Many people are looking for ways to tell their family history so that family stories are preserved for future generations.
The best way to preserve your family history is to write it down. By publishing your family history in a book, you can capture and preserve stories, pictures and genealogy data, making them accessible to other family members and future generations. A compiled family history can be a great gift for your relatives and a wonderful reason for the whole family to work together on such a book!
What are some steps you can take to get your family book? Here are our tips:
1. Imagine
Think of all the stories, photos, periods, events, people, documents and memorabilia from your family that you could include in your family book. There is no single rule for what such a book should look like. Imagine what you would like it to say about your family!
2. Plan
Consider the scope of your future book. If you are dealing with a distant past, spanning more than five generations for example, you are likely to have more facts and documents, but fewer stories or pictures. If you want to write about a time period closer to the present, you will certainly have a lot of stories and pictures. Choose a realistic length for one book. Your family book can be, for example, a collection of documents and a summary of your research – then it will be more for historical reference. Or it can be a book of memories, collecting the stories of your relatives, accompanied by photographs.
Once you have decided on the scope and style of your book, collect and organise the relevant research, stories, photographs and other documents in the order you need them.
3. Create
Make a rough draft of your book. Your readers are likely to be your family, friends and other close people. Think about what is most likely to be interesting and important to your readers?
Write the text of your book in a document (e.g. Word) format. Then choose the photos you want to illustrate the book with. If you need to scan the images, do so at the highest resolution possible and save the images in a folder dedicated for this purpose. Keep the text separate from the images and do not try to design the book at the time of writing. Simply mark in the manuscript where you want to place the images, as the position of the images may also change during layout or when corrections are made to the text.
4. Edit
A professional editor can do more than just correct your unintentional mistakes. By working with the text, an editor can improve the overall style and flow of the book. Manuscript editing focuses on correct grammar, spelling and punctuation, while also improving the overall form of the manuscript.
Remember that corrections will never be made without the agreement of the author!
5. Design
Once the manuscript has been written and the images to be used have been selected, it is time to start designing and laying out the book. These artistic and technical processes are usually carried out in design software. Unless you are a professional yourself, you should entrust this work to an expert in the field – the layout designer will, according to your description and capabilities, create exactly the book design you have imagined.
6. Publish
No author can publish a book alone. You need a good and reliable team of professionals who will listen to your wishes, give you valuable advice and help you get a quality end result in an enjoyable process.
You will probably not want to publish a large number of copies of your family's book and distribute it commercially, but will prefer a small number of copies to give to your family and friends. In this case, a small publishing house with a full range of publishing services will be useful.