Southeast Missouri roots and branches: Building a structure for your family history

Before you begin to write, you should decide on how you want to structure your family history. First, decide on your goals and/or purposes in writing. This will depend on the audience. Is your writing for family, for publication in a genealogical journal or to preserve your research for others to build upon?

A book for family has a primary goal of providing an entertaining, readable book. Secondary goals may be to provide a general summary of the family, commemorate a specific event such as a birthday or anniversary, or honor a noteworthy ancestor or family member. Some family books preserve well-used and loved family recipes or may be in the form of a scrapbook or album. You may prefer to write a memoir for family and include information on family background.

If you are particularly ambitious or have spent years researching family, the temptation is to produce the “magnum opus.” That is, including all known descendants of an ancestral couple — visualized as a pyramid or descendancy chart. While they preserve your research for the future, this type of book is a lot of work to produce and tends toward poor readability. In addition, I often discourage people from writing these because they are a monumental undertaking and tend to discourage the writer. Focusing on one question, one family in your lineage or one lineage is easier to tackle.

Other ways to organize your writing include focusing on a single line of descent (most frequently a paternal/surname line, but any line of descent of interest will work). This can be visualized as a straight-line descent, or pole. Both pyramid and pole descendancies are easier to write if you consider only a subset of your ancestors. In that case, you would write a series of smaller works, which relatives are more likely to read.

Less often, family historians organize their writing to include all ancestors of a focal individual, that is, an ascendancy or tree chart. The resulting book may include just a discussion of each ancestral couple or may include basic information on the children of the couples, including spouses of children. The way you organize your family history is completely up to you, and you may choose to combine different forms of organization.

You will also create a more readable family history if you decide on a theme and scope in advance. Think of the stories of the family that readers will find interesting. Examples include immigrant stories, stories of migration within the U. S., military service, success in a career or humorous stories of everyday life. You may want to familiarize yourself with the history of the different locales where family lived, or social history of the time and place.

Decide on a numbering scheme for the individuals in your family history, which will assist with organization and clarity. There are numerous examples of numbering schemes, summarized in “Numbering Your Genealogy,” available from the National Genealogical Society. The simplest is an Ahnentafel, in which your number is “1,” your father’s is “2” and your mother’s is “3.” The number of each individual’s father moving back in time is double the individual’s number, and their mother is double the individual’s number +1. Thus, your maternal grandmother would be number “7.”

It is extremely important to cite sources for your information. The reader may be extremely interested in “how you know what you know,” and nothing is more frustrating than having crucial information unsourced. Decide whether you wish to include sources as footnotes or endnotes and use superscripts to denote the sources in the text and the notes sections. Remember, original sources are usually (but not always) more reliable. A useful source citation should allow the reader to relocate the source and evaluate the source. For example, you may have viewed a poor microfilm copy of an original and should thus cite the microfilm number or title and repository. Just like good news articles, genealogical source citations should answer the questions who, what, when, where (original or view form), and less often why and how. If in doubt on constructing a source citation, consult the editions of Elizabeth Show Mills’ “Evidence Explained.” These provide suggestions, but not rigid formats for citing diverse types of sources.

Dividing your book’s content into sections assists the reader with accessing information and promotes readability. Sections may include a cover, title page, frontispiece, preface, table of contents, photo and illustration list, epigraphs (overall and at the beginning of each chapter), a chronology of events, introduction, narrative (the meat of the book), appendices, maps and the important every-name index.

Now you should be ready to start. Next time I will discuss writing.

Bill Eddleman, Ph.D. Oklahoma State University, is a native of Cape Girardeau County who has conducted genealogical research for over 25 years.