The next Best of Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL series webinar is on Friday (a members-only event). Learn more here. 

The next Best of Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL series webinar is on Friday (a members-only event). Learn more here. 

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Writing and Publishing Writing

Structuring a Family History – class 1 of 4

Carol Baxter
Oct 27, 2022
2.2K views
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Content

Play. Playing.
Welcome
2m 46s
Play. Playing.
Speaker's Introduction
1m 04s
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Introduction
4m 05s
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Multi-generational Family Histories
6m 47s
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Pyramid-shaped Family History
4m 10s
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Broom-shaped Family History
8m 09s
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Hour-glass Family History
13m 16s
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The Introduction
17m 13s
Play. Playing.
Biographical Structure
13m 28s
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Announcements / prizes
8m 24s
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Questions / answers
10m 08s

About this webinar

To write a family history, we must convert our ancestral information into paragraphs of prose. But how do we group the resulting paragraphs to produce a coherent structure? We start by asking ourselves what we wish to achieve. Are we writing a history that focuses on a surname line? Or one that covers all of our ancestors, or all of our descendants, or all of the ancestors and descendants of a particular person? And how do we craft an individual biography? Do we produce a family history that is a group of stand-alone biographies or one that has a narrative-style flow? These and other subjects are discussed in this simple guide to structuring a family history.

Classes 2-4 will be part of our October 2022 conference on Saturday, October 29. Visit https://familytreewebinars.com/conference/ for the details.

About the speaker

About the speaker

Carol Baxter
Carol Baxter is an experienced and informed historian and genealogist, an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning author, and a dynamic, inspirational presenter. Carol has been a genealogist for four decades having first become interested
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  1. MM
    Marg McIntyre
    2 years ago

    Was unable to watch this live, but Carol is fabulous! Very funny and has great advice about writing family histories. I’ll be watching all of her other webinars.

    Reply
  2. JV
    John Vitale
    2 years ago

    Scrivner does make writing easier

    Reply
  3. HS
    Helen Schenkelaars
    2 years ago

    Carol’s writing webinars are a must if you want people to actually read your family history. This was a great presentation on something that is quite a dry topic and not the easiest thing to teach. Looking forward to the rest!

    Reply
  4. BB
    Brian Boneham
    2 years ago

    Brilliant webinar with lots of great information and ideas to enable us to write a readable family history.

    Reply
  5. DN
    Denise Newton
    2 years ago

    very useful info, I like Carol’s presentations

    Reply
  6. DM
    Douglas Murphy
    2 years ago

    Now I see! The hard part is putting this into practice in my own work.

    Reply
  7. KA
    Kaye Arnold
    2 years ago

    Communicating how to write any kind of product is a challenge. Carol Baxter met that challenge with superior expertise, an organized presentation, and great examples. I would recommend her work to any genealogists who want to write a history others will want to read.

    Reply
  8. CM
    Carole McCulloch
    2 years ago

    Carol’s explanations of the types of family history enable me to categorise my own published book as a pyramid shaped multi-generational memoir-style bio. Now I am equipped with excellent strategies for structuring my next family history book.

    Reply
Show all comments

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