Structuring a Family History - class 1 of 4

Carol Baxter
Oct 27, 2022
2.3K views
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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

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...
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Comments (108)

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  1. MM
    Marg McIntyre
    3 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.

    1
  2. JV
    John Vitale
    3 years ago

    Scrivner does make writing easier

  3. HS
    Helen Schenkelaars
    3 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!

  4. BB
    Brian Boneham
    3 years ago

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

  5. DN
    Denise Newton
    3 years ago

    very useful info, I like Carol's presentations

  6. DM
    Douglas Murphy
    3 years ago

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

  7. KA
    Kaye Arnold
    3 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.

  8. CM
    Carole McCulloch
    3 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.

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