Having a family genealogy book is a piece of history that can be passed down to your children and to future generations. It takes all of that research that you have done and moves it away from the filing cabinets and into the hands of family and even interested reachers or history buffs. A family genealogy book is a way to share and spread the information about your family.
Here is how to get started.
1. Decide on a focus. A focus will help keep you organized and make the book more readable. You could choose to focus only on a certain number of generations in your family. Or perhaps just concentrate on one era in history and how it affected your ancestors, such as homesteading, the Industrial Revolution, etc.
2. Set a deadline for your book. A solid deadline will help your book move forward instead of remaining just something to get to someday. It will also help your book from getting too large, since you may continue to gain new information as you go along, making the book one that is never ending.
3. Decide on your tools. Will you be using a word processing program to write your book? Will you type with a typewriter? Will you use a readymade genealogy software tool? Figure it all out before you get started and have everything at the ready before you write a single sentence.
4. Review other genealogy or history books. Get familiar with how the authors lay things out for inspiration on your own book. See what you like or don’t like about these books. This will make it easier for you to go forward.
5. Decide how your book will be published. Will you simply print out copies for yourself and relatives? Will you create an ebook? Will you self-publish the book with a self publishing company? Will you find and agent or a publisher so you can share your book with the world? Knowing how it will be published will help you decide on the tone of your book and what to include because you will know who your readers are going to be.