Posted on

Announcing: ‘Storytelling for Genealogists: Turning Family Lineage into Family History’ – By Doug Tattershall

Storytelling for Genealogists: Turning Family Lineage into Family History

Genealogy is about solving puzzles. Who is related to whom? Who was my immigrant ancestor? How far back in time can I go? Do I have a famous ancestor? And so on.

Family history is different. If you want others to learn about where you and they came from, you must command their attention. As Doug Tattershall states in the Introduction to his new book, “We work hard to discover our family tree. But what we [and the people we are writing for] really want to know is our family story.”

So, how does a genealogist transition to family history? You will find the answers in Storytelling for Genealogists: Turning Family Lineage into Family History, by Doug Tattershall. In less than one hundred pages, he shows how to start and stay on track in transforming the skeletal outline of a genealogy into an engaging family story. 

Chapter One discusses the elements of a good story: strong characters, a good plot, and the theme or point of the story—all based on the facts uncovered by your research. Doug draws on his own and others’ family stories and images to make his points.

Chapter Two, “The Stuff,” explains how to incorporate the biographical details from your research. Details gathered from interviews (oral history), personal letters and diaries, newspaper articles and obituaries, lawsuits, local histories, etc. Careful genealogists, of course, do not take everything they discover at face value. They do their best to corroborate the accuracy of their findings. For example, if you cannot authenticate a rumor about your ancestor, state the information as just that—a rumor. 

Chapter Three, “Puzzle Pieces” emphasizes the importance of establishing a timeline to your story, while Chapter Four illustrates how things like paintings or photographs, geographic details, and mementos can add specificity and immediacy to it.

Not every storyteller needs to convey his family history in a book. In Chapter Five, “Format,” the author draws on his experience as a journalist to compare the merits of the various media you can choose from: written narrative, audio, video, blogs, and podcasts. 

The final chapters of Storytelling for Genealogists: Turning Family Lineage into Family History emphasize the importance of creating a storyteller’s outline to keep everything together, examples of “Good and True” storytelling, and a helpful family story worksheet. 

As Doug Tattershall reminds us, “We research our family histories to satisfy our own curiosity about our past, but we quickly find that we want to share what we have found . . . Telling your family story deserves an effort that incorporates the best practices of the dedicated storyteller. . . Your family history is a story worth telling and, therefore, a story worth telling well.”