Family History Writing

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​If your summer has been like mine, despite my best intentions, I find it hard to stay indoors to write about my family history. I’m always looking for motivation to help me continue my endeavors. Let’s look at some ideas.

 1. Take an inspiring writing class or watch a video. 
a. Here’s a video from Lynn Palermo who specializes in teaching people to write their family histories. Check out the video and other offerings at the Family History Writing Studio.
b. How to Maintain Your Writing Momentum Through the Summer Months | The Family History Writing Studio

2. If you can’t get in the mood to write, pause and spend time thinking about the information you have and who you want to share it with. When we think about our audience, it helps to narrow the focus. For example, your grandchildren may find the story of how great grandfather stowed away on a ship to come to America interesting, but they probably won’t be excited to look at pages of dates and historical events. As much as we find all our discoveries fascinating, sadly others don’t. They don’t live and breathe all this information.

3. Perhaps the thought of writing your family history becomes overwhelming. What if every couple of weeks you wrote a brief biography about one ancestor or ancestor couple…don’t worry about their ancestors right now, just write about their life. Eventually you can piece together these biographies into a story format.

4. Organize. Sometimes the reason we can’t start our writing is that we have so much information that we are overwhelmed. Take some time to review the data and break it into chunks by time period or places or by generations. As mentioned before, as much as we would like to include everything we find, sometimes we need to parse down the data to make our story more interesting to non-genealogists.

While I still don’t know if you can resist the lure of summer and all the activities that go with it, I hope that this has given you some ideas to help motivate you. Happy writing!