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Family History Essay | How to Write? and 400 Words Essay on Family History

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Family History Essay: A family involves individuals living respectively that structure a gathering of people inside a local area. Individuals making this gathering are dependent upon connections either by birth or blood, and it involves at any rate two grown-ups as guardians and grandparents, along with little youngsters. The relatives have a common association between them. Thus, an exposition about family ancestry is a rundown of a person’s social personality and the equal relationship(s) he/she imparts to individuals living respectively.

Adapting family ancestry is indispensable to comprehend our economic well-being, mankind, and variety. History saves our recollections for ages to comprehend what their identity is and their geographic beginning. Having decent information on family foundation allows you to see the value in the things or penances made before by grandparents to encounter better things throughout everyday life. A person’s underlying foundations and beginning bring a self-appreciation revelation. Likewise, expounding on your family ancestry is one method of protecting its legacy for people in the future.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

How to Write a Family History Essay?

When composing a, there is a consistent construction you should continue in giving out your contentions. An appropriate diagram will deliver an energizing show of each segment, and it will interest the peruser. The standard design of an article has a presentation, body, and end. Here is a magnificent illustration of a layout for a family ancestry article:

• Topic: My Family History
• Introduction (Outline): Write a short brief about your family background and why your family is important
• Body: Write about your family members, how you live together and who your neighbors
• Conclusion: Rehashing your conflict, Sum up your key thoughts, and Give a last remark or reflection about the paper

Essay on Family History 400 Words in English

Would you need to know how everything began until here? My grandpa disclosed to me that he met my grandmother at a show where probably the best craftsman was performing during one of the late spring occasions in London. As he was moving alone, my grandpa moved toward a wonderful woman (who might turn into his perfect partner) to request that she dance together. They later consented to meet for a supper date. Our family lives in London. Without a doubt, this is the best family, and it’s an honor to be essential for it.

Each individual includes different sides inside his/her family; my fatherly side begins from Canada, while the maternal side is from America. Despite the fact that my extraordinary granddad comes from Spain, my grandpa and grandmother live in London. My granddad is Indo-British who functioned as a barkeep, no big surprise he adored shows! My dad fills in as a traditionalist for amphibian fauna while my mom works in the bread kitchen. My mom and father met in a store when they were both shopping.

Despite the fact that we live in a similar city, my grandparents have their loft, a separation from our own. We live as a group of five; father, mum, and three youngsters. As we as a whole live in a similar city, we (me and my two sisters) incidentally visit our grandparents during the end of the week to invest some energy with them; grandpa and I were doing some planting while my sisters and grandmother do cook and other house tasks. The connection between our extraordinary guardians and our own is extremely phenomenal.

At Christmas, every one of my youngsters, mum, and father travel to our grandparents for an entire week. During the new year, we get together at our home, my parent’s home, to invite the year as a whole family. Now and again during the end of the week, we normally invest the majority of our energy on the seashore swimming, besides on chapel days. As a family, our number one food is rotisserie fish, rice, and vegetables. In any case, my grandpa likes chicken hash.

All in all, the social conjunction between us is fantastic, which has made a powerful common bond for the family. From visiting one another, investing energy in the seashore, getting together suppers to usher in the new year, and observing Christmas as a family, the bond continues to develop. I’m favored to be essential for a particularly incredible family.

FAQ’s on Family History Essay

Question 1. Why is it important to know family history?

Answer: Knowing your family ancestry is vital. It empowers one to self-find himself inside the general public and like the heredity. At the point when you find out about your family’s past, you will comprehend the things you see and experience today. Composing an article on family ancestry requires a ton of comprehension and consideration regarding the viewpoints you need to depict. The basic factor being the family foundation, at that point seeing how you need to design and scribble down your thoughts.

Question 2. What are the points that can be mentioned in a family history essay?

Answer: You can write about family members, relations, values and traditions of your family. Write down the places from where your ancestors belong or the origin of your family. Also, mention the family reunion or gatherings or the occasions when you all get together.

Question 3. What family really means?

