Do you want to write a family history or biography? Are you struggling to turn your ancestors' difficult-to-find facts into engaging prose?

    A wise person once said: “First drafts don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be written.”

    We should keep these words in mind as we begin our family history writing journey — or any writing journey, for that matter.

    We might plan to write a family history covering several different generations, or a biography, profile, autobiography or memoir, or even a genealogy article, an essay or a short story. 

    We might plan to publish a hardcopy book or ebook, a magazine article, a family newsletter, a blog post, or a simple printout for our immediate family members.

    Whatever our literary form and whatever our publication type, we begin our genealogy writing journey by typing words onto our page. 

    Let author and genealogist Carol Baxter help you via this six-lesson course.   

The first step in writing anything is to turn our research material into words – into “prose”, as it’s customarily called.

    However, thanks to computers, our words are no longer prisoners of the page (to quote author Sonya Hartnett). 

    All prose has two components: its structure and its contents. When we write a family history or biography, our research material provides the contents. This lesson provides instructions on how to build a simple prose structure, irrespective of our literary genre or publication.

Lesson type:               Writing skills

Video duration:           48 minutes

Reading time:             11 minutes

Handout:                      Yes

Writing exercise:        Yes

As nonfiction writers, we should record the sources of our family history information somewhere in our prose or publication — that is, we should annotate our sources. 

    This lesson explores the different ways in which our documentary or other sources can be annotated. It also provides simple source-referencing structures for primary and secondary sources.

    This information will be especially useful for those who haven’t already adopted a source-referencing system.  

Lesson type:               Educational

Video duration:          33 minutes

Reading time:             2 minutes

Handout:                      Yes

Writing exercise:        No

The fundamentals of writing include our personal style, tone and voice.

    In this lesson we explore these terms and how they influence our writing.

    We also explore some other writing fundamentals, such as person, point-of-view and tense, and how we can use them to engage our readers.

Lesson type:               Writing skills

Video duration:          36 minutes

Reading time:             9 minutes

Handout:                      Yes

Writing exercise:        Yes

In the previous lesson, My Style, My Voice, we discussed our personal writing style and voice.

    In this lesson, we explore our options for using other peoples’ voices as well as different styles and narrative voices of our own.

    In doing so, we can craft prose that’s more interesting for our readers even though it’s included in a work that’s mostly written in the expository (or encyclopaedia) style.

Lesson type:               Writing skills

Video duration:           34 minutes

Reading time:             12 minutes

Handout:                      Yes

Writing exercise:        Yes

For most family historians, the through-line of a biography is usually the chronology: birth to death with everything that happened between those events communicated in a chronological sequence.

    However, our prose will be much stronger and more readable if the through-line is a powerful big-picture theme that communicates a larger truth.

Lesson type:               Writing skills

Video duration:           49 minutes

Reading time:             1 minute

Handout:                      Yes

Writing exercise:        Yes