Family History Books and Writing your Story
Writing Your Family History Story. Where to Start.
Family history is becoming more popular with most people wanting to know where their ancestors came from, how and why they travelled thousands of nautical miles to make their home in Australia.
Where to start your story is generally what everyone that researches wants to know.
Ultimately we all collect a lot of information and end up with a multitude of papers that we continue to shuffle from one place to the next.
From my perspective, I got tired of doing the last mentioned and decided to focus on another method which seems to be working for me.
I started at my father and moved back through the generations from him and followed my paternal line first. For example from my father to his and so on. When I managed to go as far back as I could, I kept a log and created a family tree with the information I had found. This enabled me to keep track of who was who as the family name that kept repeating in the English line was James and each father was of that name and the eldest child of each family was named so.
Next was to find all that I could on my Grandfather and start writing everything that I found in chronological (by date) order. Once I found all that I could I then researched my next person eg. a sibling and added another page of notes or text on that person. By writing in this method I found that I was in fact writing the book as I went. If at any stage I found anything else on a person that I had in my notes, I simply add to that story.
I use Evernote to keep track of my research as it is very useful for all types of files. Photos can be seen in full, pdf documents render so that they can be read without opening onto your screen. Notes can be written directly onto a note within Evernote and Folders for each person can be created and are easily searchable. Evernote has made my research so much easier, it also has its own web clipper so that clippings of documents can be taken from an online website. It also can be installed onto all types of media: your computer, laptop, iPad, phone, etc. It can be accessed via the app or an online page and all documents can be found on the cloud. Most important thing is that it is easy to use with the capability of dragging and dropping files or documents directly to Evernote.
There are so many free family history sites and it's not necessary to pay for subscriptions to Ancestry; My Heritage or the like as most can be accessed at your local library on their computer for free. Alternately you could join your state Family History Society, I am a member of the Queensland Family History Society QFHS for a small fee of $75 per annum, and this enables me to access those sites for free from my computer in the comfort of my own home. The Societies also give training and guidance from the volunteers that are always available, a great place also to start. They are well versed in Family History and genealogy.
So now that you have been given all this information Get to it.