Answer: Family implies having somebody to adore you unequivocally disregarding you and your weaknesses. Family is cherishing and supporting each other in any event when it is difficult to do as such. It’s being the best individual you could be with the goal that you may motivate your adoration ones.

Question 4. Why do we need family?

Answer: Family is the absolute most significant impact on a youngster’s life. From their first snapshots of life, kids rely upon guardians and family to ensure them and accommodate their necessities. Kids flourish when guardians can effectively advance their positive development and improvement.

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How to Write Your Family History

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Choose a Format

Define the scope, set realistic deadlines.

• Choose a Plot and Themes

Do Your Background Research

• Don't Be Afraid to Use Records and Documents

Include an Index and Source Citations

• Certificate in Genealogical Research, Boston University
• B.A., Carnegie Mellon University

Writing a family history may seem like a daunting task, but when the relatives start nagging, you can follow these five easy steps to make your family history project a reality.

What do you envision for your family history project? A simple photocopied booklet shared only with family members or a full-scale, hard-bound book to serve as a reference for other genealogists? Perhaps you'd rather produce a family newsletter, cookbook, or website. Now is the time to be honest with yourself about the type of family history that meetings your needs and your schedule. Otherwise, you'll have a half-finished product nagging you for years to come.

Considering your interests, potential audience, and the types of materials you have to work with, here are some forms your family history can take:

• Memoir/Narrative: A combination of story and personal experience, memoirs, and narratives do not need to be all-inclusive or objective. Memoirs usually focus on a specific episode or time period in the life of a single ancestor, while a narrative generally encompasses a group of ancestors.
• Cookbook: Share your family's favorite recipes while writing about the people who created them. A fun project to assemble, cookbooks help carry on the family tradition of cooking and eating together.
• Scrapbook or Album: If you're fortunate enough to have a large collection of family photos and memorabilia, a scrapbook or photo album can be a fun way to tell your family's story. Include your photos in chronological order and include stories, descriptions, and family trees to complement the pictures.

Most family histories are generally narrative in nature, with a combination of personal stories, photos, and family trees.

Do you intend to write mostly about just one particular relative, or everyone in your family tree ? As the author, you need to choose a focus for your family history book. Some possibilities include:

• Single Line of Descent:  Begin with the earliest known ancestor for a particular surname and follows him/her through a single line of descent (to yourself, for example). Each chapter of your book would cover one ancestor or generation.
• All Descendants Of...:  Begin with an individual or couple and cover all of their descendants, with chapters organized by generation. If you're focusing your family history on an immigrant ancestor, this is a good way to go.
• Grandparents:  Include a section on each of your four grandparents, or eight great-grandparents, or sixteen great-great-grandparents if you are feeling ambitious. Each individual section should focus on one grandparent and work backward through their ancestry or forward from his/her earliest known ancestor.

Again, these suggestions can easily be adapted to fit your interests, time constraints, and creativity.

Even though you'll likely find yourself scrambling to meet them, deadlines force you to complete each stage of your project. The goal here is to get each piece done within a specified time frame. Revising and polishing can always be done later. The best way to meet these deadlines is to schedule writing time, just as you would a visit to the doctor or the hairdresser.

Choose a Plot and Themes

Thinking of your ancestors as characters in your family story, ask yourself: what problems and obstacles did they face? A plot gives your family history interest and focus. Popular family history plots and themes include:

• Immigration/Migration
• Rags to Riches
• Pioneer or Farm Life
• War Survival

If you want your family history to read more like a suspense novel than a dull, dry textbook, it is important to make the reader feel like an eyewitness to your family's life. Even when your ancestors didn't leave accounts of their daily lives, social histories can help you learn about the experiences of people in a given time and place. Read town and city histories to learn what life was life during certain periods of interest.  Research timelines  of wars, natural disasters, and epidemics to see if any might have influenced your ancestors. Read up on the fashions, art, transportation, and common foods of the time. If you haven't already, be sure to interview all of your living relatives. Family stories told in a relative's own words will add a personal touch to your book.

