How to
How to write a family history book people will actually read
A family tree is a diagram. A family history is a book, and the difference is stories told to the end by the people who still remember them.
Pick the people, not the generations
Choose five to eight people the book turns on. Give each of them the full treatment: what they looked like, what they said, what they wanted, what they did when it mattered. Everyone else gets a name, one detail and one line.
Interview the living first
Records can wait. Memory cannot. Every grandparent and great-aunt holds stories that reach two generations further back than any census, and those stories die with them. Ask about the people they knew who are gone: what they said, what they cooked, how they came here, what they carried.
Use records as scaffolding
Dates, addresses, ship manifests, service records anchor the stories in time and resolve the arguments. They are the skeleton. They are not the book.
Write scenes
"They emigrated in 1911" is a list entry. "He sold the horse on a Tuesday and they left on the Friday with one trunk and the baby" is a scene. Every chapter needs at least one.
Mark what is known
Told, family story, inferred, uncertain. A family history that marks its sources will be trusted in a hundred years. One that does not will be argued about in ten.
Start asking: questions to ask for this book.