How to Write Your Family History

If you are looking for a book about how to develop your family’s genealogy, How to Write Your Family History is not the book for you. Instead, you need a how-to-book about genealogy research. My personal recommendation is Who’s Your Daddy? By Carolyn B. Leonard, which is a guide to genealogy from start to finish, designed for both beginners and anyone else who needs help along the way. This book, How to Write Your Family History, is designed specifically for writers who have been “volunteered” to write their family histories but already have genealogy reports from two or three different family members. This book assumes someone else researched the information and asked you, their writer relative, to turn it into a book instead of 200 pages of meaningless information.

Actually researching your family history is hard, tedious, confusing work, especially if your family had a habit of naming sons after fathers and uncles. In my family tree, James is a favorite name, and sometimes even brothers were named James with different middle names. Compounding the issue is the fact that many men (especially those named after their fathers and grandfathers) went by nicknames. My great grandfather was named Charles, but my great grandmother called him Mitt. His father and three of his nephews were also named Charles. Whether or not your relatives have already completed the necessary research, you will feel like a master detective once you’ve finished unraveling all the confusing names.