I’ve been doing genealogy for quite a few years. When I first started, I remember someone asking if I was going to write a book. I quickly told them no I’d wouldn’t know where to begin.
But in the last few years, I’ve enjoyed writing stories about the ancestors that I’ve found, and I thought why does it have to be a big project? Why can’t it be something that I work on as I do my genealogy? A little at a time. So that’s what I decided to do.
As I’ve mentioned before I use a program called Forever Artisan to create photo books and so that’s where I’m starting. Yes, Forever does have predesigned books where you just pop your photos into the spots, add some text if you want and then print and enjoy. But Forever Artisan is a program where I can purchase digital art and create my own one of a kind book.
So I opened a new project; a 12 x 12 book (I chose this size because then I can always decide to make the size of the book smaller) then I chose some art that I like called Reminisce Heritage, and then I added the final ingredient; the story. In this example, I took the story that I wrote in last week’s blog about Jesse Vincent and with a few additional facts I’ve already created a section about Jesse Vincent and the rest of his family. Have a look at some of my pages.
The beauty of it all is I can write a bit at a time. I don’t have to do it in any particular order as I can rearrange the book later as I see fit. Here was an added bonus that I hadn’t thought of. As I was creating this section of my family history book, I realized there were small details missing in my genealogy that I hadn’t found while working on the family before. So I stopped the book and looked up those documents. If they would have required more effort, I could just add them to a “to-do list” for later.
So I can use this method to add my story of Harriet or write some of the interesting things that I’ve learned through my DNA or write a story about an item my ancestors owned. I think this will make it a much less daunting job and more fun.
So I guess the next time someone asks me if I’ve going to write a book I can tell them I’ve already started.
If you’d like to learn more about Forever Artisan please, feel free to email me at [email protected] or you can go to my Forever site HERE