Most genealogists hate writing. Most people hate it. A sage once described the chore as 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration. Yet, to be genealogists, we must write. We must know the mechanics of writing, as well as a lot of irksome rules we tried to ignore in school.
Machines don t write prose that humans want to read.
Toward that end, this column s focus is not on those rules we can glean from any self-help book but on a few particulars peculiar to our field. The point should be obvious, but publishers offer several attractive manuals that lead us into grave sins against truth and reality. One teaches us how to invent drama and characters that bear our ancestral names, dates and places how to recreate thoughts and conversations those people surely had, even though they left no record saying so. Another encourages us to read social history and revise our ancestors documentary record to make those forebears fit aberrations that are currently faddish in controversial scholarly circles. To the contrary, we genealogists have an obligation to treat our ancestors with respect.