Working Title & Start of Book Log

Well, now that I've made a lot of noise about writing this documentary book about how my dad got to the UK, I am not a professional researcher (although my post-graduate certificate in Health Informatics should claim otherwise) and nor am I a genealogist so no idea at this moment about how to sort out all the keys things I need to do...

I'm hoping part of this blog will serve as a sort of "log" of how I will approach it and record my efforts - good and bad...

Also, I'm still thinking of what to call the book. A few working titles come to mind so I'll list them here:

1) "One foot East, other foot West"
2) "Fathers' journeys" (deliberate possessive plural as some of the book will also include short features about other men/women of his generation)
3) "Londoni" (Generally a Bengali term referring to one who has been abroad, specifically to the UK)
4) Coming back to the idea of creating myths, legends and heroes from the stories of these first travels of immigrant fore-fathers, I think a better title is required than the three above and I want to avoid it coming across as too commercial or as if it's some kind of "soundbite". How about "Passage from Sylhet"? or "Sylheti Journeys"?

I suppose I will have to sleep on it, but so far, none of these really sound right. I wasn't specifically thinking that the book would only include stories from Bangladeshi migrants and certainly not just those from Sylhet, at any rate, those "other" stories would only be intermittently spaced between the whole of describing my father's footsteps. So, perhaps it needs to be more personal? Oh, I'll come back to it. I'm sure something much more organic will emerge as I start to compile it.

The PLAN:

1) Research - to validate exact dates for things like flights, official documents and so on. I have to make sure these all come from primary sources (I knew I did A-Level history for some reason). This will help me fill the gaps of some of the timelines and to work out what I need to address either through some oral collection from living relatives or another means. I think this part of it is going to be the most difficult because I'm barely speaking to 99% of the family right now....

The research will also involve finding at least 2 or three other families whos parents came over at about the same time as my dad and collect their transcripts of that so will need to send out calls for submissions of these in the next few weeks. They'd have to be people I have no family link with - completely and totally fresh stories to my own.

2) Structure. I think I already have a vague idea in my head that this will have the following:

a) Introduction - why I have the desire to write this and the scope of what's included and what's excluded. (2000 words)
b) Timelines (as validated as possible), maps and other interesting artefacts to help visualise and illustrate the wider picture. (1000 words)
c) Brief History of migration from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan - with focus on Bengali migration. Information about migration now, census data on poverty, employment, education, health. (6000 words?)
d) Brief history of the poitical context of how Bangladesh was formed and its current political state. (3000 words)
e) Presentation of the relevant documents in time sequence order from each decade split into chapters - 196os, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s up to my dad's death) and the known details surrounding them in terms of the family, the context in terms of immigration and the context in terms of my father as an individual while linking his experience to the experience of some of the others who will be interviewed. (20,000 words)

f) A chapter addressing the implications his migration has had on the family and the wider issues in British Society. (5000 words)
g) Conclusion/Personal thoughts about the journey (3000 words)
h) Log of how this book was compiled. Mistakes I made, things I learnt. (3000)
i) Bibliography
j) Index

So far, the plan appears to be a word count of between 43,000 and 50,000 words.