In 1914 a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl crossed the Atlantic in steerage and came through Ellis Island. Her granddaughter, Deanna Bennett, turned that crossing into the Anna Immigration Trilogy: Anna: Going to America, Anna: American Journey and Anna: American Dream. Later she finished Anna’s Daughter, the memoir her mother had started, and told what became of the real Anna.
Deanna founded the East Lake Writers’ Workshop in Palm Harbor, and I sat at her critique table for years. I spent many hours critiquing her Anna chapters there, and I heard that research come out week after week. She built a teenage girl’s life out of whatever records survived, and she kept at it until the girl on the page could carry three books. When Deanna died, I wrote a tribute to her. Her grandmother is in three books because Deanna refused to let the scraps stay scraps.
Most immigrant stories never get that kind of attention. The person who crossed dies, and the grandchildren end up with the name of a village and a year. Deanna had the discipline to do the work herself. If you don’t have the years for it, a ghostwriter can do it with you, and I’d much prefer to see a story written that way than lost.
The loss follows the same pattern in family after family. The people who crossed worked too hard to sit around telling stories, and their children wanted so badly to fit in that they never asked. By the time the grandchildren get curious, the people who could answer are in a cemetery, and what’s left is a surname some clerk spelled however he liked. Ellis Island alone processed more than twelve million people between 1892 and 1954, and most of their crossings survive as a single line on a ship’s manifest.
That’s a loss bigger than any one family. An immigrant story holds what the history books leave out: why somebody walked away from everything they knew, and what it cost them to stay once they got here. Roughly one person in seven living in the United States today was born in another country. Every one of them has a version of that story. If your family came from somewhere else, so do you, and nobody has written yours down yet.
Can a ghostwriter write an immigrant’s story for my family?
Yes. An immigrant story is a memoir or a family history with an ocean or a border in the middle of it, and a ghostwriter who writes memoirs already has the process for it.
You talk while I record, and the draft comes back in a voice your family recognizes.
The book comes in two versions. In the first, you made the crossing yourself and you’re the one telling it.
In the second, a parent or grandparent made it, and you’re reconstructing the story from what they told you and what they left behind. Call the first one a memoir. The second leans toward a family history, and my article on ghostwriting a family history book from genealogy, photos, recipes and immigrant stories covers that side in more depth. Which one are you writing? You’ll know by the end of the first conversation, and the answer decides whose voice carries the book.
If the person who made the crossing is still alive, get them on a recording this month. Every year you wait costs details nobody else has, and no archive in the world holds what your grandfather remembers about the day he left. The urgent version of this project is hiring a ghostwriter to capture a parent’s life story while they can still tell it, and it’s the version I’d push you toward first.
Can a ghostwriter help if my English is limited?
Easily. Clients with limited or no written English are one of the main reasons I’m hired.
Plenty of people speak English well enough to run a business and argue with a contractor, and still can’t produce a book in it. Written English is a separate skill. Nobody should have to master it before their story’s allowed to exist, and a person who crossed an ocean at twenty and built a life in a second language has earned a book without passing a grammar test first.
You don’t need to apologize for your English on the first call. You need to tell me which language your memories live in, because that’s the language your best stories will come out in, and you should tell them that way. Worried your accent or your grammar will end up in the book? Neither will. Your way of seeing things will, and your family wants exactly that on the page.
One of my first books was an Afghan politician’s memoir. His wife translated, and we packed a full day of interviews in before he left.
Every question went through her to him, and every answer came back through her to me.
A day like that runs slow, and the translator shapes the book almost as much as my questions do. Who should translate? You want somebody the storyteller trusts, with the patience to sit through a full day, who wants the book to exist. If English is your own second language and you’re the one telling the story, my article on whether a ghostwriter can write your book in English when it’s your second language walks through how your voice survives the move into English.
How does a ghostwriter interview someone through a translator?
Plan for twice the time. Every exchange happens two times over, and the storyteller needs room to think in one language while the conversation runs in another.
I record every session, on Zoom or on a tablet when we’re in the same room, and a summary of each session goes to the client afterward. I keep recordings three months after the project ends unless the client asks otherwise. Ask me to keep them longer, or better, keep your own copies forever. The original-language audio is the only place your grandmother’s own words survive, and a grandchild who learns the language someday will want to hear her say them.
Family translators come with a problem you should know about before the first session. They soften things.
A grandson translating for his grandfather will skip the curse word and tidy up the story about the uncle who drank. He’s protecting somebody he loves, and the book loses the edge that made it worth reading. Tell your translator at the start to translate everything, including the parts that make them wince.
You and the storyteller decide what goes in the book later. Nothing gets cut in the room.
Expect tears. Clients cry in my interviews all the time, and through a translator you’ll see it on the storyteller’s face before you understand a word of what was said. When it happens, I drift to something easy, the food or the old neighborhood, and come back to the painful material a session or two later. People approach the worst of it over several sessions, and that’s fine. You’ll see the story come out in pieces, and the pieces add up.
