Who's the Audience for Your Memoir or Family History?

Some of our Stories To Tell workshops begin with a “Dedication Page” exercise. We ask participants to answer two questions:

• Who is your book for?
• Why are they special to you?

The exercise is designed to make participants think about the people who will be reading their books. Understanding the audience for your book can sharpen its focus and make it much more engaging.

If you say you’re writing for a “general audience” or “society” or “everybody,” the tone of your book may be flat and formal. But if you decide that you are telling a story to a single person or a specific group of people you will use a particular way of speaking or voice. You would tell a story differently if the audience was your grandmother than if it was you boss or your bridge club or your daughter’s fourth grade class. Knowing the audience for your book will allow you to adopt the appropriate tone, vocabulary and degree of informality.

It’s important to recognize that different audiences have different frames of reference. If you are writing for your grandchildren things like phonographs, typewriters or polio might require some explanation. If you are a military veteran writing for other veterans, you may assume that they have experiences similar to yours and dispense with some of the detail you can assume is common to all of you. If you are writing a tribute for a person who is retiring after a long career you will want to emphasize accomplishments and positive traits with less focus on personal life. Awareness of audience will help you decide what your readers will want and need to know and to shape your book accordingly.

Knowing your book’s audience will also help you to frame your stories effectively. As you introduce and conclude your stories what should you emphasize? If you are writing a family history you’ll probably want to highlight shared experiences, family values and traditions. A memoir of one’s career might want to point to the professional insights and wisdom to be gained from the stories you relate. And if you see your stories in a self-help context you will want to headline the life lessons demonstrated by the incidents you recount.

Reassure Your Relatives

What do you do if a family member is concerned about being listed in your family history book? This question comes up frequently, and together with client Marsha Allen, we devised a form letter to be sent to skeptical relations to solve the problem. Thanks, Marsha, for offering your records as examples.

First, we explain how genealogic records are recorded. Often, the relatives who distrust family histories are the ones who know the least about it. So we want to reassure them that we are following a tried and true format, one that every other researcher uses.

In many cases, the objection is based on a fear of identity theft. To alleviate that fear, we point out that this is information we have located through public records – we are not disclosing something “secret”. In fact, a cursory internet search will often turn up far more.

Next, we give an example of the record we wish to include. In many cases, the listing itself is enough to reassure the doubter. They will see for themselves how mundane these facts are, and that their family skeletons are not present here!

Last, we give them an “opt out”, with specific instructions for the actions they should take to modify the record. This puts the ball in their court, requiring a written response. In the same way that banks make your privacy policy a “passive opt-in”, the author offers to change the book only if a relative objects in writing. Those few people can specify which elements of the listing will be edited.

Most people, upon receiving this letter, will be satisfied that the author knows what she is doing! Those who had some concern will feel “heard” and be reassured; many will not care enough to take action. If you have a vehement objector, you have listened respectfully, and provided them with information and an appropriate action to take.

This win-win approach should settle any ruffled feathers among family members. Although you don’t need to send a letter like this to everyone, it is a helpful way to reach out to the few who may criticize, rather than applaud, your forthcoming book.

Sample Letter

Dear _______

Thank you for the interest in the family history book I am writing. It will be called _____ and will be about _____________.

Genealogy uses documents that are in the public record. Birth, marriage and death records are catalogued by software databases for family lines worldwide. As I have worked on my book, I have adhered to the traditional format and standards used by professional genealogists. For example, here is the listing of my own father: (Insert a sample record from your family here)

GOLD, Everett Van Orden  b. 6 Sep 1910 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT; s/o Cyrus William GOLD & Annie Alazana PECK;  m. 3 Sep 1938 Cristobal, Panama Canal Zone to Thelma Lucille GRUBER; d. 9 Mar 1996 Scottsdale, Maricopa, AZ.

Here is a record of a living person, one of my own sons, as an incomplete record sample: (Insert a sample record from your family here)

ALLEN, Byron   b. 1972 AZ; s/o David ALLEN & Marsha GOLD; m. Janice GALE.

The above living person would be listed in a complete record as: (Insert a sample record from your family here)

ALLEN, Byron Frihoff    b. 17 Jan 1972 Mesa, Maricopa, AZ; s/o David K. ALLEN & Marsha Jean GOLD; m. 17 Nov 1994 Chandler, Maricopa, AZ to Janice GALE.

