photo: bananaana 04, creative commons license
How you decide to tell your family story depends on your goals, the amount of time you have to spend, and what you’re comfortable doing. I’m a mystery writer, and I approach family history as if it were a mystery story—conflicting clues, unreliable information, secrets—but nevertheless enabling some sort of conclusion.
As last Friday’s general tips for organizing and reporting your genealogical findings emphasized, there is no one “right way” to do this. Three ways to narrow the task of presenting your data were described yesterday. Here are two more elaborate, but very different, options.
Broad in Information, Simple in Execution
My goal in exploring my family’s story has been to understand better the context of my ancestors’ lives, so my family history includes a lot of information about the places and times they lived in. In this, I’ve had the great benefit of contributions from other family members and especially the partnership with a first cousin who lives many states away.
Most of our research has been on the Edwards family. There’s lots of information online about the Edwardses, much of it bogus. Here’s why, if you’re interested (large amounts of money are involved).
I haven’t taken the plunge of putting our family story online, though there would be many advantages of doing so. To date, it’s still a Word document—225 pages long, with 350 footnotes, photographs, charts, maps, and numerous appendixes. Coping with such a large and, in places, unwieldy document, I’ve learned one overriding lesson: don’t let your reader get lost!
People can grasp graphical “family tree” information quicker than text. A whole family tree, which can include hundreds of names, is probably best created online in one of the sites developed for that purpose. However, using descendant software (some of which is free and open source; see this discussion) to display a relevant portion of the tree keeps readers oriented.
New Haven, Conn., 1641
Maps and timelines help your readers—and you, too!— stay oriented. For example, I found an interactive map of old London on which I can approximate the location of an ancestor’s shop in 1550. Maps can reveal relationships. The 1641 map of New Haven, Conn., shows the householders’ names, including our ancestor’s and that of their neighbor, a ship’s captain active in the Chesapeake Bay. Thanks to him, the next generation of our family ended up in Tidewater Maryland.
Graphics are helpful too. Charts, maps, illustrations, bulleted lists—all those elements break up your text and enhance readability. Of course if you have family photos, that’s great, but feel free to be creative. Some of the pictures in our Civil War chapter are historical photos of particular battle-sites. Look for images that are not copyright protected so that you are free to “publish” your work to the Web. (Google Images > Tools > Usage Rights > labeled for reuse)
Narrow-to-Broad in Information, Elaborate in Execution
Finally, there’s a true high-end way to go, with a self-published book. Find lots of information on those choices, including some pricing information, in this guide.
Ancestry.com has a publishing partnership with MyCanvas, for example, where you do most of the writing work. Another example is a company like Bind These Words, which combines family interviews with photographs and graphic elements. The cost of such a project depends on the time involved and number of photos/graphics. (I have not worked with either of them.)
These are examples to explore. While working with a commercial publisher is expensive, it might be appropriate for some defined piece of your project or to commemorate a special wedding anniversary or other family milestone.