Your grandmother crossed an ocean at fifteen. The least her family can do is get the story down before the last person who heard it is gone. – Richard LoweShare on X
Should an immigrant’s story be a ghostwritten memoir or a family history?
It depends on who’s alive to tell it.
If the person who crossed is sitting across from me, the book is their memoir, in their voice, first person. That’s the strongest version by a long way. A reader believes a woman who says “I was fifteen and I’d never seen the sea” in a way no grandchild’s summary can match.
If the person is gone, you have a choice to make. You can write it as a family history, with the grandchild as narrator and the records laid out in the open. Or you can write it as a story drawn from her life, filling the gaps with what probably happened and saying so.
Don’t put words in a dead grandmother’s mouth and call it memoir.
Readers forgive a gap in the record. They don’t forgive finding out that the heartfelt first-person account was invented by a grandson seventy years later.
What does a ghostwriter need to write a grandparent’s immigration story?
Start with the oldest living relatives. Get them on a recording before you touch a single document, because the documents will still be there next year and your great-aunt won’t be here forever.
Then gather the paper. Ship records and old passports come first, then letters from the relatives who stayed behind and any photograph with names written on the back. Each of those gives me a scene. Don’t throw anything away because it looks unimportant, since a receipt from a boarding house tells me where your great-grandfather slept his first week in this country. A photograph of a wedding in a village you’ve never seen tells me what people wore and who’s missing from the picture.
Make a list of names and places, even if the spellings are a mess. Immigrant families changed spellings at the border and changed them again to get a job. A list saves your ghostwriter days of sorting out who’s who. You’ll save money and weeks, and you’ll catch the relatives nobody remembered to mention.
And accept that the record will run out.
Every immigrant story has a year where nobody knows what happened. When we hit it, the book says so. A gap stated on the page is more honest than a guess dressed up as fact, and readers trust the rest of the book more for it.
Can a ghostwriter help if my parents won’t talk about the crossing?
A ghostwriter can work around a silent parent, and you shouldn’t force it.
Plenty of people who crossed spent fifty years refusing to talk about it, and they had their reasons. You won’t get the story by cornering them at Thanksgiving. Start somewhere else. Ask about the food and the house they grew up in. People who won’t talk about the boat will talk for an hour about their mother’s kitchen, and the kitchen leads back to the boat on its own schedule.
When a client reaches something they can’t face, I offer to leave it out of the book. Almost every time, that offer makes them insist it goes in.
You’d be amazed how much a person will say once they know they’re allowed to say nothing.
And if your parent still won’t talk, you still have a book. You have the relatives and the paper, plus your own memory of growing up in a house where the crossing was never mentioned, and the silence belongs in the story too.
What should a ghostwriter leave out of an immigrant memoir?
At the kickoff I’ll tell you what I tell every client: never tell me anything you don’t want in the book. Immigrant families need that rule more than most, because the story touches people who still live in the country the family left.
If relatives are still there, and what you write could reach them, change the names and the identifying details.
Some families carry old fears about what happens to people who talk. Respect them. A book that costs a cousin his job or his safety isn’t worth writing, and no reader will know the difference between the real village name and a changed one.
The relatives on this side of the ocean get the same care. A recent coaching-book client had a whole family chapter struck because the family didn’t want to be in it. My article on writing about living people without getting sued goes through the legal side. I brief every client on the legal risks and show them how to change details so the story stays true and the people stay protected.
Keep today’s headlines out of it too. Arguments about the news date a book within a year, and they push away readers who would have loved your grandmother if you’d let them meet her. Keep the book on one family and what the move cost them.
What makes a ghostwritten immigrant story worth reading?
The failures.
Nobody has a perfect life, and readers want to know what went wrong and how the family recovered. Immigrant stories drift toward legend fast. Grandpa never complained, and Grandma worked two jobs without once raising her voice. Families tell it that way out of love, and it produces a book nobody outside the family can finish.
Expect me to probe for failures on purpose, like the shop that went under the first year or the brother who gave up and went back. Clients drift toward one of two extremes when they tell their stories, the hero or the self-flagellation, and I talk them toward the middle, where real people live.
Would you want to read three hundred pages about a saint? Neither would your grandchildren. They want to meet a frightened fifteen-year-old who made a bad decision or two and survived anyway, because that’s somebody they can recognize in themselves. If you’re still deciding whether to bring in help at all, my book The Ghostwriting Advantage makes the case for working with a ghostwriter.
How do you start a ghostwritten immigrant story?
Record the oldest person who remembers, this month, in whatever language they think in. Then gather every scrap of paper the family has kept and make a list of names, however badly spelled. That’s enough for a first conversation with a ghostwriter, and it’s enough to keep the story from disappearing while you decide.
The Memoir Hub collects everything I’ve written on getting a life story onto the page, and my memoir process explains how I work with families, translators included, from the first interview to the finished draft.
Deanna spent years making sure a girl in steerage in 1914 would be remembered by people who never met her. Your family’s crossing deserves the same, and somebody in your family is the last person who can still tell it.
