Family History

In an interesting article in the June 26, 2006 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow, son of Harry and Naomi Zaslow, writes about the tug of war with two parents who spent many years writing about their personal and family histories.

My mother recently finished writing a book about her life, and in it, she sums up her past three years with my father. “I felt,” she writes, “like I was living with his mistress.”

The mistress is my father’s 663-page memoir. It has been an obsessive project for him, and my mother worries that he’s stuck in the years 1944 and 1945, when he was an American solider in Europe. He writes far more about his World War II experiences than he does about his 60 years with my mom, and that’s painful for her. She doesn’t appear in his book until page 500.

She took to writing her life story as a way to reconsider her reflections, as my father was lost in his. They wrote their dueling memoirs on opposite sides of their house in Florida…

The article goes on to explain that there has been a boom in adult-education classes and workshops on autobiographical writing, encouraging the vast number of seniors in the United States to write about their past and share their memories with others. It also discusses the risks involved in such memoir-writings such as “misunderstandings in marriages, and friction within families”, emphasizing the fact that “people need to be aware of the emotional land mines”.

Reasons for publishing your memoirs is varied, as highlighted by this quote from the article:

…a memoir has many purposes: to convert experiences into wisdom, to pass on values, to find forgiveness, to bring people from the past back to life, to see connections between experiences that seem unrelated. A memoir shouldn’t be a tool for revenge or mudslinging. Nor should it be an exercise in self-pity…Don’t be a neutral reporter in your life. Memoir writing is not journalism.

P.J. Cherrin, publisher of Memoir Press

How you handle your own auto-biography or memoirs is up to you. You can write it for publishing and sharing only with the family, or possibly reach out to a larger publish by self-publishing or finding a publisher. There is a growing number of publishers interested in auto-biographical stories, especially about the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, with a new trend in portraits of life in the 60s and early 70s.

You can write it for the reasons listed, focusing your writing purpose on writing your story for others. Or write it just for yourself. Preserve your own memories of your childhood and adulthood, your life through the trials and tribulations, just for you. You don’t have to share it with others, just write it and set it aside for someone who might find it down the generations and be heartened to find out who you were and how you contributed to your life and the lives of others.

The following resources will help you with writing your memoir and auto-biography.

• Association of Personal Histories
• Center for Autobiographic Studies
• Writing the Journey – Online Journal Writing Workshop
• Bellingham Public Schools – The Biography Maker
• Writing and Reading Memoir as Consciousness-Raising: If the Personal Is Political, Is the Memoir Feminist?
• Scholastic – Biography – Writer’s Online Workshop with Patricia and Fredrick McKissack
• TV 411 – How to Write Your Autobiography
• NY Times Learning Network – Biographies Lesson Plan Unit and Guide
• Memoir – A Journey Into Your Past Online Workshop
• Memory Archive – Wiki of Memoirs
• Essortment – Writing Narrative Personal Essays
• Personal Narrative Collection – Memory Prompts
• Tips and Help for Writing Your Autobiography From Scratch
• Inkspell – Memoir Writing
• Inspired to Journal
• Life Story Writing Network
• The Lifewriter’s Digest from Turning Memories – Resources
• Daily Writing – Soul Food Cafe
• Writing It Real

The Wisconsin Historical Society has an excellent article on researching church records as part of your genealogy research.

The article offers excellent tips and search strategies to help you locate which church your family members were affiliated with, and then where to search for records from that church.

Church registers of births, deaths and marriages are the most helpful to genealogists but often there are other types of useful church records available. The existence of these other types of records varies with the denomination and the era of the church. These records can include lists of members, church accounts, journals of clergy, disciplinary records, and family registers. Church newspapers are also useful. They can include obituaries of lay members and clergy and items about church members who have moved away.

Church records of births, deaths and marriage may seem easy to interpret but there is often more information in them than you are first aware. Particular ethnic groups may have traditions in the naming of children or in the choosing of witnesses that can reveal collateral lines or highlight relationships between families. Researching the traditions of a particular ethnic group or church may help you interpret the church records more effectively.

There is a lot of information to be gleaned from church records, often more than from government records like the census, birth, death, or marriage records.

While a lot of information is slowly being made available on the Internet, most church records are still in books or microfilm, which often cannot be loaded out or borrowed, so onsite research may be required.

You can find some church records through PERiodical Source Index (PERSI), as well as online catalogs at local libraries in the community where your family attended church. Some LDS Family History Centers and Genealogy Societies also maintain some church records, though at the most, you will be lucky to find only indexes available online, and even that might come with a fee.

Researching the US Census records on my ancestors is a time consuming and often frustrating process. Not all the information is correct in the census, and not all of the information has been transcribed and is easily found in databases. Sometimes you have to dig into the census records manually and virtually thumb through page after page in a specific city, county or state.

For those you do find, proving that who you found is indeed your relative comes down to location, family members, birthplaces, and age. One of the frustrating parts for me is figuring out how old each person I’m researching was in which census record. How old were they in the 1860, 1880, 1910, or 1930 census?

The Master Genealogist (TMG) has a Timeline feature which makes this process of determining how old each person was at the time of a census. To initiate it globally, go to Tools > Timeline Manager. Go through the list and deselect (uncheck by using the unselect button or double clicking on each selected item) every checked item in the Timeline list. Then select only USCENSS1 described as “As-of dates for all census tabulation since 1790. Contributed by Lee Hoffman.”

Be sure and check the box at the bottom of the screen that says Show the events from the selected time lines. and click Close.

Now, when you view each person’s details, the year of the census will be shown in red.

If you have the Age Column turned on, the estimated or actual age of the person will be shown next to the year of the census. To turn on the Age Column, go to File > Preferences > Tag Box and select Show Age Column. On the same panel, you can also set the color background for the Timeline fields. I’ve set them to be red so they are easily identifiable from the rest of the data.

Now that I know I’m looking for a Hans Anderson in Wisconsin who was 35 for the 1880 Census, I can rule out the Hans Andersons who are 12, 48, 54, and 76.

To turn this feature off, simply go to Tools > Timeline Manager and deselect the Census timeline. It’s back to normal.

You can use this feature while researching any time-oriented aspect of your family’s history. By turning on the Timeline for a specific war, epidemic, US political history or history throughout the rest of the world, or whatever time line you have included. The Master Genealogist comes with a wide variety of timelines installed, but you can add more. For a list of some timelines you can add to TMG, see TMG Timelines.