Blogging Family History
In the current Family Chronicle, Janice Nickerson has an engaging article on writing your family history one short story at a time. She provided several great theme suggestions for story projects and I especially enjoyed her delightful ideas for getting genealogically-challenged family members to help write stories for you. It’s an informative article and well worth reading.
It’s also a lesson we bloggers have already learned.
The primary reason I started my Moultrie Creek blog was to write short family stories along with stories about my hometown and the characters who have inhabited it. I don’t have the patience to build a complete family narrative, but I do have a lot of stories to tell and as my research continues I find even more. Blogging is a wonderful medium for people like me. In addition to providing a platform to develop stories and include photos, video, scanned documents and other ephemera, it also allows me to share the stories with my family and even make new connections with research cousins. By taking advantage of blog features such as categories and tags I can organize my stories by family, location and era even though I wrote them in no apparent order.
If I decide I want more permanence, I can take advantage of services like Blurb to slurp [their word, not mine] my blog posts – text, images, comments and links – into a beautifully bound book. Although I’m no way near ready to do that, it is an intriguing idea.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to tell my stories one blog post at a time.
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July 21st, 2008 at 5:46 am
Denise,
Very interesting post. I guess I’m kind of like you in that I’m more interested in short family stories too. If I tried to write a complete and comprehensive family history I’d probably get frustrated, bored, and never complete it…but I do love writing short stories about ancestors because they have a beginning and end…a complete family history has no end.