Research reports are not just for professionals, but are a great tool for anyone who wants to answer their research questions. Write a research report to yourself to organize your thoughts, analyze the evidence, document your findings, and solve your puzzles. Using an example from the Netherlands, this presentation demonstrates how you can organize a research report to spot more clues in records, discover and resolve discrepancies, and build reliable conclusions.

As researchers, family historians, compilers, bloggers, or writers of other ilk, genealogists face legal and ethical perils they often do not anticipate. This crash course offers practical guidance to enhance your skills and keep you safe as you explore history, reconstruct lives, and “write up” your findings. While the issues are serious—from the legal issue of copyright to the ethical issue of plagiarism—the lessons are taught with a light heart and humor.

Genealogists write. Their written narratives include stories of ancestral families, biographies of individual ancestors, and explanations supporting genealogical proofs. For their writing to succeed, genealogists—like all effective writers—repeatedly self-edit everything they write. The process results in polished products that the genealogist’s readers will understand, enjoy, and cherish. Emphasizing genealogical narrative, these two webinars will address the self-editing process. Part 1 will focus on “big-picture” editing, including stages of self-editing; focus; keeping the writer out of the narrative; editing the writing’s overall structure, organization, and flow; and improving major and minor subdivisions of written genealogical narratives, including paragraphing. Part 2 will focus on “nitty-gritty” editing, including capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, word choice, and reducing word count.

Genealogists write. Their written narratives include stories of ancestral families, biographies of individual ancestors, and explanations supporting genealogical proofs. For their writing to succeed, genealogists—like all effective writers—repeatedly self-edit everything they write. The process results in polished products that the genealogist’s readers will understand, enjoy, and cherish. Emphasizing genealogical narrative, these two webinars will addresses the self-editing process. Part 1 will focus on “big-picture” editing, including stages of self-editing; focus; keeping the writer out of the narrative; editing the writing’s overall structure, organization, and flow; and improving major and minor subdivisions of written genealogical narratives, including paragraphing. Part 2 will focus on “nitty-gritty” editing, including capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, word choice, and reducing word count.

Learn how to conquer family history writer’s block with 50 fun and practical tips for getting words on the page.

Learn how to automatically create citations for your DNA matches to help you in organizing your genetic genealogy research efforts.

This workshop will guide researchers through a series of steps and stops to find the history of buildings and places. Follow some case studies and learn how to find excellent records in MyHeritage, the steps to follow followed, and the ideal interplay between primary and secondary sources. Also, learn pro-tips for writing a compelling narrative. This presentation will inspire attendees with the power that the places of our ancestors have to draw us near and to strengthen a sense of community. 

Often the hardest part of writing an ancestor’s story is getting started. Learn how to use MyHeritage tools and features to outline, write and share family stories with ease.

When it comes time to write the stories of your ancestors’ lives, whether you want to write a blog post or a book, you are going to want more than names, places and dates. These lists of facts make for boring reading. This lecture will reveal Janice’s secret method to uncovering hidden episodes of our ancestors’ lives that bring their stories to life.