FAMILY HISTORY PUBLISHING

Writing Your Family Story

Genealogies and family trees are the skeleton of your family story, and family history is the rest of the body of information that makes your story interesting. Family members will enjoy hearing the family stories from long ago. Collect and write down as many family stories as you can. Use them to enhance your basic family tree.

Some stories can be gleaned from the facts. Take a look at the age of the parents and siblings at the age of the birth of each child. Note how long each family member lived, and how old each person was when they died, and also, how old they were when other family members died. This helps you understand what the family had to deal with. Where the children orphaned at an early age? Did the mother die in childbirth. Where there step-families? Was anyone sent off to war and did they come home alive? Did the family move from place to place, or stay in the same area for all their lives? Did the family emmigrate to another country, perhaps even to America from overseas? What kind of work did the family do? What was their economic and political status?

Additional information can be gotten from studying the geography, local history, jurisdictional history and political history of the place your ancestors lived. How did they feel about their social class and their status in it? What kind of education did family members receive? What was the role of women? How long did family members wait to get married? How many children did they normally have and what percentage of those children lived to adulthood? What historical events took place during the lifetime of each family, and how did these historic events play out in the lives of the family members. All of these factors will tell you a lot of information about where and how your family lived in the past, and why they made the descisions that eventually lead to your life in your home today.

Adding Pictures and Documents

Once you have a basic story line fleshed out for your family, you can begin to add pictures and documents that prove the facts and show the faces and scenery from you family's history. If you are using a word processing program, that is easy. If you are writing a family journal longhand, you may want to save pages to paste in copies of photos and documents. You will not want to paste original documents in your history, as they may not be replaceable. Using a typewriter is also an option, but if you can type, using word processing is much easier. Most public libraries provide computers for typing manuscripts as well as internet access.

You will need to scan or digitize your photos to put them in a word processing document. If you do not have a scanner, you can often order your photos from the drugstore on a cd and use those photos for your documents.

Table of Contents and Indexing

To make your family story more user-friendly, you will want to include a Table of Contents and an Index. That way researchers will be able to use your story to find out if they are related to you. They might be fifth cousins and not as familiar with all the families that married into your family. But even for those that are famiiar, they will want to be able to turn to the pages that mention themselves, and whoever they want to learn more about with ease. Table of Contents list the page numbers in sequential order, so you will need to have the content of each page ready before you begin. Indexes are a cross-reference to surnames, places, localities, and other subjects listed alphabetically at the back of your book.

Adding Appendices to the Family History

Some family histories also include appendices. YOu can use an appendix to provide maps, photos, charts and documents that might be important references for many pages in your family story, so they can be quickly found.

Getting Your Family History Published

There are two ways to get a Family History published - self-publish, or find a publisher. Finding publisher is often expensive, as most publishers who take on genealogies and family histories use the "Vanity Press" method, making the author bear the entire cost. However, this can be useful for folks who are not familiar with word processing and page layout. The publisher will charge for page layout as well as for printing costs. Vanity publishers like this often require that orders of at least 1000 copies minimum, which can drive up the costs of the books that may not sell in the quantity ordered.

Fortunately, there are some publish-on-demand sites on the web now that allow for publishing a smaller number of issues of a book as you require them. Patrons can use a search engine like Google to find and compare what these internet-based publishing companies offer. Some offer fancy papers and binding for an extra charge. Ancestry.com has a service where they will publish a family heirloom book with your patron's information in fancy style. They will charge you a fancy price as well.

Self-publishing your Family History

Self publishing a Family History takes more work on the author's part, but can be a considerable cost savings. You can type up and print out each page, put it in order yourself, and take the manuscript down to a local copy shop to have copies printed and bound. Usually these copy shops charge by the page. They will charge extra for color pages of photos. New copy machines can easily print booklets for you, which may be all you need. If you have hundreds of pages, you might want to consider more than stapled binding. Glue binding will last a while, and plastic spiral binding will allow for opening the book flat on a table. But these do not last for decades. If the author wants to self-publish a family heirloom, they might want to contact a book printer and binder to put the book together Providing a list of local book binders would be helpful to patrons at this stage in their research.

---

This website written and designed by:
Sharon Marie Centanne,
Genealogy Research Instructor and Internet Trainer
Please direct any questions to:
Sharon.

This page updated April 15, 2008

---