Don't Be Afraid to Use Records and Documents

Photos, pedigree charts, maps, and other illustrations can also add interest to family history and help break up the writing into manageable chunks for the reader. Be sure to include detailed captions for any photos or illustrations that you incorporate.

Source citations are an essential part of any family book, to both provide credibility to your research, and to leave a trail that others can follow to verify your findings.

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How to Go From Boring to Brilliant Family History Writing

So, you’ve done so much family history research that you’re drowning in facts and you’ve decided – that’s it – I’ve got to start writing some of this up!

Only now you are stuck. Don’t worry, you are not alone.

Unless you’re a bit of a Marvin (from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy) you are probably perfectly fine at telling stories. I mean, we tell snippets of stories all the time, whether it’s moaning to the postman about our encounter with a grumpy lady in Tesco’s. Or explaining our Great-Grandfather to our 3rd cousin twice removed. We tell stories daily.

It’s often only when we come to write these stories down that we struggle. We can’t find the “right” words. We lose our voice. We get bogged down in details. We forget about our core story. The thing that made us want to tell it in the first place. We either stare at a blank white page, unable to even start writing OR we write tons of words – read them back and decide we’d like to delete the lot.

In this article, I’ll share some tips that’ll transform your family history writing. I’m not saying you are going to become a world-renowned author. We’re not all JK Rowling. But, when you give your cousin Sue the story about your great-gran, you can be sure she’ll read it, enjoy it and therefore remember it.

Table of Contents

Before you start writing your family history, decide your audience.

Sometimes our audience is clear, such as I’m writing this for my children. But, we don’t always have a particular person in mind. You may be writing up your family history for fun, to check for gaps in your research, as ‘cousin bait’, as a blog for fellow genealogists or professional reasons.

That’s fine, but you need to try to imagine who might be reading. Let’s use my blog post on my Woodrow witch ancestor as an example. It could attract unknown cousins, fellow genealogists or person’s interested in family history. It might attract those that like reading true stories.

These readers all have some things in common. They are unlikely to be children. They are likely to enjoy history. Yet, some readers may have lots of family history knowledge, others none at all. I need to ensure I don’t alienate anyone. For example, I use language appropriate to their reading age but without jargon.

Envisioning your audience, their likes and dislikes will help inform your writing.

Decide On The Message For Each Piece of Family History Writing

Your writing doesn’t have to have a deep and meaningful message. But, it does have to have some sort of point. For example, my blog post ‘ Blue Blood ‘ explores my illegitimate ancestor. I wanted to make my research journey clear and to inform readers of the parentage of my ancestor. That was my message. Whereas, my blog post ‘A Hidden Victim of Ripper Mania ‘ had a statement at its heart. I wanted to use my ancestor’s story to explore the effect of constricted gender roles. I wanted to show her story of suicide as a possible consequence of Victorian rigidity.

Regardless of whether your message is divisive, exploratory or informative, decide it before you start. Don’t let it get lost or diluted. Keep checking on your message. Are you getting to the point? Is it clear?

Set A Plan & Avoid Tangents

Before writing your family history make a plan. Exactly which ancestors are you going to cover? Over what time? Who will you start with? How will you break up their story? How does this plan work with your decided audience? Where will you show your message?

Setting a plan will give your writing structure. It’ll ensure you cover all the points you want to explore. It’ll ensure your message comes through. It’ll help you weed out or avoid random tangents.

Odd pieces of off-topic text can be very distracting. It’s easy to fall into a trap of including things because they are ‘interesting’. This is an error. Adding random pieces of content dilutes your story. It starts to feel rambling and the message becomes lost.

Writing Your Family History

If you can't write it, say it.

One of my favourite writing styles, especially for short stories, is ‘conversational’. I like to feel like the writer is sat next to me, sharing their tale over a cuppa. That’s not always easy to emulate. So cheat! Record yourself whilst you explain the story.

You don’t need anything fancy to do this. Download the free app Otter ( Google Play or Apple Store ) onto your phone. This nifty programme will listen to you talk and convert your words into text. It’s not perfect but its accuracy is impressive.

Next, take that speech-to-text and edit it. Use it as a starting point and build upon it.

