# 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.