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For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History by Charley Kempthorne
Writing Your Family Story
Our articles and books may be forgotten over time, but if we write the story of our families, it’s likely to be handed down through the generations, giving us a form of the immortality every writer dreams of. After all, what story is more exciting to any reader than our own, or that of those who helped us become who we are? Telling family stories is a great way to improve our writing skills.
Sometimes the story tells itself best if we don’t write it in order. Sit down one Sunday afternoon and start making a list of all your personal memories. If you do journaling, refer to the journal. Don’t worry about order. Just get the list on paper or your computer. Now go through and shuffle them into order.
From here, you can either work systematically down the list, or go in random order. I prefer a random order because I think I tell the story better when I write what is vivid and memorable to me at that moment. Close your eyes, picture the event, and tell it. Be sure to include all the elements that make great fiction: plot, characterization, description, and dialogue. Tell it like a real story, as if it were for publication. Help your reader live the experience. Keep in mind, it may be read in two hundred years, and the world will be different then, so explain things clearly. Cars might well be relics found only in museums at the time of one of your future readers.
Once your own story is told, begin to tell the story of either your birth family or your married family. Prepare the same way you did for your own story, but keep in mind, it’s about everyone. It may be that you are the only person who tells the story, so try to give equal billing to all involved. Be fair and be kind, especially if the “characters” are still living, or people who love them are still living. There is nothing to be gained by hurting the people in your story or in your life.
You might want to conduct interviews with family members to get the facts. This lets you learn the story from the point of view of others, and you can mingle all the different memories and interpretations. This can be very enlightening. I’ve always been surprised that two people could go through the exact same experience, and remember it entirely differently. What was a wonderful, hilarious experience for one family member is a huge embarrassment to another. It’s great practice for your writing career, and you may extract some publishable material from the experience.
Once done, you can have it published through a self-publisher such as Lulu.com or you can simply type it up and send the disk to your family. It makes a unique holiday gift if you print it out, and you might partner with another family member to do a scrapbooking supplement.
Telling the story of our family is a meaningful way to use our writing talents to benefit the people we love the most.
For more detailed information on writing amd self-publishing family histories, try this book:
Producing a Quality Family History by Patricia Law Hatcher