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"Along Those Lines"
11/22/2002 - Archive
Writing Your Family History: Other Resources and References
In last week's "Along Those Lines . . ." column, we discussed
the importance of working with and citing your sources. In this week's column,
I want to conclude this series with a further discussion of formatting your
written family history, and a brief list of resources and references that may
be of help to your efforts.
Conquering That Pesky Formatting Challenge
One area we discussed last week included footnotes, endnotes, a table of
contents, and an index. A number of people have written e-mails asking for a
little more guidance on the subject.
First, please be aware before you purchase software to produce your written
family history that you should determine whether you want a table of contents,
an index, appendices, footnotes, endnotes, and other specialized formatting.
Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, and other full-feature, professional word processor
software packages will produce these features for you. However, others, including
Microsoft Publisher, may not. Do your homework before you invest in the software!
Make sure it does what you want it to do, unless you want to spend an inordinate
amount of time manually creating these portions of your publication. This also
applies to the genealogical software packages, which claim to allow you to publish
a family history. While they may be able to generate reports with footnotes,
annotated source citations, and other information, none can do everything you
will want in order to produce a quality publication. You will undoubtedly end
up copying and pasting from your database (or an exported report extracted from
it) into a word processor program.
If you plan to publish a professional manuscript, you definitely will want to
consider creating and incorporating the following components:
Title Page
Publisher information, copyright, publication date
Dedication page
Table of contents
Chapters
Footnotes or endnotes (by page, chapter, or for the entire book)
Appendices
Index
In addition, you will probably want to include genealogical charts and forms,
maps, and photographs. You will want to be able to add labels to them, probably
in the form of 'figures' and to prepare a separate table of contents of these
illustrative materials. This might follow your table of contents or it could
be made into an appendix. Another consideration raised by one reader was whether
to include women in his index under both their maiden name AND their married
name. This might be handled in an appendix of alphabetically arranged brides
names' and grooms' names to assist the reader in cross-referencing the people's
names.
Microsoft Word, for example, allows you to add a code to each chapter, and subsection
if desired, which allows for the automated creation of a table of contents.
The use of another type of code causes the automated creation of an index. Other
codes can be used to generate appendices, footnotes, endnotes, etc., depending
on how you plan to organize and produce your book. All the codes are invisible
to the reader, and are only used to generate these supplemental materials. The
investment of time in planning your outline and layout in advance, followed
by learning about these automated facilities built into your software, can save
you many hours of manual work later on, and help guarantee an excellent publication.
Excellent References and Resources
There are many excellent reference materials to help you organize your
work and produce a high quality publication. There are a number of books available,
and two of my favorites are:
Hatcher, Patricia Law. Producing a Quality Family History. Salt Lake
City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated. 1996.
www.ancestry.com/rd/prodredir.asp?sourceid=831&key=P1024
This book is the best-written guide I have seen on the subject. Ms. Hatcher
has made understanding the organization and creative process simple indeed.
She covers every aspect for the beginner and focuses the attention of even the
seasoned genealogist and experienced writer on what is needed to generate a
high quality publication. This book is a winner!
Kitchel, Dwain L. Writing and Marketing a Family History in the New Millennium.
5th Ed. Knoxville, TN: Tennessee Valley Publishing. 2000.
Mr. Kitchel's book makes a wonderful companion to Ms. Hatcher's book. Not only
does he address the organizational and formatting processes, but he goes into
extensive detail about how to approach publishers, the ins and outs of publishing
agreements, how to embed photographs and other materials and provide these supplemental
materials to a publisher, how to advertise and market the publication, and many
other practical facets of publishing a family history. He includes lists of
family history publishers and binderies, and their addresses. His appendix of
genealogical resources on the Internet contains some valuable reference resources
as well.
In last week's column I discussed Elizabeth Shown Mills' book, Evidence!
Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian, (www.ancestry.com/rd/prodredir.asp?sourceid=831&key=P1251
) published by Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., of Baltimore in 1997.
It is an essential reference to any family historian documenting their sources
and in producing footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies.
Certainly don't forget the use of a good dictionary and thesaurus. While the
full-function word processors include spell-checking and a thesaurus, none can
include everything. You will find these printed resources infinitely valuable.
In addition to printed reference materials, you will find a number of strong
online sites to help in your publishing efforts. Phyllis Ziller's website, "Genwriters:
Writing for Future Generations" (www.genwriters.com/
), is an excellent starting place. She discusses organization of materials,
the use of social history to develop context and to enhance your work, and presents
a wealth of writers' reference tools. Ms. Ziller has a winner of a website that
you will want to visit and bookmark.
Other excellent online reference facilities are available at the Librarians'
Index to the Internet (www.lii.org ).
And while there is no specific listing there for thesauri, enter the word 'thesaurus'
in the search box and you will be rewarded with links to nineteen of them! Another
favorite reference site I use is the Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org
) and its Reference Center. Seek thesauri and other reference sources there
too.
In addition, don't overlook the collection of websites at Cyndi's List under
the "Writing Your Family's History" area (www.cyndislist.com/writing.htm
).
Mary P. Parker, president of Computer Management Corporation of the South, clearly
understands how difficult it can be to organize the various data you have collected
and generate a life story. Her software package, "Write Your Life Story"
is described at home.netcom.com/~genealogy/life_story.htm
and can help you organize the details of an ancestor's life or your own.
Don't Delay! Start Today!
Over the past weeks, I've covered a number of aspects of writing your family
history. This is just the beginning, though. I've tried to get you started thinking
about your own writing project and to provide some reference resources.
We've all heard it again and again: start interviewing your relatives now before
they are gone. It's true! There is no time like the present. On the other hand,
you may well be the best person to write the compiled family history for your
own clan. Haven't you been collecting the information? Haven't you been documenting
the data? Then why not continue the process with your own work. Interview all
the family members you can, gather the original documents and photographs, create
the source citations, and start writing that family history!
Be sure to visit your local public library for more guides and references to
help you with your writing, and search the Internet for others. There is a wealth
of material there!
Happy writing!
George
George G. Morgan would like to hear from you at atl@ahaseminars.com
but, due to the volume of e-mail received, he is unable to answer every e-mail
message. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual research.
Visit George's website at http://ahaseminars.com/atl
for information about speaking engagements.
Copyright 2002, MyFamily.com Inc. All rights reserved.
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