All Family History Books Don’t Have to Be the Same
Biff Barnes
Family history books are usually of a piece. They are organized chronologically by family line. The emphasis is on providing a report of the lives of ancestors, sometimes as an ongoing narrative, others with individual biographical sketches. There are pedigree charts and family photos. With the help of a good professional book designer, they are beautiful books, often family heirlooms. But a family history book doesn’t have to fit this blueprint. We have recently worked with several authors who have created unique and wonderful family histories that are very different from their more conventional cousins. Let’s take a look at some of these alternative approaches to writing about family history.
Detective Story – The author returned to her childhood home town for a high school reunion. She and her husband took a side trip to a small local cemetery to visit her grandmother’s grave. They found the stone marker for her grandmother, but the author remembered that she had visited the cemetery with her parents every Memorial Day and there had been five or six other relatives buried there as well. She couldn’t find markers for any of them. Her husband said, “We have to take care of this. People need to be remembered.” The author remembered that years before her grandfather had said the same thing. She and her husband visited the keeper of records for the cemetery and got names and dates for 133 years of her family history and names to go with seven unmarked graves. The visit to the cemetery triggered an eight-year, two-country chase to learn the stories of these unknown ancestors. The author's book is the story not only of those relatives but of her search to fill in the blanks. It is a fascinating detective story.
Creative Nonfiction – The author’s mother was born on a homestead on the frontier of northern Montana in 1920. She left the prairie at age twenty-one and seldom returned. Her brother said, “She heated the prairie.” But in her seventies, she began writing of her childhood memories: the isolation of her prairie home; her mother’s good cooking, fortitude, and courage; the oft-told story of her own birth; the joys to be found in the familiar; a child’s experience of tragedy and loss. In the final years of her life, the prairie was almost all she talked about. When her mother died in 2015, the author discovered among her things packets of letters written by her grandfather in 1912, 1917, and 1929. The first were from his homestead in Montana to his not-yet wife back home in Indiana, the others spanned their life together on the prairie. Combining these written records with wonderful research on life on a prairie homestead and from newspapers, in small Montana towns, the author weaves a narrative of her family’s life on the frontier. The story reads like a novel.
How To - The author, an African American woman, recognized as she set out to research her family history that most people beginning their search for their ancestors have access to birth, marriage, death and even church records as well as possible newspaper articles, biographies, wills, probate and land records, and maybe naturalization and military records. Almost none of these records exist for enslaved African Americans. As she overcame that obstacle and unearthed fascinating information, hidden connections, wonderful websites, and created strategies to bring her ancestors’ lives to light, she thought others might want to learn how she accomplished this daunting but rewarding task. She devotes more than a third of her book to guidance for others who want to resurrect their ancestors.
Every family’s history is unique and every family’s story can be told in a unique way. When you set out to tell your family’s story, don’t be bound by a perceived set of rules. There are plenty of ways to write a great family history.