Every family has its stories, some are common knowledge, but others are hidden gems—from the grandparents’ early romance to a great aunt’s quirky behavior at every holiday gathering. To preserve the stories of four generations of her family, Christian Monroe Holliday Douglas set out to document her roots in the small community of Galivants Ferry.

What began as love letters to her children, Holly, Russell, and David, The South I Knew soon evolved into a full-fledged book. Douglas started with thirty years’ worth of photographs and selected those that captured the significant people and places of her life’s history. To add to her material, she interviewed longtime residents and collected many of their family photographs with a portable scanner.

It appears that she began the project just in time. When the Galivants Ferry native moved back from Greenville, South Carolina, twelve years ago, Douglas says, “So many things were being torn down, and people I remembered were gone.” Written in an epistolary style, the recollections—not history, Douglas asserts—capture the South she remembers and this remarkable community. “The people around here are just incredibly good people. Here there is no social strata,” she adds.

Many residents are aware of the area’s past events, says Douglas, but she wants to capture the details that are not recorded, including stories of her well-known aunt, Floramay Holliday McLeod, the first Miss Palma Festa, giving out advice, along with the tale of a teenaged Douglas sneaking out of her family’s Myrtle Beach vacation house to pilfer her father’s Cadillac for a night out. She also aims to preserve memories of the Galivants Ferry Stump, a long-running Democratic event originally organized by the Holliday family in 1876 and still hosted by them.

With the book due to be published in 2011, there’s already been an overwhelming local response, says Douglas. She has been told readers outside the state and even the South will appreciate her recollections and adds, “There’s a resurgence of the South. People are yearning for the old ways, and we’ve still got it here.”

Visit www.thesouthiknew.com for a taste of Christian Monroe Holliday Douglas’s book.