Pay special attention to the words you use or turns of phase. This is your real voice. Use those phases in your family history writing to make it feel more authentic.

Use Endnotes or Footnotes to separate your family history writing from sources

You don’t have to put all your details within the body of the text. I have read a lot of family histories that start like this:

“My ancestor, John Brown was born on 5th June 1857. He was christened on 10 June 1857 in St Michael’s Church, Basingstoke. His older brother, Thomas was christened on the same day. Thomas was born on 20th March 1855.”

For an instant win, try putting some of those details in footnotes or endnotes, alongside any source information. Doing so transforms our sentence, to something like this:

“John and his older brother Thomas were both christened in the summer of 1857 at St Michael’s Church, Basingstoke.”

Bring Your Family History Writing To Life

Reading a list of facts is boring. We need details to help spark our imagination. Writing family history is challenging because we need both accuracy and imagination.

Let’s look at our 1857 christening example. It took place in the summer and it’d be easy to presume that the weather was hot. We need to check though! That June may have been infamous for its terrible weather.

Our example took place in a church. We may look at a photo of that stone building and presume it looked the same way in 1857. Again we need to check. What if the church flooded that year? What if the building we see today is a replica?

Once we’ve got our confirmed details though, we can use them to create texts rich in detail:

“Summer 1857 was hot and the parishioners of St Michael’s Church must have felt relieved to sit within the cool of the church’s thick stone walls. On 10th June the Brown family filled the congregation. A generation of bottoms squashed into the tiny pews. I imagine the new Brown babies (Thomas and John) cried as the icy holy water splashed onto their foreheads. Three years before them, a daughter had been baptised using that same deep stone font. Her little bottom was missing from the row of Browns that watched the ceremony. Perhaps her mother, Elizabeth was thinking of her as she hushed her son’s bawl…”

Find The Right Words

Successful authors tend to have a fantastic vocabulary. Reading widely can help you to expand your own. But, you can also use a thesaurus to aid you – especially if you find you are using the same words repetitively. There are loads of free thesaurus’ online.

It is also worth bearing in mind that old adage, “show not tell”. If you find your text is full of adjectives (describing words) then start pruning them! Replacing those adjectives with strong nouns can actually enhance your writing.

I recommend reading “ Kill Your Adjectives “. It really explains this concept in much more detail and gives some great examples.

Use Tech To Help With Grammar

Even the very best of writers make mistakes. That’s why they have proof readers and editors. Now, whilst using a real-life person is always best, that’s not always possible. So, use apps to try to fill the gap. Hemingway is a free editor. Type in your text and using various colours, it’ll highlight sections that use a passive voice or are hard to read. It’ll point out your use of adverbs too. Fixing these errors will lead to better writing. 

Other apps that can help include, Grammarly (a free app or chrome extension). It will point out all your spelling and grammatical errors. Underlined. In red. I hate it. I love it. It’s one of those kinds of relationships.

Editing and Proof-Reading

Apps aside, nothing beats a human eye on your work. In an ideal world, once completed, put your writing away. Leave it for at least a couple of weeks before you pick it up and start editing. Then finally hand it to someone else to read. Proof-reading is a talent. It’s why people get paid to do it! So, do what you can. Pass it to who you can. Don’t beat yourself up if 3 months later you look at it again and there’s an apostrophe in the wrong place.

Enhance Your Family History Writing

An image is worth 1000 words.

Those of us writing up our family history today have a huge advantage over our ancestors. We have the mighty power of the internet. Within seconds we can have access to quality photographs to add to our work.

Use images to “back up” the detail you’ve written or to separate large pieces of writing. These don’t have to be images of your ancestors. Use photos of buildings, maps, artwork, newspapers. Mix it up!

On a practical note, ensure you are not breaking any copyright laws. On Google Images select Settings-Advanced Search and filter by ‘Usage Rights’ to find images marked as shareable. Read the different levels of copyright and attribute your images as appropriate. If in doubt, check with whoever owns the image before you use it. If you can’t find someone to ask and are still unsure, then don’t use it. And yes, I know exactly how frustrating that can be!

