, genealogy mysteries, colonial American historical fiction and some true crime.
I came across SubStack, I don't know, a year and a half ago, and got really interested in that as a blogging type format. I also started doing videos on Tiktok, just for short, interesting stories that I found in newspapers or something I found at a yard sale that told an interesting story, and that I find interesting. And I'm like, I don't know if anybody else is going to like this, but I'm going to do some videos and just kind of share that information. And so through SubStack and Tiktok, I'm finding out that there's a whole community of people who find stories interesting. They don't have to be about my family,
LORI
That's what I do too, right? I've got a whole bunch of family stories that I work on independently, but I love just finding these cool stories, like you said, that have no relationship to anything I know, and then following them up. You do just a great job with that. So thank you.
CYNTHIA
Yeah, I can be in a Newspaper Archive looking at an article regarding what I'm actually working on, and then what's that? And then, well, that sounds like an interesting story! I'm saving that so I have this folder of possible things, you know that I want to look up. Well, I'm always taking on other stories.
LORI
You have more discipline than I do then, because what happens to me is – two hours later, I'm like, “Oh, wait. How did I get here?” So, that happens too. But I eventually find my way back to what I actually am researching.
CYNTHIA
I find that SubStack has been really great for finding other people like yourself. And you know, people who are into genealogy, professional genealogists, beginners, people who are specialists in just restoring pictures or whatever, just all kinds of adjunct things that go along with genealogy. And so that's inspired me to keep going with telling genealogy storytelling, to tell the stories of these people that have been gone for so long. But something happened in their life, and they all had real lives, just like we do, right? Not just what's in the paper that day. So I want to know a little bit more about them. Yeah,
LORI
I think you touch on a little bit on the size of the room for genealogy right now, especially on SubStack. You know, we've got people that are, are hardcore, you know -- I call them “the begets”, which is great. And they're doing a great job of getting the accuracy of all of those long chains of people. And then on the other side, we've got people that are military specialists or cemetery specialists –which blows my mind!
We’ve got people in all these little nuances and niches of genealogy that, probably a couple decades ago, no one had access to all the information. They may have been curious about it back then, but how do you do that research? And now we've got so much information out there that if you've got something that you're passionate about, or you find really interesting, you can go all the way.
And then you've got, you know, fabulous storytelling at the other side of the room, that almost borders on historical nonfiction in some in some ways. That tells the family stories or just general genealogy stories that are almost historical non-fiction, and sometimes even historical fiction.
There's just this huge, big room that I find here on SubStack that's just so welcoming and really, really exciting, and, like you said, really inspirational. Because you never know what somebody's going to come up with. And you're like, “oh, that's super cool!”
CYNTHIA
Right? You never know what you're going to find, because even through the DNA testing that we've got now – this has been several years ago now, but I was contacted by somebody who turned out to be a fourth cousin, which isn't real close, but he didn't live far away. And we found out we both had a common ancestor that we had both been looking for, like, what happened to him? Where did he go? Where is he buried? It has to be here. We'd both been looking for this guy and his wife for a long time.
Long story short, we ended up having a casual conversation with a nearby farmer when I was over there in a cemetery. He invited me to look at a little cemetery on his property that he'd been plowing around for years. In the spring, I met this cousin of mine there, and we uncovered it, and we found that guy amazing, that cemetery! So you never know what is going to lead to something else.
LORI
Who's going to have that little piece of information that unlocks it, right?
That connectedness that's available now. I mean, in your case, that was just old school research, right? You just worked that out, and that's just sometimes even more powerful than what you can find, on the internet or in an archives or things like that. Just that one little key that opens that door that tells a whole new story. That's super cool, right?
So what happened? What happened with the cemetery?
CYNTHIA
Well, he was plowing around it, but it was totally covered in brambles and sticker bushes, you know, blackberries, that kind of stuff. So it was mid-summer when I first talked to him, and he said, “Why don't you come back in the spring? Because it'll die down a bit.” So that's what we did.
