For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History
The author, a former teacher and magazine editor and publisher who specializes in teaching family history, has combined his talents to produce this work. In four chapters, he discusses family history and its importance, includes techniques for writing family history, provides forms, and explains the methods of printing and publishing the histories. Part 3, "Forms of Family History," for example, not only addresses writing biography, autobiography, and family newsletters but provides an especially useful illustration of how to incorporate letters and cookbooks into family history. The print and publishing chapter looks to be just as useful for general works as for family history publications. Ultimately, Kirk Polking's Writing Family Histories and Memoirs (Betterway, 1995) is probably more useful to genealogists, as Kempthorne's work emphasizes writing in general. But it adds an exciting new dimension to writing modern family history that seeks to place our ancestors in a larger framework of family, neighborhood, and history. It suffers from the lack of an index but otherwise is recommended as source both for writing modern family history and for writing in general.?Judith P. Reid, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.