Your Family Is Important Tell their Story Make it Personal
Computer programs allow you to create beautiful family trees, charts, and group sheets. Don’t just organize them from your earliest ancestor to your present-day families. Print them and call it your family story. It is the lineage of your family—a wonderful thing to behold—but it is not a story. Take the extra steps to flesh out your family’s names and dates with stories, photographs, a historical context, and county, state, and federal documents. Trace their journey from their country of origin to the United States and how they settled into life here. Add a few treasured family recipes and now you have a story that everyone will be excited to read.
Is it hard work? Yes! Is it time-consuming? Yes! Is it entertaining, exciting, and educational? Absolutely!
In genealogy, always work from the present to the past—from the known to the unknown. Begin gathering all your own family documents and write a short story about your family—a vignette. Next, gather your parents’ documents and write their vignette, followed by your grandparents, your great-grandparents to as far back as records exist. This could take years, so you must decide when to publish and how far back to publish. You might do your nuclear family to celebrate your parents’ 50th anniversary or you might decide to go back to your earliest ancestor and publish an entire ancestral line for a family reunion. Or you could do both!
There are many websites now that can help you get started and there are many records available online now also. Consider visiting local libraries with genealogy collections, writing to the National Archives and other repositories, and visiting courthouses in the states and counties in which your ancestors lived. The less that you know about your family, the more research you will need to do. Librarians will help you as well as private research companies.
For the first section of your book, write accounts about the family and stories that place them in a locale and historical context for the first part of your book from information that you have gathered from records and interviews from family members. The next section of the book should include family photographs and illustrations that document family events. The last section of your book should include copies of the documents that you’ve gathered. When writing about sensitive material, discuss it first with the family, but tell the truth; don’t be defensive.
Keep a list of family members’ addresses, emails, and telephone numbers as you go. Send them family charts to fill out; invite them to a reunion; invite them to order your book. Ask them for family photographs and recipes. Set up interviews. Have family members review your book and edit it carefully for spelling and grammar mistakes.
Your family is a part of history. Make sure it doesn’t go untold.
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