I understand that you have concerns about identity theft. Although this information is available in public documents elsewhere, if you prefer, I will edit your record to protect your privacy.

Now that you have been informed of what the complete record would state in the book, if you wish to limit your record, please mail me to identify which facts you do not want to be published.

Do not include for ______________________(name)

______ middle name

______ birth - date and month

______ birth - city and county

______ marriage - date

______ marriage - location

Thank you for helping me to contribute to our family’s history in as complete a way as possible. I am sure our descendants many years from now will appreciate knowing about all of us.

Respectfully,

Author

Storytelling at RootsTech

RootsTech, where we spent the weekend, as its name suggests was heavy on using tech tools for family history. There were sessions on software, apps, social media galore. Our own Stories To Tell sessions focused on using Microsoft Word and Adobe Creative Suite to self publish family history books. With the conference’s  emphasis on high tech, it was great to see that the idea of family history as storytelling didn’t get lost.

Ian Tester, a product manager at BrightSolid, a British online publishing company, offered a Friday session titled "Telling Stories: Transforming the Bare Facts of Genealogy Into the Astonishing Tale of You and Your Family."

Said Tester, basic genealogies often don’t capture family stories. They “…are stark and bare — they are the bones, they are the skeleton; they’re not the meat of the story. They don’t record that very well."

Ira Glass of This Amerrican Life in the Third Coast Digest

Storytelling requires us to dig deeper, to “… take the facts and put something on top. We embellish. We make creative decisions on top of the facts."

"When you put yourself in the place of your ancestors and you empathize with them and you realize suddenly through 150 years of history how hard their life was or how fantastic their life was or how they were like you," Tester said, "(those moments) are the thing that keep people doing family history."

How does a family historian become a storyteller who can display that kind of empathy?

Ira Glass, host of the popular NPR program This American Life, speaking in Milwaukee a day later offered his audience some storytelling advice. Look for the “everyday extraordinary,” he suggested. Glass’ stories focus on common people who become heroes when doing extraordinary things. What makes glass such an effective storyteller is that in the lives of ordinary people he is able to find universal themes.

It takes a willingness to find those common themes in family stories that will allow the family historian to achieve the empathy Tester was describing.

Real family history lies well beyond the vital records.

RootsTech: The Intersection of Family History Research, Writing, Publishing and Technology

We’re excited to be here in Salt Lake City where the RootsTech Genealogy Conference has brought over 4,000 people to an intersection of family history research, writing, publishing and technology. We will have three days to talk with participants about book projects and to advise them on how to decide which digital tools to employ, and which might best be left to the experts, as they create and self publish their books.

Genealogists are tech savvy researchers who can tell you everything about how software programs or web based applications will help them find an elusive ancestor. Most of them will say that someday they’ll turn their mountain of research into a book. But for many of them that means a whole new skill set and a world of new world tech. Navigating it can be a daunting task.

Writing a book is a creative process. If your goal is self publishing, as it is for many family historians, it can also be a technological one. We’ll help people see that tools are available at each step of the author’s journey – Imagine, Plan, Create, Edit, Design and Publish. You might begin by using software for prewriting activities like Mind Mapping or use a content generation tool like Scrivener to plan and draft their manuscript. If you know a few tricks Microsoft Word will allow you to do everything from formatting the manuscript to indexing, using footnotes and endnotes to manage documentation, captioning photos and illustration and a variety of other tools to produce a professional looking document. The process of preparing photos including proper scanning and processing with PhotoShop to ready them for publication can be a challenge. DIY authors may choose to use sophisticated software like Adobe Creative Suite to design their book and prepare to submit them to a publisher or printer. Our goal is to help conference visitors make good decisions about how much of the process they feel comfortable taking on themselves and where they might be better served by hiring a professional.

Helping people to realize their dreams by creating a family history book and getting it into print is something we really enjoy. We are looking forward to plenty of opportunities to talk with people about their books over the next three days.

If you are going to be at RootsTech bring the draft of your book to booth 628 and we’ll help you get it into print. If you’re not here, drop us a line and we can help you to make your book a reality.

