Five by Five: An ‘offhand comment’ leads to a string of family secrets

Francine Falk-Allen

By Max Bowen 

When Francine Falk-Allen attended a memorial service for a late uncle, she certainly didn’t expect to leave with the idea for her book, “A Wolff in the Family,” (She Writes Press, Oct. 1).

What mysterious scandals led a father to abandon his five youngest children—and for the elder siblings to keep it hidden for 80 years? In this interview, Francine talks about the initial secret that led her to do extensive research on her family, which led to a lot more that had never been spoken of! She goes into the research itself and shares a few details of what she learned….but for the full story, you’ll need to read the book!


What led you do to this research on your family?
I had attended a memorial service about 20 years ago for one of my uncles; one of my mother’s eight brothers. Afterward as I sat across from my youngest aunt in the church social hall, eating sandwiches and chatting, she said, “…when we were in the orphanage…” as an offhand comment amidst another story. I had never heard that any of the family had been in an orphanage, was absolutely stunned, and pressed her further to elaborate. I learned that my grandfather had placed some of the children there. My mother, who’d been dead eight years at that time, and was exceptionally fond of her father, had never breathed a word about the orphanage, or the surprising reasons the youngest of her siblings had wound up there. I had to know more!


How did you do the research?
I asked my aunt for as much detail as she could remember during the short time I had with her and went home and made notes. I immediately contacted my much older sister (she was 19 years older, born of my mother’s first husband). She also had not heard this story but had some other family tales and gossip I hadn’t heard, which aunts and uncles had told her or that she knew from her own early experiences. I then contacted my other two aunts and asked them what they remembered and asked cousins for what they knew, which was almost nothing.

I had known my grandfather, so I wrote up a nine-page essay on all that my family had shared about him and the orphanage story. When I later decided to write a novel based on the tale, I did a ton of research using census and genealogy records to find out who was where and when they lived with whomever, delving into not just my mother’s family but others who were involved in the story. Several of my cousins had already done a lot of genealogical research on this branch, and I had previously done extensive research (back to the 1600s) on my father’s branch, so this was revisiting a skill I had already honed.

I found a history of the orphanage, medical records of people in the story who had died, even the names of the doctors who had attended them. I also researched newspaper articles from the early 1900s and found bits naming a few of the characters, plus pricing for things they may have owned or could not have afforded, based on the salary records I found for my grandfather’s railroad engineer job.

It was really a lot of fun to find all this information, and every time I found a new detail, such as the house where my grandfather stayed when he was away on the railroad, I used the information to inform the fictitious aspects of the story alongside the parts that were factual.


This secret, is it something anyone in your family ever talked about or even hinted at?
My mother kept more than one secret. My grandfather putting his children in an orphanage is just the beginning of a set of scandals. All her siblings knew about much of this story, and some of them spoke of it to their children, but my mother never mentioned a word of any of it to me or my sister or brother. We didn’t have much contact with our aunts and uncles because we lived far away from them. As the eldest, my mother kept these things (of which she was ashamed) to herself for over 60 years, and some of her siblings also died without sharing these things with their children or even their spouses. So, the secrets and scandals may have been discussed among some, but they certainly weren’t what we talked about at holiday dinners! Some of my aunts and uncles put a different slant on the story, making it sound as if my grandfather didn’t have a choice regarding putting the kids in the orphanage, which in their final eulogies implied loftier intentions on his part.


What were the family secrets? (If this isn’t too big a spoiler)
There were about a half dozen secrets! The fact that the five youngest kids had lived in an orphanage was just the beginning. My aunt Dorothy, one of the orphans, didn’t even have all the facts straight, I learned, when I did my research. But the rest of the secrets are what make up such a good story. There are lots of twists and turns even before the orphanage event, and then, the way I made up the missing pieces, the saga comes to a boiling point, and everything gets chaotic for a while in the middle! So yes, it’s too “spoilery” to tell the other secrets.

I hope that when people read the book it will not only provide them with a juicy cinematic and familial saga but give them a sense of the time from about 1918 through the early 1940s, and how things were, especially for women, in the early 1900s. I also think a lot of people don’t know how much the railroad affected people’s lives in those days, also. Few people had automobiles in those days.

I read that this is set in the Great Depression. Does this time period help drive the story?
The Depression does come into play and does help drive the story…but not in the way one might expect. When I first told friends about hearing the orphanage story from my aunt, older friends said, “Oh, it was common that people had to give their children up to orphanages in that time, or to other friends or relatives.” So, in the beginning, I hope the reader will be thinking along those lines.

Financial difficulty, or at least a great deal of resourcefulness or creativity in making ends meet is portrayed in the story, even before the Depression. The main family was eventually comprised of a dozen children, and the household was supported on one railroad salary! There are other aspects that the reader will not be expecting, which are based upon my research into that time and where and how the characters seem to have been living. Sorry to sound secretive again, but I’d like it to be at least a bit surprising, if not jaw-dropping, to learn about even the Depression Era financial aspects of the family.

I hope I’ve been secretive but “hinty” enough that you’ll be intrigued to read “A Wolff in the Family.” Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it.