Writing a family history can allow you to preserve the stories of your ancestors, giving you further insights into your roots and, by extension, providing you with a better understanding of yourself. It also preserves these crucial stories for future generations to enjoy and cherish (as well as future historians eager for quality material). Once you decide to take on this intriguing project, though, what’s next? What should you do first? Here are pro tips on logical steps to take.

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First, gather together and organize the genealogical material that you already have or have ready access to. This can include material that’s already written down and writing down what’s in your memory. Also check in with various family members to see what they can contribute. Many times, families have a “keeper of the stories,” which is often a person from an older generation but can be a family member of any age who shares an interest in your shared ancestry. Ask if you can have copies of anything they possess about your family history with items like family letters and photos (especially with captions) serving as cherished resources.

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Next, identify the gaps that you’d like to fill in, including going back further in time than the information you’ve gathered provides. Do you want to go back to when family members immigrated to the United States? After you identify a scope of information desired for your book, you can then work on filling in the ancestry-related gaps.

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A great way to find resources to fill in those gaps is Cyndi’s List. This is a rock star level of compiled websites and databases that allow you to search for information, including by country, state, religion, and by time period among other methods. Note that, although Cyndi’s List is free, some of the resources she lists may come with a fee. 

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One of the resources listed is quite familiar to most people conducting genealogical research—and that’s Ancestry.com. Besides conducting your own research, you may quickly discover that other people have already been building family trees that intersect with yours, allowing you to glean more relevant information from Ancestry. This website comes with a free basic version and a much more robust paid version that allows you to obtain scans of important documents. Note that many libraries offer access to Ancestry.com when you’re a card holder; you may, however, need to conduct the research within one of the library’s branches. Perhaps you could meet other people from your family at the library to make it a fun research-related day out.

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Depending upon your feelings about DNA testing, if you do so with the Ancestry product, you will receive notifications about people who share your DNA (often labeled as second, third, or fourth cousins), and a true treasure trove of information can open up to you that way. 

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FamilySearch.org is a massive collection of genealogical records compiled by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it doesn’t just focus on people who belonged to the Mormon Church. The material is provided, free of charge, to people of any religious affiliation. 

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Also interview family members with memories of people from previous generations, recording what they have to say. If they don’t live near you, arrange a call with them via FreeConferenceCall.com. This site offers numerous services that really are free with add-on ones coming with only small fees. You can receive recordings of the calls that can be easily turned into transcripts, which can serve as time-saving rough draft text for your book (more about rough drafts later in this post). To find good questions to ask, The Oral History Workshop: Collect and Celebrate the Life Stories of Your Family and Friends by Cynthia Hart and Lisa Samson is an excellent resource.

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Use resources like Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com to see what ancestors of yours made the news. You can search by their names, filtering it appropriately by the geographical areas and dates. Find-A-Grave.com can help you to gather more information, typically showing photos of the gravestones and related data. Sometimes, only bare bones information exists at this site while, other times, people have supplemented it in richly useful ways. 

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If members who will be included in your family history served in the military, check NationalArchives.gov and gather what information you can. For a fee, you can order your ancestors’ military records and pension records. Another site with quality military information: Fold3.com. 

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Look at where each of your ancestors were born and lived. Then, contact historical societies and libraries in those areas to see if they have helpful information for your family history project. If your ancestors attended a college or university, you could also check with their libraries and archival departments. 

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When researching ancestors that lived in another time and place, read about the setting where they lived to ground their stories into their reality. Even if no one from your ancestry is specifically mentioned in these resources, you may gain additional ideas for your research.

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To create a structure for your family history for future generations, information found at genealogy sites and documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates, and death certificates can help to outline the story for you. Family bibles can serve the same purpose if you have access to them. Important as factual information is, though, you can go beyond this data to enrich the book for today’s readers and for those of future generations through the inclusion of family lore. 

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So, also ask your relatives for family stories that have been shared and passed down. For example, maybe Great-Aunt Melissa shocked the neighborhood when she went outside without putting on her shoes or Great-Grandpa Sam loved to take his grandchildren fishing and share tall tales of his youth that could rival ones told by Mark Twain. Although the specifics remembered by family members may not be hard and fast data, they will allow future generations to know what their ancestors were like, personality-wise, and flesh out the dry bones of the data you’ve gathered. When sharing family lore, you could always say, “Sam was legendary for his larger-than-life stories,” indicating that, even if the details of his tales weren’t always strictly factual, this demonstrates how he related with others.

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As anyone who likes to research or browse the internet for intriguing stories knows, it’s easy to go down plenty of rabbit holes on the web. At some point, though, you’ve got to start the actual writing process. When it begins to get difficult to gather new information or you just see the same details, over and over, it’s likely to be time. Then, if you do find new data about your ancestors while writing your book, you can always add it to your manuscript. Plus, the reality is that, even if you think you’re done with your research, questions can come up during the writing process that you’ll really want to try to answer.