I met my cousin over there, and we cleared all the debris away from it. Most of the stones were flat. I mean, well, all the stones were flat on the ground, and a lot were covered. We did manage to find the wife of the guy that we were looking for. Her marker was completely intact, a large stone, but it was about a foot down, so we did raise it again. Yeah, so super cool. The farmer, he's a big graph drawer, so he graphed out the cemetery, and I took the names down and recorded that.
LORI
Yep. Now it's preserved until the next group of families look for it and can't find it right?
CYNTHIA
Until it grows over again!
LORI
Super cool. Let's see So, so kind of talked about how you think what you do fits into the greater genealogy community. Let's talk a little bit about what specifically you're doing. I know you're doing your own family history, some great storytelling out of that. You're doing some postcards, and then you're doing some kind of lost and found research, like around the autograph book from 1882
CYNTHIA
I do different types of topics on SubStack instead of just sticking with one thing, like just sticking with my family story, because those are interesting to me. They may not be to everybody, so I try to incorporate some other things – Here's an interesting article, maybe I'll write about that.
And I do like to kind of root through antique stores or consignment shops or whatever, to find old pictures, paintings, any kind of documents that are interesting. I’ll did pick up a handful of postcards from a flea market type thing. You know, the consignment shop where everybody has a section that's theirs.
I did a series of posts about postcards, which was really interesting. Some of them had writing on the back, like had actually been mailed and so they had the name of the person and the address that it went to and the person it came from. So that was great, because I could, ask the questions -- who were these people? Why was this person here, you know, and this must have been really big for him. He comes from this little farming community, and he's traveled to this big city, and he's sending postcards home. So, right?
And then there were some that had not been mailed. They had been purchased. You know, how we all do? You go on vacation, you buy one and you take it home. But even so, with nothing on the back, the actual subject to the postcard can be of interest, like a long gone fixture in a city in Tennessee that actually was initially built by Ulysses S. Grant.
LORI
I loved that story!
CYNTHIA
Yeah, I didn't expect that, right? There was no writing on it, but the building itself on it was of interest.
LORI
How many postcards did you go through before you found that one? How far in the research did you go in the other ones before you found that one, and when were you like, “This is the one I'm going to follow”? Because for me, sometimes I’ll spend a week on something that turns out that I'm like, “yeah, that’s not a story I’m interested in telling.
CYNTHIA
In that particular pack, it was probably seven or nine postcards. I had done the ones where they had been mailed with writing first, and I kind of put aside the ones that didn't have anything on them. But I had done those, and I thought, “well, let me look at this. I'll just see what this is. It's kind of a cool I got it” And then I'm like, “okay, maybe I should do these”. So I did the others, and it was just a handful, but I went ahead and did the others.
I'm sure that won't be the last that I do. I'll be looking. It’s kind of addicting, isn't it?
LORI
I found a picture one time in one of those antique shops, and it was a crystal clear picture of a guy, and it said he was 91 years old, and it had been taken at the 75th anniversary Union Army reunion. And I thought, “this is going to be super cool!”
I bet I found 50 copies of that picture everywhere. I’m like, dang!
CYNTHIA
You do a similar thing, don't you? Where you find photographs, and then you research those. And did you have any that were really surprising for you?
LORI
You know, I haven't done a lot of those. I've got them in the in the hopper, but I haven't put a lot of those out. A couple of them are a little surprising, but nothing has been like, “Oh, my goodness, that's super cool” for me. A lot of them are just really small stories, which are great, but not for me. You go so far and wide on yours that it fills the story out really well. My attention span isn't quite as long as maybe it should be for those kinds of stories.
CYNTHIA
I understand. I did pick up that 1882 autograph book.
LORI
Yeah, let’s get to that!
CYNTHIA
The one that I worked on last, and I kind of set it aside to work on a family story, but she's the first one out of the mix that I've done that I'm like, there has to be more than this about her, because I'm just not finding it. There's plenty about her family members, but maybe she just lived a quiet life, so that may not translate as well. And if I end up with several of those, I may put them together in one post, this is where she ended up, here's who she married, and he was this, you know
LORI
You do such a great job of finding details. You obviously go through more than just newspaper clippings and their genealogical documents, and records. So how do you get such intimate details of their lives? Where are they coming from?
