How to write your family history

How to turn names, dates, documents and memories into a family history someone will actually read.

Most family histories are never read, because they are filed rather than written, a tree of names and dates that means everything to the compiler and little to anyone else. The ones that get read are stories. They take the same records and memories and shape them into something a grandchild will sit down with. Here is how to write that kind.

Choose a thread

You cannot tell five generations evenly, and you should not try. Find a thread, a migration, a house, a trade carried down, a single ancestor whose choices set the rest in motion. The thread gives the reader a way in and gives you a way to choose what stays. A family history about one true thing will be read, and one about everyone equally will sit on a shelf.

Gather before you write

Family history runs on sources, and they scatter fast. Pull together what exists, the birth, marriage and death records, immigration papers, wills, the shoebox of photographs, the letters and diaries, and above all the memories of the oldest people still here. Interview them first, because that material disappears in a way the paper records do not. Keep everything together, named and dated, so you can find it when you draft.

Write people as people

A name and two dates is not a person. Your job is to put flesh on the tree, what they did for a living, what the times did to them, the one story that survives about them, told as a scene. Where the record is thin, the careful, honest detail of the period can carry it, what the voyage was like, what the work was, what they would have seen. Write them as people a reader can picture, and the dates will look after themselves.

Keep it honest

Family stories grow in the telling, and your history is only worth keeping if a reader can trust it. Check the facts you can against the records, the dates, places and relationships, and where a family legend cannot be confirmed, say so on the page rather than passing it off as certain. Treat a relative's memory as their account, and note where versions differ. A history that is honest about its gaps is the more trustworthy for it.

Give it a shape

Decide how the book moves, straight down the generations, outward from one ancestor, or around themes like work, war and migration. Lay out the chapters before you draft, so the gathering has somewhere to go. A clear shape is what turns a pile of research into a book someone finishes.