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Some people envision their family history books as ones filled strictly with factual information while others imagine a more creative telling where family lore is included. Depending upon your purpose, there’s no right or wrong answer. If you simply want to preserve the information for future generations, then a “just-the-facts” family history story may be just fine. If you’d like for others to engage with the stories and bring your ancestors’ lives to people’s attention, then you’ll want to write a book with material that allows this to happen. Some people like to include humor while others want to incorporate moments of high drama—or both. It’s your ancestors’ story, so do what makes sense to you.

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Fascinating as the people in your ancestry line can be, you’ll want to ground them within real-world settings that allow readers to envision them interacting with their surroundings. Did they, for example, own a bucolic farm where white, woolly sheep foraged on bluegrass and Grandma Louise picked plump blackberries for her blue ribbon pies? Or, did they work hard in a smoky urban environment to support their large family, which allowed future generations to go to college and live out their dreams? Setting really matters.

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How you write the book, in some respects, depends upon whom you envision as readers. If you’re writing for family members only, for example, you might want to include specific addresses where members of your shared ancestry lived and describe the homes’ layouts in detail. If you’re writing for a broader audience, you may not want to share such particulars for privacy reasons and/or because it’s important—for a wider audience—to keep the action moving along.

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A point of view character (or POV character) tells the family history from their perspective, which is something important to consider if you’re going beyond a simple gathering and retelling of facts. That person provides context; using our examples from above, they’d refer to Sam as their great-grandfather, Louise as their grandmother, and Melissa as their great aunt.

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Think about your favorite movie that contains numerous characters. You typically “see” the film through the perspective of a POV character or think about the unfolding of the story in ways that would impact that specific character. When that doesn’t happen (in a book or film), the story can lack a strong focus. 

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Let’s say that the POV character in your life history book is a family member named Robert. This doesn’t mean that only Robert’s stories are included in this book. Far from it! Stories included can be about ancestors who are no longer living and from other family members who helped to contribute material for or are featured in the book. Robert is, instead, the lens through which the entire family’s life history can be shared in a structured, easily understood manner.

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Perhaps the POV character stays the same throughout the book. Or, maybe each section of the family history is told through the lens of a different POV character—or it could change by chapter. These are the decisions that need to be made. You could experiment with different ones to see which setup works best, or perhaps the choice is obvious.

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Many family history books are organized chronologically, which makes logical sense. Even when structured chronologically, though, it’s often best to start with an “inciting incident”—an engaging event that grabs readers’ attention and sets the stage for what happens next. Let’s say, for example, that members of your ancestry escaped from a war-torn country in a dramatic fashion. You could start the book with this event and then continue from there or go back in time to let us know how their story developed before this crisis point—and then chronologically tell us what happened after the thrilling escape throughout the generations.

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Other times, books intended for both current and future generations organize the book thematically. You might, for example, group together family stories of military service across generations in one section of the book and focus on the family’s entrepreneurs in another, philanthropy work in yet another section, and so forth. Each family history book will be unique and can provide variations on the themes accordingly. 

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It’s typically helpful to outline your book before writing it, but that doesn’t mean you need to remember or reuse the outline type using Roman numerals taught in school. If that system works for you, then, great! If not, it’s okay to jot notes about various elements of your book, moving them around until they fit into an order that works well for your family history. In other words, you can be as formal or informal as you’d like. This isn’t an outline that you need to show outsiders. It’s to help you and your family get organized with the wealth of material that you’ve collected. 

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With your first draft, also called a “rough draft,” it’s important to get the gist of the story down. If you’re someone who can write more polished material from the start, that’s wonderful—but that’s not how it typically works in most instances. If you get to a section where you find that you’re missing information, you could write FILL IN MORE HERE before continuing. The point of a first draft is to transform the often-intimidating blank page into the beginnings of a family history that you can revise and polish. It’s to get you past the stumbling block of simply getting started.

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If you’re working with another family member on this project, you might want to get feedback from them when the first draft is finished. Or, you may prefer to wait until it’s more refined before sharing the text.

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If it fits your timeline, put your first draft away for a while. This will allow you to review and revise it with fresh eyes once you return to the project. When you pull the text up again, you might realize that you’ve discovered new information in the interim that can be added, and you might find ways to refine anecdotes to make them more humorous or more compelling. You might decide that too much word count exists in one part of the book while another part needs more bulk. Even experienced professional writers go through this stage. It’s just a natural part of producing the best book possible. 

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Once you’ve completed the book, you’ll want to share it with your audience—whether that means friends or family members or a broader audience. One option is traditional publishing where you research the market trends and find out which publishing houses want certain kinds of material; craft a book proposal to entice an agent to represent you or a publishing house to consider your manuscript; and go through this process. On the far other end of the scale, you can self publish, hiring people to edit your book, format it, and create a book cover; buy your own ISBN and barcode; choose a printer; and come up with a distribution plan. 

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If that sounds like a lot of work, well, it can be. There are also hybrid choices, though, like StoryTerrace that can handle everything under one umbrella, including to provide you with a skilled, experienced ghostwriter who knows how to navigate questions of tone, setting, audience, POV characters, book structure, and more.

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At StoryTerrace, we work right alongside you so that your unique vision for future generations comes to fruition. We leverage cutting edge technology, Bookmaker, to ensure clear communications and ease of process. Interested? Reach out today!

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