The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Get paperwork done on family past
This column was published July 7, 1996
For as long as I can remember, my mother has had a framed embroidery hanging in her bathroom. It states, "No job is finished until the paperwork is done."
It suggests to me a fundamental question for genealogists.
When is our job finished?
We spend decades - in some instances, most of our adult lives - collecting, organizing and filing genealogical data and family stories. To what end? Has it all been a mere hobby, a pastime that kept us out of trouble, or - in some cases - gotten us into hot water?
Is our job finished when we lose interest, no longer have the mental ability to cope with the complexities of research and organization or until someone fills in a death date on our record?
Genealogists often feel their work never will be done, and they will "genealogize" until their bodies grow cold. Feel free to disagree, but it seems to me our goal should be to finish our job.
My view is biased by witnessing the latter years of two dedicated genealogists in my family - my mother-in-law and one of my grandmothers. Both did an incredible amount of research and collecting. In their old age, both not only reached a point at which they were unable to engage in the work that had given them so much pleasure in younger years, but they also began to unravel what they had done.
In both instances, I inherited considerable disorganized genealogical papers and old photographs.
Neither of these marvelous women finished their job by doing the paperwork that will make genealogies as permanent as they can be.
If we want the results of our research to outlive us by more than a few years, we need to publish it in a book.
Publishing a book is a daunting undertaking, especially for people who don't think of themselves as writers. Fortunately, there is help. Several books on the market show how to write and publish a genealogy. The best I've read is Patricia Law Hatcher's Producing a Quality Family History.
By profession, Hatcher is a technical writer, instructor and genealogist, all of which shows in her book.
Producing a Quality Family History takes you through the entire process, from research to selling your published book. Yes, unless you are exceptionally well-heeled, you'll need to market your book. Not that you're going to make a profit. Few do. But you will need to recover as much of the cost as you can by selling copies.
Hatcher cautioned her book isn't a step-by-step cookbook. Rather, it's a guidebook full of sage general advice.
She correctly pointed out modern technology makes self-publishing easier than ever, especially for those who jump into the arena of desktop publishing. That is, preparing the manuscript for publication in a personal computer.
Hatcher wrote about traditional genealogies and explained trends toward the new, more honest genealogies. The book can help you decide whether to write the traditional "descendants of ..." genealogy or an "all-my-ancestors" genealogy.
The descendants approach begins with an individual, often the most distant progenitor on a single line, and comes down to the present, including all known descendants.
This creates an enormous fan, beginning with two individuals, opening up into hundreds and often several thousand descendants.
The "all-my-ancestors" approach is the reverse, a fan opening in the other direction. From a beginning in our generation, usually with the author/genealogist, the fan opens as grandparents multiply with each generation as the book goes back in time. In the same number of generations in the same family, this would produce a smaller number of people to be treated in the book, but the numbers still can become large.
Hatcher discusses strategies such as publishing separate books for each of your eight great-grandparents.
"Getting an eighth of your research prepared for publication seems a more reasonable goal that will allow you to focus on quality, not quantity," she explained.
Even though you use a computer to write your book, Hatcher warned you don't want your book to sound like a computer wrote it. "We want to write about people not names," she advised.
Hatcher clearly and thoroughly explained how to use a computer's word processor to format your book for publication. This is excellent information. I am disappointed, however, she devotes only a paragraph to other software, such as GenBook, which takes information from a computer database and converts it into narrative.
This doesn't take all the work out of writing, but it removes an enormous amount of tedium by providing what I would interpret as a draft ready for editing. More information on how to use this type of software in conjunction with word processing software would have been helpful.
Rarely do I disagree with Hatcher's advice. One of the few instances has to do with another feature of any word processor worth having. Although Hatcher noted grammar-checking features in word processors sometimes give bogus suggestions, she recommended using them.
My experience is grammar-checkers give so many bogus suggestions, they're more trouble than they're worth. And the more you need them (because of poor grammar skills), the less value they'll have because you may not recognize bogus suggestions.
Nonetheless, Hatcher has produced a book of special value to genealogists who want to do that paperwork that finishes the job.
Producing a Quality Family History is available from Ancestry, P.O. Box 476, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84110-0476. It costs $15.95 plus $3.50 for shipping.
Copyright 1996 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.