Family History and Your Life Story

By admin, on July 22nd, 2010

Family Roots

When writing your life story, you get to decide how you want to add your family history. Some people spend their time in the present tense so they only mention relatives as they encounter them in their life. Some people start their stories with the previous generations before starting their own stories. There is no better way or even right way. It depends on how you are telling the story. And it depends what you want to accomplish in your writing. If you want to connect generations in your family then the more information you can get about previous generations is key. But remember that you too will be that past generation is a few years. So write with the detailed information about your own life as well as about the past generations that you get from interviews or research.

I would start in the regular library. I would see what information they have about the communities in which your family lived. I would use the help of the librarian to direct me to books that give an idea of what it was like to live in _______ in 1870 or what ever years your family might have settled in a area. Once you create you list of book and research source, you then can go on lime to get the rest of information. I would check old newspapers from the area to get of feel for the community. Only once you have painted a picture of what it was like would start the genealogy.

I keep on seeing those commercials from Ancestry.com that say “you don’t need to know what your are looking for but just have to start looking”. Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history resource, with more than one million paying subscribers. More than 5 billion records have been added to the site in the past 13 years. Ancestry users have created more than 17 million family trees containing over 1.7 billion profiles. Ancestry.com has local Web sites directed at nine countries, including its flagship Web site at www.ancestry.com.

I too think you have start the journey but I think you may want to know some “local history” to understand what you are looking at. When you see lots of people dying in the same year, you would know what the disease was that had been through the town causing mass deaths or might have been a draught or flood that hit farmers very hard and your family were farmers. All those items can paint a picture of you ancestors that you never met before or known and from just reading the birth and death records bare a part of your story.