Stephen Szabados - Write Your Family History: Easy Steps to Organize, Save and Share

Introduction

G enealogy research should go beyond finding documents and filling in charts. This book outlines a simple process that will aid your research and create pages of information that can be read and understood by all family members. Your research will become faster and more accurate, and your family can enjoy their family history.

We all have family stories that give insights into the lives of our ancestors. Some are entertaining, others are celebrations of our cultural heritage, and others are more historical by nature. We should save all family stories so they can accurately pass down to future generations.

You may find it hard to believe that your family history is essential to save. You should consider that all of our immigrant ancestors contributed to Americas history, and save their stories should for our grandchildren. The farmers and the factory workers contributed their efforts to the growth of America alongside all of the names listed in the history books. Our family histories should give clues about their roles, and this will help us understand our roots.

Your collection of family oral histories, photos, and documents are incomplete unless someone writes an explanation of how they are related. Explaining the relationship of your materials creates your unique family history and is the core of why someone needs to write them down for the enjoyment of your children and grandchildren. You may be reluctant to capture these stories because you do not consider yourself a writer. Writing your family history can seem to be a very challenging project for many people. If you feel you do not have the skills to do this, who in your family can? If you like to do the research, is there someone that can work with you to write it? It is essential to understand that someone in your family should capture and save the oral histories now before family members further dilute the stories.

I also find it challenging to write. However, I began creating summaries for the individuals that I was researching, and I used these as quick reference pages. When I discovered that family members could easily read the short summaries, I began slowly expanding the summaries to create my family history.

If you are interested in telling your family stories, I hope that the materials in this book will help you overcome your fears of writing and you will commit your family story to the written word. I show how getting started with brief biographical summaries can make writing easier and overcome your fears of writing, I cover simple methods for organizing the summaries and how I combined them into a larger document that later became my family history.

The book reviews a simple process that compiles oral history, family pictures, and genealogical documents and puts it together into a readable and exciting material that suddenly becomes your family history.

Dont be afraid to begin. Concentrate on finding one story and then another by doing the research. Finding the small pieces will make the task easier and will be fun. Eventually, the small pieces will begin to fit together, and the overall story that is your family history will appear.

My focus in the early stages in writing my family history was the research and identifying the stories that my relatives, documents, and pictures told. My focus was not on writing a history. The summaries that were the basis for the history were written to help with my research and to help share the information with my family. As I connected with family members, groups of summaries were merged to share information about their ancestors. Over time the merged groups of summaries were combined and organized in one large document that became the family history that was published and distributed to the family members.

As you can see, the family history came together almost by accident. This method put very little pressure on me to produce such an important document. There was a lot of work to do the research and keep the summaries updated, but the final material seemed to emerge and cry out to be published. Also, note that the summaries and documents could also stay in the ring binders and not be published. The ring binder will still be organized enough for someone in the future to pick up and continue your work. However, publishing your work gives the family more copies of your work and more chances that your work will survive and be available for someone to continue your work.

You should base your family history on thorough and sound research; identify what information is fact and what are conclusions; tell stories of our ancestors; be well organized in content and presentation; document all events (cite your sources); includes family documents and pictures

A family history can be a great treasure to you, your family, and future generations. It can help us understand our heritage both here in the U.S. and where our ancestors left. It lets us gain knowledge and appreciation for our ancestors and their lives.

Whichever path you choose, do the work so it can be organized and saved to be used by future generations. Get the details and do the work so that its worth saving.

Do it now!

CHAPTER One - Why Write Your family History

W hy write about your family history?

I have always wanted to know more about my familys history. However, I began my genealogical research after my parents and grandparents had died. I was handicapped by not having my parents or grandparents available for questions, but I got over it after I found my first documents. I quickly became addicted to genealogy research.

Once I began compiling the information from oral history and documents, I realized that family histories are more than piles of papers that list parents, grandparents, and their ancestors. Our family histories are made up of the stories that the family repeat in their oral histories, the pictures, and the documents. I found that I became more excited about my history as the stories developed on how these pieces of information were related. I also discovered that my initial view of my family changed quickly as the information and stories flowed from the documents. As I found more information, my family history gave me a greater closeness to my ancestors and their lives. They are identifying who, what and where about the family members I found in family photo albums will pass along the memories that my ancestors tried to capture in these photos. Interpreting the facts shown on the various documents and explaining their relationship in the lives of my ancestors brought my pages to life. Being able to see my ancestors in my material was important because only a few people enjoy doing the research and then interpreting the documents. However, most family members enjoy reading the stories. Our task is to find a way to save our family history in a format that can be enjoyed by most family members.