CYNTHIA
I start with the genealogy documents, like vital records. And then I go to newspaper archives, and I try to pull out little things from the newspaper articles that can lead me somewhere else, right? If so and so was an actress in said company, then I can research that company. And there may be something about her in there that I found and that I didn’t know.
LORI
That was the girl from Montana, right, from Helena?
CYNTHIA
Yes, I think so. I’m thinking it was Sarah McKenna Lena Elma Wallace. I think that's the one, and she was a big deal, a Big Deal. Then by the time she was older, you know, I bet a lot of her family didn't know how well-known she was at the time,
LORI
Right? That was a great piece of research, because you just kept connecting the dots, and the story got better and better and better.
A lot of people lived quiet lives publicly, you know, they don't have a diary out there. They weren't in the newspaper. They didn't have a scandal in their life. There weren't any big tragedies. How do we find their stories? Because we all have great stories, even if they're just told verbally among family members. And, how do find those stories?
One of the things I want to do this year is start to find old diaries and journals and housekeeping books and things like that that might have some of those little daily life things, right? Yeah, things that the newspapers are never going to talk about.
I kind of go back and forth and think it's kind of intrusive on my part to try to find those little intimate details of the family life of people who aren't my family.
What about you? How do you deal with that kind of like, eeww, cringyness?
CYNTHIA
There have been some things that I didn't include, because even if I found it in a document, I don't need to put that in there. You know, I'm not trying to be sensationalist.
There was one person that signed the autograph book that had a family member who completed suicide, and I thought, “well, I want to be sensitive about this”. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of that, but it affected her life. It was in all the papers, because he was a prominent person, so I just tried to relay the facts, and then go from there and then, this is the impact it had on her. Because that event had a huge impact on her life, and to not add that would take away from what she accomplished afterward,
LORI
Right? And then that's part her story.
For me, at least, I usually pick out a person, and then kind of try to keep along that string. There’s always a cause and an effect in a life. You know, this happens, and so this person does that. So, like you, I usually throw it in there quietly, you know, especially on some of those more personal tragedies, I guess, right?
CYNTHIA
This book was from 1882, so any type of family event like that impacts everyone. It was terrible thing for women in the late 19th century, early 20th century. It affected maybe their entire lifestyle, because they had to rely so much on their husband to provide where they lived and the support, how they maintain status in the community. So, what happens now?
LORI
Let’s talk a little bit more about that. With the autograph book, you just pick one of the people, then start with a genealogical record, then go into the newspapers, and then dig through everything else, right? So how do you string that story together? What's, what's your writing process for that?
CYNTHIA
I'll show you a page out of it.
LORI
This book is super cool.
CYNTHIA
This is the book. And this is a velvet coating, and the word “autographs” is a one-piece metal. Such workmanship.
LORI
There’s no page that says who published the book or, where the book came from, as far as the manufacturer, or anything on there, right?
CYNTHIA
No. The very first page. I’m having to presume that this belongs to this lady, and you probably can't see it. It's really faint. You can see how fancy is.
My first step in answering your question is to read what the person wrote. And, I mean, I don't know who their parents are. I don't really know where they're from.
This autograph book is from 1882 and it is signed all by women who attended Saint Mary's Academy, which was on the campus of Notre Dame in South Indiana at the time. So they aren't related, necessarily, probably not.
LORI
And they’re from all over the United States. Maybe there's some foreign people,
CYNTHIA
Right? Most of them did not say where they were from. Well, some of them say, you know the name, and then from such and such place in this state, and that helps a lot. Some didn’t sign their full names.
LORI
And there are probably 1,400 Mary Smiths, right?
CYNTHIA
Those are a lot harder. And some of them don't sign their full name, like this person. Her name is Eliza Estelle Todd, but she only signed it, “E Todd”, but she did not put where she's from. Yeah, that took a little longer.
LORI
So were you able to access resources from St Mary's?
CYNTHIA
From the school? No, not that I can find.
