The Albuquerque Tribute’s Mary Penner has written “Planning Will Save Your Family History Project”, a really good overview of why and how you need to plan your family history research project.
Consider these obstacles: You want to cover 200 or more years of history; you have thousands of names in the family tree; you have copies of odd-shaped original documents including wills, deeds, licenses, letters; you have photographs; you have charts and timelines. And to top it all off, the research isn’t finished. It’s never finished.
How can researchers take mounds of research, organize it in a way that won’t baffle all of your relatives, and compress it into a book that weighs less than 50 pounds?
Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula, but before you sit down and type “Chapter One,” sketch out a plan to guide you through the process.
Whether you are creating a family history scrapbook, book, or blog, get your plan in order to figure out what you want to do, what you will include, and then how you will put all the pieces together to make this into a single family history project.
Penner offers excellent guidelines on a step-by-step approach to planning your family history compilation.
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