Delia Montrose has a spreadsheet with 38 rows. Each row is one entry from the log her father kept in the summer of 1982, when he took a borrowed johnboat from Alton, Illinois, down the Mississippi to the Gulf. The columns record the date, the place he tied up, the wind, the river stage he wrote down, and, in the last column, whether she could confirm any of it.
Most of the cells in that last column say yes. A few say no. One says "Dad was lying, or drunk, or both."
"I adjusted claims for twenty years," Montrose said. "You learn to love a document and distrust it at the same time. My father's log was the most precious thing I owned. It was also a witness statement, and I treated it like one."
Her memoir, What the River Kept, braids that log with her own run down the same river in 2023. Before she wrote a word of the finished book, she spent the better part of a year checking her father's account against every outside record she could find. It is an unglamorous part of writing memoir, and the writers who do it well tend to describe it with a mix of pride and exhaustion.
The record and the story
Montrose started with the weather. Her father recorded wind direction and river stage every morning, and historical river readings and weather observations for the period are available to anyone who asks. She compared them day by day.
"Mostly he was right to within a few inches," she said. "Which told me he was paying attention and he was sober in the mornings. That was worth knowing before I wrote about the evenings."
Three entries in a row, near Cape Girardeau, did not match. Her father claimed high wind on days that were, by every record she could find, calm. She never learned why he stopped there. But she kept the discrepancy in the book rather than smoothing it over, and she told readers exactly what she had checked.
"The mismatch was the most interesting thing in the log," she said. "If I had fixed it, I would have erased the one place where he was hiding something."
What the archive knows
Gideon Pell has spent twenty-six years as a county archivist in Dubuque, Iowa. He estimates that about a third of the researchers who come through his reading room are writing some kind of family history, and that a growing number of them are writing memoir.
"They come in with a story they have heard their whole lives," Pell said. "Grandpa lost the farm in a card game. Great-aunt ran off with a traveling dentist. And my job is to hand them the deed transfer, or the marriage license, and watch their face."
Pell keeps a short list of records he recommends to every memoirist. Property transfers. Court dockets. City directories, which list who lived at an address in a given year. Church registers. Obituaries, which he calls "the family's official press release, useful precisely because you know who wrote it."
He is gentle about what those records can do. "A document tells you what happened on paper," he said. "It doesn't tell you why. The farm was sold. The records won't say whether there was a card game. The family story might be the only place that part lives."
"You learn to love a document and distrust it at the same time. My father's log was also a witness statement, and I treated it like one."
Asking the people who were there
Records only go so far. For most memoirists, the hardest fact checking happens across a kitchen table.
Renata Solis spent four years writing Borrowed Names, a memoir about her grandmother's decades running a boarding house in San Antonio, published last year by Common Ground. She interviewed eleven relatives, recorded every conversation and transcribed them herself.
"No two of them agreed on anything," Solis said. "Not the year the boarding house opened, not how many rooms it had, not whether my grandfather was a good man. I stopped trying to find the true version. I started writing down who said what, and why they might need it to be that way."
Her solution was structural. When accounts conflict, Borrowed Names says so on the page, often in a single sentence naming the relative and the disagreement. Solis was nervous that readers would find it tedious. Instead, she said, it became the part people wrote to her about.
"Every family has that argument," she said. "Readers recognized it immediately."
Montrose took a similar approach with her father's surviving brother, the one living person who could contradict her father's version of certain events. She sent him the manuscript and asked him to mark anything he remembered differently. He marked several things, including the names of two sandbars. She corrected those. On matters of memory rather than geography, she let both versions stand.
"A sandbar has a name," she said. "A family argument has two versions at least. I'm not qualified to pick one."
The limits of checking
Every writer interviewed for this story said, in one way or another, that fact checking a family is never finished. Documents go missing. Relatives die. Some stories were never written down anywhere.
Pell thinks that is fine, as long as writers are honest about it. "Readers can handle not knowing," he said. "What they can't forgive is being told you know when you don't."
Montrose still adds rows to her spreadsheet. A retired towboat captain wrote to her in July with a correction about a lock her father passed through. She checked it. He was right.
What the River Kept by Delia Montrose (independently published, 248 pages, $17.99 paperback) is out now.
Senior writer. Julian profiles debut novelists and the lives they write around. He spent a decade as a features reporter at newspapers across New England.