Composing Photo Captions for Your Memoir or Family History

Not every photo needs a caption, and documents also frequently speak for themselves. Consider grouping pictures without captions in some sections of the book. It allows the reader to enjoy a purely visual, non-verbal experience, and breaks up the “wordiness” of reading stories. Photos that are best without a caption are self-explanatory. For example, if you have a grouping of baby pictures of little Joey, you needn’t identify him again and again. However, as a general rule, stimulating captions will complete your photographs and improve your book.

The most important job of a caption is to provide the information a journalist would seek to include in a story:

• Who are the people in the photograph?
• What is happening in the photograph?
• When and where was the photograph taken? (Sometimes an estimate of time is the best you can do.)
• Why did you choose to include this photograph? Why did the person or scene look that way?
• How did the event occur?

Squeak and friend, Ft. Bragg, N.C., 1942

Obviously not all of the questions must be answered for every photograph. A good rule to follow in writing captions is that shorter captions are better than longer ones. Another is to avoid the known and explain the unknown. It is unnecessary to use adjectives such as beautiful or dramatic to describe the picture. Those qualities should be evident from the photograph itself. The caption should provide a full explanation of the picture to the reader by supplying information that the photo does not. For example, a photo might show a person competing in a beauty contest, but it may not show what contest or that she wins it. The caption supplies that information.

If you intend to discuss a photograph in the stories you tell a shorter caption can be used to provide brief information to identify the subject of the photo and the people included in it. The details of the photograph which are given in the text of your story need not be included in the caption.

Some variety in the type of captions used can help increase reader interest. Among techniques you might consider are:

• If you have interviewed someone in preparing to record your story, an excerpt or quotation from the interview might provide a caption.
• If you have kept a daily journal, an entry might be used as a caption for a photo.
• If you are interested in providing a context for a photo, you might choose a line or two from a book, song or poem that dates from the time of the picture.

If you employ one of these techniques it is a good idea to make sure that you have also included the kind of identifying information described in the previous paragraph.

The most important thing to remember is that good captions are tools to help your reader understand the stories you are telling.

Your Memoir Is History

In recent years many people have taken to calling memoir personal history. This term gives the product an autobiographical cast. However it is important to remember that there is a significant difference between memoir and autobiography. An autobiography is a full chronological account of both the life and times of its subject with an emphasis on the interaction between the person and unfolding history. A memoir has a narrower focus placing the emphasis on the author’s memories, feelings and emotions. Nevertheless there is a place for historical detail in your memoir.

Photo from the National Archives on Flikr

Maybe you don’t think of yourself as a part of the sweep of history. Think again. American Heritage Magazine ran a feature for years called “Eyewitness to History.” Anyone thinking of writing a memoir today is just such a witness. They have watched a parade of presidents and a panorama of events on the world and national stages. They have experienced the most rapid period of change in the world’s history. People have gone from listening to radio on a crystal set to the internet, from washtubs and ringers to a washer and dryer in every household, from Carter’s Little Liver Pills to knee replacements, heart transplants and gene therapy, and from Charles Lindberg’s trans-Atlantic flight to Neil Armstrong’s “giant step for mankind.”

Your life story is a document of social history to transmit to future generations. What may be more important is that your audience may need some help to understand the world you have lived in. For example, if you are writing for an audience which includes people under thirty years old words like typewriter, phonograph or ice box may have no meaning unless you provide some explanation. If you are telling stories about World War II or the Kennedy years, your readers may need some details about the times to provide a context through which to understand the stories you relate.

So, if you want to include historical details that you may not recall, where do you look? Start at home. You may have scrapbooks, diaries, journals or old letters which would add considerable spice to your memoir. If you want to know exactly what was happening on a particular day or year your local library has books like The Timetables of American History which provide details of day-to-day events, art, literature, pop culture, science and technology. Websites like the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Timeline or Digital History provide similar information. If you need details of events closer to home your local historical society will be happy to help with your research. Microfilm of newspapers is available at most local libraries.

Taking the time to add historical details to your memoir can make it much more memorable for readers from generations to come.

Dealing With Incomplete Memories in Memoir and Family History

Almost anyone who begins a memoir or personal history project of any sort will sooner or later confront the limits of her memory. She will find herself or someone she is interviewing unable to recall the name of a person or the details of an event and that person or event is critical to the story she wants to tell.

