Genealogy is not a topic that often hits the pages of the New York Times, except when the business pages report on companies like Ancestry or My Heritage. Today’s op-ed piece Your Ancestors, Your Fate by is one that should generate wide interest, especially among those interested in genealogy and family history. According to the author, researcher Gregory Clark, “To a striking extent your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents.” University of California, Davis economics professor Gregory Clark is the author of The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. He and fellow researchers began with a simple question: what is the reason for a person’s upward social mobility, or lack of it? Clark reported that,” …my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past.”

Creating a family history book is a two part process. The first is, of course, research to gather as much information as possible about the ancestors who will be included in the book. Unfortunately, no matter how we might try to keep things organized research often takes on a somewhat random quality, running into brick walls here only to uncover unexpected discoveries elsewhere. While the events of an ancestor’s life are arranged on a simple timeline, there is seldom such a clear pattern to the way we learn about it. Step two then is deciding how to impose order on our rather disheveled mass of research when we begin to write about it. Posing two questions will help do it: How do you know what you know? How do the facts which you have gathered relate to other things you know?

Many biographers, stuck for a more clever title, have simply called their books The Life and Times of [their subject here]. It’s not terribly creative, but it does convey an important idea for every biographer or family historian to remember: every life comes with a historical context. A person’s life story is shaped by the time and place in which he or she lived. What social, cultural, technological and political forces might have had an impact upon the subject of your research? For family historians exploring those larger forces can seem like a huge endeavor tacked onto canvasing family and vital records to gather the essential facts about a family member. That task just got a lot easier. The Associated Press and Ancestry.com have announced a partnership that will make more than one million stories from the AP newswire available in a searchable database.

To construct a narrative family history one must gather the family lore and stories to supplement the facts drawn from vital records. Unfortunately, as most family historians know too well the people we would like to ask about those stories are often no longer with us. When that’s the case, you need to reconstruct your family’s narrative from the limited records available. Letters and diaries can be a rich source of family stories. Even a single letter can be a wonderful tool in understanding an ancestors time and place. Letters and diaries are part of the cultural conversation of the times in which they were written. The topics they address are those which were important not only to their authors, but to their contemporaries. These personal writings can help us to understand both our ancestors’ connection to their times and their the unique way they experienced those times.

October is Family History Month. We want to invite you to help us celebrate by participating in a poll. It short and sweet: What’s the best reason to write a family history book? Leave you answer in the comments (or if you would rather Tweet them using the hashtag #STTBooks). We’ll compile the results and post them at the end of the month. We hope you’ll enjoy telling us what you think. Encourage your friends to share their thoughts. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

As you are working to get the coals just right for your Labor Day barbeque, take a moment to think about how we happen to be celebrating this day all across America. The holiday’s origin goes back 119 years to 1894. The American Railway Union had undertaken a drive to organize railroad workers nationwide, triggering strikes across the country. A strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in the Chicago area was the lynch pin of the effort. The administration of President Grover Cleveland, which was solidly anti-union, sent 12,000 troops to Chicago to break the strike. U.S. Marshals fired on protesters near the city, killing two, and the strike collapsed. But the results sparked a massive backlash against Cleveland’s heavy handed actions and only six days after the strike ended both houses of Congress had approved a bill proclaiming Labor Day a holiday and Cleveland had signed it hoping to quell the protests. It’s a fascinating story. You can learn more about the Pullman strike in an article titled Pullman Strike of 1894 in the California Historical Society’s journal California History. A post on the PBS NewsHour Blog The Origins of Labor Day provides details about the holiday itself. If you are a family historian think about the working men and women in previous generations of your family. A search of some of the many excellent collections of documents in libraries and archives will help you understand much more vividly how your ancestors lived.