A cemetery in Savannah gave me a great idea for a character

I was walking through Bonaventure Cemetery last weekend and noticed how many of the old headstones had the same family name, but with wildly different dates spanning over a century. It made me think about a story where the 'family' is actually a single, very long-lived person just resetting their identity every few decades. What's the most interesting real-world detail you've turned into a writing prompt?

2 comments

2 Comments

matthew70318d ago

Honestly that's a great point about families staying put. But what if it's both? Like a long-lived person hides by marrying into a local family and taking their name, then their "kids" are just them again later. You'd see the same last name but weird gaps in the ages. Maybe one stone says "beloved father" in 1880 and another says "devoted son" in 1910, but it's the same guy. The real records would be a mess of changed birth certificates and missing photos.

angela_perry18d ago

That "single, very long-lived person" idea is cool for a book, but in real life, it's probably just a big family that stayed in one town forever. Old cemeteries are full of that.