“I attribute this to what I call the ‘overfilled filing cabinet,’’ says Fred Cicetti author of The Healthy Geezer. “As we get older, we accumulate so many memories that it’s impossible to find the ones we want.”

However, memory researchers have found that it may take some doing, but it is very possible to access those elusive memories.

The first think to remember is to relax. “Anxiety blocks memory functions,” according to Corinne Gediman and Frances Crinella in their book Brainfit. The more anxious you become, the more difficult you will find it to recall the memory you want. Relax a bit, breathe deeply and you may find that the memory comes to you later out of thin air.

If relaxation doesn’t prove to be enough, there are more active steps to pursue in recalling a partial or lost memory. Alan Baddeley, author of Your Memory: A User’s Guide advises that the elusive memory, “... may be possible to retrieve given a clue or cue.”

Retrieval cues may take a variety of forms. Some of the most effective are:

• Association or context cues – Recalling the environment in which something occurred can bring details of what happened into vivid focus. Seeing, hearing or touching something associated with the memory in some way is a wonderful memory trigger. Looking at old photographs, documents, letters, or diaries may stimulate recall. Listening to music from about the time of the event can help recapture the details of what happened.
• Scenario Cues – The gaps in a memory may be filled in when a person visualizes the scene of an event, the people who were present and the location where it happened.  
• Event or Chronological Cues – By creating a timeline of what was going on at approximately the time a person is trying to recall, the memory she is attempting to access may come into focus.
• Word Association Cues – Remembering favorite sayings or speech patterns of a person involved in a memory can aid the recall of details of a specific event.
• Smell Cues – It is amazing how much can be triggered by remembering a smell. Often it’s enough to call up details of time, place and events.
• People Cues - Talking to someone who might also know the people or events to be recalled may release a flood of memories. These conversations need not be focused on trying to capture a particular detail, but serve to get a person thinking about a time in the past and letting memories come back naturally. None of these cues will necessarily produce instantaneous results. Memories take time to percolate. As Alan Baddeley put it, “There is an apparent unconscious process whereby information ‘pops up’ for no obvious reason.”

If none of this works, go for a strenuous walk, take a long run or spend some time on the treadmill. Aerobic exercise produces endorphins, hormones in our brains following exercise, which can elevate one’s mood and sharpen one’s memory.

How to Gather Stories for Your Memoir or Family History

David McCulloch, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his books on Harry Truman and John Adams, knows how to write a good life story. Says McCulloch, “I believe very strongly that the essence of writing is to know your subject…to get beneath the surface.” As you create your personal or family history book that’s advice you should take to heart.

Unfortunately it’s something we often forget when we set out to research our genealogy or create a family history. We turn into Joe Friday, the character played by Jack Webb on the old TV series Dragnet, who was fond of saying, “Just the facts, ma’am.” A plethora of tools beginning with ancestory.com and familysearch.org help us find more and more of those facts. But as we gather the facts we may miss the stories that would make the family history memorable.

 One of the great challenges of writing a family history is to recreate the experiences of its subjects. What were people’s lives like? What did they believe and value? What did they enjoy, hate or fear? How did they love? Part of the job is learning as much as you can about the person.

Genealogy.com has created a tool that will help anyone trying to “recreate” the lives of family members. Biography Assistant is a list of topics, each with numerous questions attached to help you “get beneath the surface.”

Topics range from those that illuminate the person’s daily life to those that relate her life to broader historical events. Here are a few samples:

• Entertainment and Popular Culture – What was the most popular kind of entertainment of the time? What were the fashions of the day?
• The Great Depression – What is the first thing that comes to mind when she hears the word Depression now? What did she have to do without?
• Watergate – De she witness Nixon’s speech to the nation? What was her reaction to Nixon’s resignation?

Exploring questions like these as you research your family history can bring the names and dates on the family tree to life.

If you are fortunate enough to have relatives or family friends who knew the person you are researching you can play “oral historian” and interview them. The questions from Biography Assistant would provide a fine list to use to guide the interview.

Even without interviewing anyone, you may find letters, diaries, documents, records and family memorabilia including photographs which may provide interesting stories and insights about the person you are researching.

Finally, a little research into the times in which the person lived can provide a better understanding of the experiences you are trying to recreate.

Taking the time to gather the stories beneath the surface will give your family history a richness that your readers will appreciate.