Off topic: chat

Mick Tator wrote: »

It’s a good question and I’ve not yet fully decided. For the moment I’ve gone with the format of putting all my source notes as endnotes because I believe they interrupt the flow when they are footnotes and are a hindrance there to all except nerds. Keep the endnotes for sources, not for descriptive text. Check a style manual and keep to the same format for all notes (there are rules, use them from the outset). When I get an opportunity, I just write stuff, often roughly and cutting/pasting from the ‘person notes’ on my FTM tree. Get it down ‘on paper’ (hard drive), you can strip it out/tidy it up eventually. The important thing is to get it written down. You will be surprised at the large amount you have!

Are you writing your book with a view to it being given free to family or sold to them? That will govern your two choices, you write one for genealogists or you write one that will entertain and educate your relatives about their ancestry (i.e. one that will be read/ sold!). The former would be quite turgid were it filled with copies of every BMD cert and riddled with source notes. The latter would include just one or two ‘typical’ GRO certs (e.g. with a note saying this is the first of the family registered when compulsory registration was brought in during 1864). Then contrast that with an image of the spidery writing Parish register variety. Or perhaps use a cert if it has interesting sponsors or witnesses. (E.g., Sponsor Jim, an uncle of the newborn, later married sponsor Mary, they emigrated and are the ancestors of the family now in Brooklyn, NY.) Try to stitch all together, make it a narrative if possible. I can go back quite far, so have branches in a few countries and I give each of them a chapter (eventually!).

I don’t like the book you linked to, it’s more of a photo album, not a family story. It shows that an abundance of photos can be a hindrance! Nor do I like the trees or the way the maps are included – a county map showing where marriage partners/families hailed from make much more sense, showing distances between homesteads and- even better - a larger scale one of the townlands on which the family is centred. (Or if urban, e.g. a Dublin docker family.showing streets and proximity to work area.) But I see little point in having large-scale maps unless they really illustrate a point. Same with census data – strip it to an image of the family entry if they are sharing a house, no point in including the people on the same landing! People love newspaper clippings, although not all are easily reproduced.
Photos – if you don’t have them you can use images from Wiki that are not copyright. I have ancestors who were ‘active’ in the War of Independence and in writing about them I included a piece on a distant relative who had a pub in Cork in the early 1900’s that was destroyed in the ‘Burning of Cork’ in 1920 - I’ve no photo of them, so just used a photo of smouldering city ruins to illustrate their story and it is more evocative than an image of a few uniformed soldiers/Tans. Works fine! Family photos can be over-rated, too many of the same individuals is plain boring. They need to be edited, it’s a book not a photo album.

Start, keep writing and polish it periodically (but not too often)!