Search query: family history

Product: How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History
Description: Do you have a box of mementos you’d love to turn into a book? Discover where to start and how to choose a format to bring your ancestry to life.

Have you inherited the responsibility of preserving your family history? Do you wish you could transform your old photos and artifacts into entertaining tales? Want to record all those great remember-when’s but worry your writing will bore your relatives to tears? Author and writing instructor Annette Gendler has helped countless eager writers over her many years of teaching at StoryStudio Chicago. Now she’ll show you how you can turn your treasured family saga into a captivating narrative you’ll be proud to share.

How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History is a concise guide for converting your heirlooms and oral anecdotes into engaging prose. Following Annette Gendler’s step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn how to decide which memories are best suited to chronicle your loved ones’ unique journeys through life, and what makes them an absorbing read. Supported with personal examples and writing prompts at the end of each chapter, you’ll quickly be giving voice to your ancestors’ adventures.

In How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History, you’ll discover:

How to prioritize all those photos, letters, diaries, and official documents
Sample passages and an extensive reading list to inspire your creativity
Ways to craft stories that won’t put your readers to sleep
Tips for dealing with negativity, missing materials, or too much information
Methods for conducting research to preserve accuracy, and much, much more!

”…a treasure chest of advice for any nonfiction writer.”
—Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community and a Century of Change

”I’m gathering info about my family by doing weekly Skype sessions with my parents, and I am trying not to panic about how I will turn this into a book later. This book gave me a lot of great ideas and a way forward.”
—Lana Raykin, advance reader

How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History is a must-have resource for anyone interested in preserving their lineage. If you like actionable advice, no-frills-added instructions, and guidance from a memoir specialist, then you’ll love Annette Gendler’s easy approach.

Buy How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History to keep the memories alive today!
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Product: The Boston Massacre: A Family History
Description: A dramatic untold ‘people’s history’ of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution
The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs and and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.
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Product: A Recipe for Writing Family History
Description: A Recipe for Writing Family History takes the fuss out of writing stories of your ancestors - the ones you’ve met and those you have not. This writing recipe will flood your mind with family stories and give you the confidence to put their lives in a readable form. You will move past writer’s block and fill pages with facts and details you never thought possible. A Recipe for Writing Family History is the best way to start writing today. Your ancestors will be “Gone, But Not Forgotten.”
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Product: Don't Make Me Pull Over!
Description: Part pop history and part whimsical memoir in the spirit of National Lampoon's Vacation - Don’t Make Me Pull Over! is a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips - a halcyon era that culminated in the latter part of the 20th century, before portable DVD players, iPods, and Google Maps.

In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them - from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

The birth of America's first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming - sans seatbelts! - to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. Frequently, what was remembered the longest wasn’t Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, or Disney World, but such roadside attractions as “The Thing” in Texas Canyon, Arizona, or “The Mystery Spot” in Santa Cruz, California. In this road tourism-crazy era that stretched through the 1970s, national parks attendance swelled to 165 million, and a whopping 2.2 million people visited Gettysburg each year, 13 times the number of soldiers who fought in the battle.

Now, decades later, Ratay offers a paean to what was lost, showing how family togetherness was eventually sacrificed to electronic distractions and the urge to "get there now". In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including 20-foot “land yachts”, oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes”, “Smokey"-spotting Fuzzbusters, 28 glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio.

A rousing Ratay family ride-along, Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together - for better and worse - have largely disappeared
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Product: The Family Tree Toolkit: A Comprehensive Guide to Uncovering Your Ancestry and Researching Genealogy
Description: The popularity of Family History has increased over the past five years due to TV shows like Genealogy Roadshow, Finding Your Roots, and Who Do You Think You Are? The ability to access records online has opened up the one time hobby for genealogy enthusiasts to the mainstream.
Companies like Ancestry.com, Familysearch.org, Findmypast.com, and MyHeritage have spent millions of dollars making records available around the world. DNA technology continues to evolve and provides the instant gratification that we have become use to as a society. But then the question remains, what does that really mean? Knowing your ancestry is more than just ethnic percentages it’s about creating and building a story about your family history. The Family History Toolkit is designed to help you navigate the sometimes overwhelming and sometimes treacherous waters of finding your ancestors.
While this is not a comprehensive guide to all things genealogy, it is a roadmap to help you on this journey of discovery, whether you are looking for your African Asian, European, or Jewish ancestry. The Family History Toolkit guides you on how and where to begin, what records are available both online and in repositories, what to do once you find the information, how to share your story and of course DNA discoveries.
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Product: The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy: Trace Your Roots, Share Your History, and Create Your Family Tree (Everything®)
Description: Use online tools to discover your family's history!
Thanks to the overwhelming number of genealogical records available online today, it's never been easier to trace your family history and find your roots. But where do you begin? With all that information, it can be impossible to know where to start! In The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy, 3rd Edition, genealogy expert Kimberly Powell guides you through the process of finding your ancestors, helping you:

Effectively search various websites
Decipher census data and other online records
Choose the best way to share data with family members
Connect with other genealogists through social media

Packed with tips on using free databases, new websites, and a growing number of genealogy apps, The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy, 3rd Edition has everything you need to scour the Internet and find your ancestors, going back generations!
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Product: How to Trace Your Family Tree in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales: The Complete Practical Handbook For All Detectives Of Family History, Heritage And Genealogy
Brand: Southwater
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Product: Family Heritage Journal: History, Stories, and Cherished Keepsakes
Brand: Weldon Owen
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Product: An Oral History (Preserve Your Family's Story)
Brand: Peter Pauper Press
6.25" W x 8.25" H x 1" D
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Product: Family Tree Memory Keeper: Your Workbook for Family History, Stories and Genealogy
Brand: Family Tree Books
Color: Tan
GenealogyReference, miscellaneous
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Product: Tracing Your Family's Genealogical History By Records: First Edition Instructional Guide
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Product: How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist's Guide: With Specific Resources for Major Christian Denominations before 1900
Brand: Genealogical Publishing Company
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Product: You Can Write Your Family History
Brand: Genealogical Publishing Company
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Product: Our Family Tree: A History of Our Family
Brand: Chartwell Books
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Product: To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come
Brand: Doubleday
Color: Multicolor
Family & Relationships
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Product: Our Family Tree
Brand: Peter Pauper Press
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