LORI
When I was working on the Call Me a Bastard story, there were a lot of boarding schools in there, and I was able to actually reach back to them and get some of their records. Most of the little schools back then had little newspapers that they put out weekly or monthly. One of the schools had them all bound, and their archivist went through and picked out everything involving Aimee. I mean, Big Bonanza there!
CYNTHIA
That’s on my list to do if I need to. Saint Mary's produced a catalog every year, and I have found ones from 1860 to 1862 that listed the students, among other things. But I haven’t found one from 1882 yet. The reason I haven't had quite as much trouble, and why I haven't had to do that yet, is because I do have the 1880 census, and a lot of these girls were already there. That tells me what state they're from, at least
LORI
And their age and that helps. I mean, an age range, at least, that helps a lot.
CYNTHIA
Sometimes there were siblings, a sibling that was there. That helps to say, “yeah, this is the right person.” When you find them in the census, there's a lot of that connecting the dots.
LORI
I just love the research part of these projects. I love the genealogical research. I love the, you know, the finding the connection between these people and the place.
I can’t help but think, “why did they go there, how did they afford to go there in 1882 right? You know, what was the process of enrollment, and where did they live?” So many questions and then I go down the rabbit hole!
CYNTHIA
Right. One of them was from Kentucky, and like a rural area of Kentucky. But it turns out they lived right where the Maker's Mark distillery was. Now, oh, sure. And they were involved in that early on, so, you know, maybe that’s how they afforded it.
LORI
Maybe some of them were legacy enrollees, you know that their parent went there or something like, I found that before too, and going through school records, it's like, you know, they had generational access to that school, or something super cool.
So what kind of feedback and reaction do you get from your stories? Do you ever have, like somebody that's found their ancestor story in something that you’ve written, has that happened at all?
CYNTHIA
I have not had any of that through SubStack. The only time I've actually had a family member of someone I wrote about reach our is a True Crime book that I wrote. And I have had a grandson, you know, somebody who worked with his father, you know, things like that. Yeah. They have said, “Hey, that was my dad's cousin”, or “I know this”. None of them were upset about anything. They just said they were curious about what I know about him.
LORI
I've had a couple times where they're, like, “we didn't know anything about this,” or “this is totally out of the blue for us”, which is always kind of awkward. But yeah. It’s good in an awkward way and awkward in a good way? Kind of both.
I think one of the things about Substack, too, is now that we're kind of all figuring out how it works a little better and getting interconnected, some of those finders out there – you know, the people that are looking for an ancestor and we're writing about them, or we're covering some event or something --maybe they'll be able to find something that completes their picture.
I think there are seekers outside of the hardcore or mainstream genealogy societies and groups, people who are maybe genealogy-curious. And I think some of the work that we do can maybe help answer some questions they have.
CYNTHIA
When I first started on sub stack, I didn't do that at all. And I'm trying to get better at using the meta tags, the hashtags. Yeah, I mean, how are they going to find it? Maybe if I used a hashtag with that person's name, and if they are trying to do genealogy research and they're searching on that name, maybe it will come up?
LORI
I haven't really started doing that, but it's probably something I'll try to do in the future.
We’re just about wrapping up. So we talked about your journey, we've talked about your process. We've talked about some of the projects you've worked on. Anything else you want to talk about in the next couple minutes that we haven't touched on?
CYNTHIA
Well, I'm planning on doing more of the same on SubStack, and then I also want to get to the fourth genealogy mystery series, and get that written. I've I'm learning so much from the people on SubStack and in that community and other platforms too, that I'm hoping that really adds to what I am writing.
LORI
Great! I'll include the links to that when I publish this, so, if you're watching this, there'll be some links to Cynthia's books down in the bottom here.
Well, I think we covered everything that I promised we were going to cover. So thank you so much for being here. I’ll be following you on SubStack and be enjoying your writing, and we'll talk another time.
CYNTHIA
Yeah, and I look forward to reading more of your SubStack, too. Terrific.
LORI
All right, we'll see you later. Bye.
Copyright 2025 Lori Olson White
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Really enjoyed listening to this conversation! So much shared experience researching and writing.
I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Lori about family history and comparing research methods. Thank you!