Write Your Story

​As I sit at my desk while a ridiculously early winter storm is bearing down on the region, I’m trying to remember all the things I do like about winter.  There are very few… One of my favorite things when I’m stuck indoors is family history research.  Writing down those family stories is a great way to spend a day, an evening or weekend when the weather outside is no longer as enticing.  Having you written down some family stories from interviews, research or memories?  Let’s look at ideas to help us take that first step.

Before you start feeling discouraged that you haven't written down the stories yet, take time to give yourself credit for the things that you have accomplished.  Did you find some key family history data this summer?  Or perhaps discover an old scrapbook or a diary?  Or have you finally scanned all those old pictures? Was there a family reunion to connect with relatives?  Did your DNA results point to new branches of your family? Whatever you accomplished…congratulations!  All these activities will help you add layers to your story.
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Beginning is the most difficult part of any project. Here are some thoughts of how to get started.
You know the adage…How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  While hopefully none of us are elephant eaters, it does remind us that large projects are best accomplished in bite-sized pieces. I like to think about the 5 “W” s when planning out a project.
Planning and understanding the who, what, when, where and why.

1. Who - Are you writing this story for your immediate family?  A formal submission to an organization? For you? All of these are great reasons for writing down the family history.  Determining who your audience is, will help you to focus on the appropriate content.
2. What – Gather your research, pictures, and information and spend some time reviewing to determine what type of information you want to share.  Stories only?  Pictures? Copies of original documents? A specific topic?
3. When – When can apply to the timeline of your story?  Are you going back to the earliest ancestors and moving forward to today?  Are you only focusing on your immigrant family and their experience?  Or are you writing the story of your childhood? There are many possibilities.
4. Where – Is your story going to focus on a country?  A region? A special place? Or will it follow an ancestor as they journey through regions, telling about the impact that these locales had in their life?
5. Why—Does telling a certain story motivate you?  Are you interested in telling the story of every ancestor? Or perhaps you want your grandchildren to know more personal stories about your life.  Or maybe you want to capture your grandmother’s recipes and write about why these are important to your extended family.

There are many, many books that focus on how to write your family history.  You can do a quick search at your local library, bookstore or online. They are especially helpful as you work to create an accurate but interesting story while still remembering to include sources, footnotes and indexes.  Sometimes these are the very things that seem to drag down the creative process.  However, if you’ve ever found some key information about your family online or in a book only find that the author has not bothered to note their source, it can be frustrating to your readers!  Taking the extra step to note that information will become more valuable when you are no longer around to answer questions like “where did you find that story about Grandma” or “Great-grandpa’s death record isn’t in the state vital records.  How do you know the date?”

One of my favorite things to do is read other people’s family histories.  I love to see how creative people have been in sharing their stories, pictures and history.  Check in local archives or your library for published histories.  Now that self-publishing is more readily available and not as cost prohibitive, I think we’ll see more professionally published histories from fellow researchers.  Such a gift for their families and other researchers.

To give you some examples of ways that you can write your story, I’ll share a few histories that I think do a nice job of balancing the history of a family with readability. 

• Pencil Shavings: Growing Up in a One-Room Country School on the North Dakota Prairie by Lela Atwood Peterson, published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (September 12, 2016) This is a memoir about Lela’s childhood when she attended country school.  While it is a personal experience, the memories of country school would be familiar to others. 
• Britta’s Journey An Emigration Saga by Ann Marie Mershon, published by Singing River Publications (August 1, 2004).  Ann has taken a true story about an emigrant family and created a children’s novel, using the point of view of a child to tell their experience from leaving Finland to arriving in America.
• Dear Unforgettable Brother: The Stavig Letters from Norway and America, 1881-1937 by Jane Torness Rasmussen (Compiler), John S Rasmussen (Compiler), Edvard Hoem (Contributor), Betty A Bergland (Contributor)published by South Dakota State Hist Society Pr (September 13, 2013).  This collection of letters gives us peak into what life was like for families in Norway and America while sharing the history of a specific family. 
• If you use a computer system to capture your family research, take advantage of their reports.  You will need to add more content and written context to the reports, but it is a place to start with all those names and dates.  Just keep in mind that your reader doesn’t necessarily know your family like you do so be sure to include those extra tidbits that help them following the ancestral journey and make it more interesting than dates and names.

You do not have to start your writing at the beginning.  The key is just to begin capturing those stories.  If you want to write the funny story about Aunt Mabel in the 1930s first that’s ok.  You can compile and create flow later.  Don’t let writers block or your inner critic stop you from writing those stories to share with family.

There are so many ways to share your research and history with others.  The key is to start.  Give yourself some time to think about what you’d really like to accomplish. Write a short bio about one of your grandparents.  Or write down some memories from your childhood.  Your descendants will appreciate that you wrote down the story—whether it is published in leather-bound book or a typed manuscript or shared in a notebook. The point is to write down the stories before they are lost.  Happy writing!
 
“We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one eh?”
-- The Doctor, Season 5, Episode 13