‘90s FAMILY : He’s Digging Up His Roots and Putting Them in Print

Three years ago, 60-year-old bachelor Richard McNally started to reconstruct his Midwestern roots.

“I realized I was probably never going to have my own family, and I wanted to leave something behind,” he says. So after a series of calls and visits to his native Indiana to share oral family histories, “Forbregd Fables,” the first issue of the Forbregd family newsletter, came into being.

Initial mailing: about three dozen copies, with additional copies in the “back issues department,” which doubles as McNally’s bedroom. He plans to put out a new issue annually.

The black and white six-page newsletter traces the descendants of Norwegian immigrant Gus Forbregd and Irish Mabel McNally from just after the Civil War through seven generations to the present. It also contains a photo of the young Gus.

The photo and the history that went with it were McNally’s invitation to a world he had never known. His memory of his grandfather is of an 82-year-old dying of stomach cancer. The photo shows a charismatic 20-year-old looking confidently at the camera as he is about to embark on an eight-day bicycle race. The research also showed him his family’s part in such historical events as World War I and II and the Depression.

McNally moved here from suburban South Bend, Ind., 33 years ago, to pursue an acting career whose highlight was playing the lead in “The Music Man” at the former Morgan Theater in Santa Monica. In time, he became a substitute teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District, developed a passion for tennis and became editor of the Santa Monica Tennis Club newsletter.

“So, I already had the newsletter format in my computer,” he says. McNally wrote up the family newsletter as a series of articles similar to the club’s newsletter, with a phone and mailing list insert. “I’ve got cousins whose children don’t know that the others exist, and I wanted to facilitate communication between them,” he says.

“And who knows how long this newsletter will stay around. Maybe in a hundred years, someone else will pick it up and continue tracing the family tree.

McNally writes the newsletter in a “you are there” style. One article describes his uncle, Jim Forbregd, on a morning in 1943 when he was 20. “He met the mailman at the door in his boxer shorts,” writes McNally. He whooped with joy. He had been accepted into Naval Flight School. “Grandma sat down at the dining room table and began to cry.”

Another article is about ancestor Bill McNally, who, “raised some eyebrows when he married his first cousin.”

“I wondered whether to include that,” says McNally. “But Bill’s dead, and everybody in the family already knew it, so it couldn’t hurt anybody.”

Since sending out the newsletter, he says, “I’ve been hearing from cousins and relatives I haven’t spoken to in years, and they’re all laughing on the phone and telling me how much they loved it. My mother left me a message telling me how proud she was. I’ve kept that tape.

“Doing this made me feel all the warmth and love from my family,” he says. “I just wish I hadn’t waited so long.

“To anyone else who wants to do this, my advice is, you don’t need a computer to put it all together, and you don’t need to first fill in all the blanks in your family history. Go with what you’ve got. Once you start the ball rolling, others will contact you, and whatever blanks you have in the family history will fill themselves in later.”

As for himself, “I’ve already started collecting the pieces for next year’s issue.”