How to write a family history book

Almost everyone who starts one of these has the same experience. An enthusiastic first month, a folder of scans and half-transcribed interviews, a growing sense that the material doesn’t fit together — and then a stall that lasts years.

The cause is nearly always the same: the shape of the book was decided before anyone knew what material actually existed. Sorting that order out is most of the job.

Decide what kind of book it is first

These are four genuinely different projects. Picking one early saves months, because it determines what you collect and what you can safely ignore.

Collect before you write

1. 1

   Interview the living first

   Always, and before anything else. Records will still be there in ten years; the person who knows who’s in the photograph will not. This is the only genuinely time-critical part of the whole project. The questions to ask your parents list works as a ready-made interview script for exactly this.

2. 2

   Scan everything, once, properly

   Photographs, letters, certificates, the backs of photographs. Do it at a decent resolution the first time — rescanning a box you’ve given back is a job nobody does.

3. 3

   Label as you go, with names and a date

   An unlabelled scan is barely better than no scan. Note who identified each face, too — you’ll want to know later how confident to be.

4. 4

   Keep a source note for every fact

   Not for formality. Six months on you will not remember whether a birth year came from a certificate or from an uncle who was fairly sure, and the difference matters.

Structure: pick one and hold it

Three structures work. Mixing them is what makes a manuscript feel unfinishable.

• Chronological — simplest to write and to read, and the default for a single life. Works badly across many people at once, because you’re constantly cutting between threads.
• By person — a chapter each. Good for a memoir with several voices, and it lets you finish a chapter and feel progress. The risk is repetition where lives overlap.
• By theme — work, war, houses, migration, food. The most readable option for a wide family, and the hardest to keep organised. Best when you already know your material.

Whichever you choose, write one complete chapter early — start to finish, including the boring joins. It will teach you more about the real shape of the book than any amount of planning.

What to do about the gaps

There will be gaps, including important ones. The instinct is to stop until they’re filled, which is how projects die.

• Say what you don’t know, in the text. “We don’t know why they left Cork in 1912” is a perfectly good sentence and far better than a silent hole.
• Distinguish fact from family story explicitly. “The family has always said…” is honest and interesting. Presenting it as established fact is neither.
• Never invent scenes or dialogue to smooth a gap. Once a reader spots one invented moment, everything else becomes suspect — and future generations will read this as a record.
• Leave the question in for someone else. A named open question is a gift to whoever picks this up in twenty years.

Getting it printed

Two real routes, not one vague one. A local print shop will bind a PDF you bring in on a USB stick or by email, which suits a single copy or a handful. For more copies, or for posting one to a cousin abroad, a print-on-demand site will take a PDF upload directly and print single copies to order — Lulu, for instance, prints from a UK location as well as the US, Canada, France, Australia and India, and lists A5 (148 x 210mm) as one of its standard paperback trim sizes, the same size StoryPrompt's own PDF is laid out to. Checked directly on lulu.com today — pricing there is shown in US dollars, so check the actual cost for your page count and currency before committing, rather than trusting a figure quoted secondhand.

• Photographs need to be higher resolution for print than for screen. A scan that looks fine on a laptop can print badly.
• Decide early whether photographs sit inline or in a plate section — it changes how you write around them.
• Order one proof copy before printing for the family. Errors are far more visible on paper.
• Print more than you think. Cousins appear once a book exists.

The shortcut that actually works

If this feels like a lot — it is, and most people are honestly better off starting with the first row of that table. One life, in their own words, is the version that gets finished, and it’s also the version that becomes irrecoverable if you wait. A memory book for grandparents is the shop-bought version of that idea — worth reading about before you buy one.

That’s what StoryPrompt does. One question a week by email, written for a British life; they answer in their own words; every answer collects into a typeset PDF you can download whenever you like — during the paid year and after it, for as long as StoryPrompt runs — and take to a print shop. It removes the two things that kill these projects — a blank page, and depending on someone remembering to keep going.

If you’re doing the wider research yourself, the free 100-question list is a good interview backbone whether or not you ever buy anything, and how to start a family tree covers the records side.