When Violet Ruth Pistole turned a gun on herself in a Dallas, Texas, package store in 1952, she was a woman of 27 with two husbands in her past and a four-year-old son she rarely saw. She wasn't alone when she raised the gun to fire.
Violet's story -- Out With a Bang -- is just one of the ancestories in this engaging collection by writer Marcia Smith. Each story is a vivid encounter with the murderers and madmen, explorers and settlers, and above all, ordinary men and women in her family tree. She depicts defining moments in their lives with brilliant details, adhering to facts while unearthing emotional truths. Among many others, we meet A Virtuous Woman who took huge risks to help ailing neighbors in the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago; we escape with a runaway wife in The Runaway; we witness the shocking crime of a jealous lawyer in Murder in Muskogee; and admire a dedicated teacher in The Schoolmarm. While portraying them as individuals, Smith shows their lives in the broader context of American history as they live through plagues, wars, booms, busts, and sweeping social changes.
Smith was inspired by historian George Trevelyan's comment that If you could make alive for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits, that is history to me! The Woman in the Well and Other Ancestories accomplishes precisely that. Smith's portraits come to life as time-traveling mini-biographies, making for fascinating and compelling reading.
About the Author: Marcia Smith had a long career as an award-winning journalist for newspapers and other periodicals, beginning in college as the news editor for the University Daily at Texas Tech University with later stints at the Huntsville (AL) News and Phoenix Today News. For a dozen years she was a columnist and feature writer at the Dallas Times Herald, as well as a contributor to People, Leisure, and Life magazines, among others.

Seeking to nurture her interests in women's issues and cultural history, she enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she received a Master of Arts in the Humanities, with a thesis that focused on the depiction of women's illness in 19th-century popular literature.

From there it was a natural step to teaching journalism and literature at Dallas's Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts from 1992 to 2005.

The biographical vignettes that make up this collection are a perfect marriage of her experience as a writer and researcher and of her interests in the lives of ordinary men and women in the distant past. While all the subjects in these essays have a familial connection near or distant to her, she has recently branched out to explore the lives of Dallas's early citizens buried in the historic Oakland Cemetery.