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Writing Your Family History » General Resources

44 Links

  • Adding Detail to Your Narrative

    Article by Patricia Law Hatcher.

  • Association of Personal Historians

    An international organization of skilled professionals passionate about preserving life stories.

  • Association of Personal Historians - Helping You Record Your Life Stories and Memories

    Tips for capturing family memories and interviewing elders. Lists of upcoming conferences and workshops to enhance interviewing and other skills. Membership roster lists oral and personal historians by state.

  • Editorial Services, Carolyn Schott Consulting

    Need help writing or editing your family history? This professional editor offers special rates to genealogists.

  • Family History Writing

    Noeline Kyle's Writing Family History offers practical advice for writing your family history, free downloads, and books on writing and researching your family history. Writing Family History Made Very Easy and her books on her own family plus many free articles can be accessed via this website.

  • Family Memory Book

    By offering this Family Memory Book to

  • History Echoes

    History Echoes is dedicated to offering ideas, strategies, and exercises to help family history writers write about the past and present in ways that will interest, and maybe even captivate, their current and future readers. Whether writing a biographical piece, a descriptive vignette, an essay about a family artifact or heirloom, a narrative, or a combination piece, family history writers will find useful strategies and tips to inspire their writing about the people, artifacts, and stories that make up their family history.

  • HistoryLines $

    Researching the life story of your ancestor is hard. So is writing their life story. HistoryLines automatically creates a pre-written, editable life sketch for any of your ancestors based on the when and where they lived in history.

  • How to write your family history

    How to Write Your Family History is a new app that uses tried-and-tested teaching methods to help you turn the extraordinary lives of your ancestors into compelling stories - for fun, for publication and for posterity. Available for sale through the iTunes store.

  • Knox Trail Ances-Tree

    Brent Chadwick of Massachusetts, has created a series of templates to be used for genealogical reports.

    • Forensic Report Templates

      A template that can be used by forensic genealogists to create client reports for attorneys and others.

    • Narrative Genealogy Templates

      Several multiple generation genealogy templates available for Microsoft Word in NGSQ and Register format, modeled after the formats in Numbering Your Genealogy by Curran, Crane, and Wray. The templates make use of macros to insert Microsoft Word's auto-numbering.

    • Simplified Narrative Templates

      2 and 3 Generation Genealogy Templates available for Microsoft Word in NGSQ format, modeled after the formats in Numbering Your Genealogy by Curran, Crane, and Wray. The templates use Microsoft Word's auto-numbering.

  • Legacy Family Tree Webinars - Writing Up Your Research (without using genealogy software) $

    By Claudia Breland. Legacy Family Tree Webinars are available with a monthly or annual webinar membership subscription.

  • Maybe someone should write that down...

    A website for family historians who really want to get all the stories of our ancestors preserved in written form to go along with the facts and stats. Authored to assist a beginner or a seasoned researcher, this blog shows great ways to get started on a history that will be cherished and read for many generations.

  • Memoir Mentor

    Classes, seminars, podcasts, and book for memoir and family history writers.

  • Pen to Paper: Writing Styles

    Why are most family history publications so heavy-going? Because most family history writers use only one of the literary styles we have at our disposal – the “encyclopedia” style of writing – whereas they should use more. Genealogist and biographer Carol Baxter explores these literary styles and provides links to more detailed information as well as writing examples.

    • Descriptive Writing

      Most genealogists craft little more than "prose timelines" in their family history writing — that is, lists of facts turned into paragraphs of prose. This dry "expository" or "encyclopedia" style of writing usually fails to engage their readers. However, the addition of descriptive and sensory language helps to produce books and articles that readers want to read. Author and genealogist Carol Baxter shows you how.

    • Interesting Fact-Focused Writing (aka Expository Writing)

      Most family historians use only the "expository" (or “encyclopedia”) style of writing when they write up the results of their research. Unfortunately, the manner in which they communicate these facts is usually dry and forgettable. However, with a bit more effort, they can communicate more interesting and memorable "encyclopedia" style prose. Author and genealogist Carol Baxter shows you how.

    • Storytelling in Family History Writing

      We all love a good story. Our family histories are usually full of good stories. However, most genealogists craft these stories as a list of facts rather than communicating them as "stories". Let author and genealogist Carol Baxter show you how to craft a good story for a family history or biography.

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