Discover how you can use your family history research to start writing stories that will capture the imagination of family and friends and create an enduring legacy for future generations. Chris Lightfoot makes it seem delightfully possible. Maybe it’s time to turn that dream of writing your family history into a bone fide project!

IF YOU DON’T WRITE YOUR STORIES, WHO WILL?

Are you struggling to get anyone interested in your years of family history research or your family tree? Well you are not alone and this is because names and dates say nothing about the lives of the people you have uncovered through your research. It is the stories behind the names that people want to hear. Stories which can evoke a time, a place, an event, a life of a person, which no amount of painstaking research can reveal.

Write your family history story by story

Starting to write a family history from the very beginning can be a daunting task particularly if your research takes you back hundreds of years. But, if you write your family history story by story, you will soon build up a collection of stories which you can share straight away and use as the building blocks for a full-length book. By adopting the story-by-story approach you aren’t constrained by writing chronologically – instead you have the freedom to pick out whatever you want, in whatever order you want.

If your family isn’t interested in your research (and from what I hear many aren’t) then draw them in with some crowd-pleasing stories. They will soon be asking for more rather than rolling their eyes in despair when you produce yet another list of facts and dates.