Making a family history book

As a youth, I didn’t get the chance to visit with many relatives. My father passed away about two weeks before my seventh birthday, and my mother never learned to drive, so we didn’t get out much. I only had one living grandparent when I was born, and he passed away when I was thirteen. A year later my mother died in an automobile accident. After that, my younger brother and I lived with my oldest brother and his family.

As I matured, I felt this desire to know more about my family roots, but I really didn’t have much to go on. I knew my grandparents names, and I knew that we had Native American blood from my father’s side of the family, but that was about it. I didn’t think that I would get far, but I had to try. I began by just plugging my grandfather’s name into a search engine, and found a link leading to a post made by a cousin. She had hired someone to research our family history on my father’s side of the family. In just a few minutes of reading, I found out more about my heritage than I had ever imagined. I was able to trace my father’s family all the way back to the year 1750, and to the state of Tennessee. We had been told by some family members that we were part Choctaw, but I didn’t think that was correct, considering that our family came from Tennessee. As it turned out, I discovered that we were actually of Cherokee descent. Of course we could also have Choctaw linage as well. I went about tracing my mother’s side of the family the same way, and found a detailed family history for the Stafford side of our family dating back to 1640, in the state of Virginia. I subscribed to www.Ancestry.com so that I had the ability to do my own research, and just recently I subscribed to www.Fold3.com for military records.

I now had a wealth of information on my hands, but wasn’t sure what to do with it. With as much as I had, after it was broken down and processed, the material would only fill a dozen pages, and I wanted this project to be more than just a family tree. You see, I wanted my son to know more than just the names of the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins that he had never met. I wanted him to know about them. I was faced with a dilemma however; I didn’t know that much about them myself. It is one thing to look up family names, birth dates, or marriages with census records, but even a smidgeon of information on an ancestor's life proved to be almost impossible to come by. In the grand scheme of time, it wasn’t that long ago that my grandparents lived, worked, and played, yet today it’s as if they never existed. With these thoughts in mind, I set about laying out the design for our family history book, and I decided that the main content would focus upon the living.

1. Create a cover design for the book

2. You, the primary author should write a forward, explaining how and why the book came to be.

3. A coat of arms section

4. The family tree page. Try to be creative. If you have an artist in the family, have them draw, or paint your own custom family tree. Make sure that they sign their artwork.

5. A family diagram page, as family trees can sometimes be hard to understand

6. A photo section of your ancestors if possible, along with ancestral history. Include career information. Were they farmers, bakers, or bankers?

7. A chapter dedicated to how you went about your research, including copies of census records, marriage licenses, military records and so on.

8. Let your family know about your hobbies, your favorite books and movies. Include photos to help illustrate your passions.

9. Ask each of your relatives to put together a list of their hobbies, and what makes them tick. Ask them for photos as well. For instance, If someone is a fossil hunter, get photos of their prize finds, and the story of how they found them.

10. A family story page. Almost everyone has family stories that get shared and reshared through the years. I can remember one story of a relative that was walking home one night with her husband from a rural bus stop. They say that she got tired of carrying her baby, and thought she passed infant to her spouse. When they got home, she asked, "where's the baby?" He told her that he had no idea. It's said that they got a search party together, and found the child safe and sound inside of a black bear's den. Idon't know if it's true, and it happened so long ago that it could never be varified, but it's a story worth sharing.

11. Write a conclusion that will inspire someone from the next generation to produce a sequel one day.

12. Ask everyone to chip in enough to pay for their own copy of a nice perfect bound book. You can get your book printed through www.lulu.com for a reasonable price.

By creating a detailed family history, you can leave behind something of yourself, and your immediate kin for future generations. This is information that might otherwise be lost forever.

I chose to include a photo of one of my paintings in our family history book. The painting is a scene of Native Americans, so this fits in well with our family history. I made a sample of our family tree for this article, because the detail of ours was too small to show it properly. You should create a diagram of your family tree first, this will make it easier to create the tree. It's a good idea to have someone that can print legibly to write the names of the family in the tree. That way, if you do not know all of your ancestors names, you can add them in later on without it looking out of place. Just include empty roots as I have done in the example.