Geograph is great for free images of places and buildings within the UK. You can also utilise sites like Unsplash , Pixabay  and Pexels to find free pictures. Use Canva to curate your own images and text graphics.

Add Charts To Your Family History Writing

Make use of another advantage available to modern genealogists. Create and add family tree diagrams to your text. These not only break up long passages but make the text itself easier to follow. Use charts to explain genetic relationships. Create these either within your family tree package or using Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel, or your Mac or Google equivalent.

Break Up Your Family History Writing

Depending on the length of your family history writing, consider using tools to make it easier to navigate. Very long works benefit from contents pages and indexes. All easily created in Word.

Shorter pieces may benefit from section breaks and sub-headings.

Give It A Title

People make snap decisions about what to read. Give your text the very best chance by giving it a great title. Use the Headline Analyser to see which of your ideas is worth pursuing. Or browse these 100+ blog title ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Do You Enjoy Writing Your Family History Stories?

Writing up your family history should be enjoyable. Be honest with yourself. If writing your family history feels like a form of torture then don’t do it! It’ll come through in your writing anyway. Writing up your ancestors’ lives is not the only method of recording their histories. You could simply do some oral recordings. You could try making a presentation.

Or you could join my Curious Descendants Club! With regular workshops and challenges, this Club is designed to help you write your family history. You can find all the details here, including testimonials from existing members .

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57 Angles, Tips, & Prompts for Writing Your Family History

Writing your family history.

Writing your family history is the type of huge task best manage by breaking it down into manageable parts. If you’ve ever struggled with ways to turn your pedigree charts and research notes into a shareable, readable history for your family to enjoy, read on. This list of story angles, creative tips, and writing prompts is for you. Some of these ideas might seem on the border of embroidering the truth. Let me clarify upfront that my intent is to suggest fullest use of available facts, as well as drawing well-reasoned, logical conclusions wherever possible. That said, I welcome discussion in the comments! And now, without further delay . . . !

Basic Structure & Style

1. Choose an ancestor and place births, deaths, and other impactful events on a timeline. Don’t forget their in-laws. (Tweet this)

3. Don’t be afraid to be a little repetitive if that works with how you’ve structured your history. Your family is all connected, of course, but ask yourself if your articles make sense as stand-alone works.

4. Utilize the word count function in most word processors. Aim for 150-300 words for a biographical blurb, 400-600 words for a family legend or interesting story, and 1200-1500 for an involved dramatic account. (And remember that even a broken guideline can aid the structure of your story. If you need to run longer, do, but ask yourself if the narrative contains a natural break where it would makes sense to divide it into parts.)

5. Use bullet lists or timelines if they make more sense than a narrative structure. (Tweet this)

6. Don’t get boxed into a format. Tell each individual story in the way that makes the most sense.

Picture This

8. Got an obvious family resemblance? Put photos side by side and write about it.

9. If you can take a 3-, 4-, or 5-generation photo, stop reading this and do it, right now. (Tweet this)

10. Try to recreate modern versions of old family photos.

11. Group scanned documents, newspaper clippings and photos by decade to create a visual history. ( Tweet this )

Details, Details

(Even better if you can find a historic map .)

13. Got a story about a particular day? Check the weather to help set the scene.

14. Search a “today in history” archive to give your story context.

16. Find a moment of truth–in your ancestor’s life or in your search for him or her–and record both facts and emotions. (Tweet this)

17. Highlight apparent contradictions or discrepancies in the facts. Think about who would have supplied the data and brainstorm possible reasons. For an age variance, did your ancestor lie about their age for vanity, to guard themselves from age discrimination in the workplace, or to dodge–or qualify for–military service?

18. Spend some time researching your ancestors’ friends, associates, and especially neighbors. See if you can find a connection. Adding relevant details will enrich the story.

A maybe-haunted house. A family tree full of secrets. My debut novel, Whispers in the Branches , is available now!

Content & Substance

20. Resist the urge to do a Federal Census recap–unless it reveals something significant. Highlight the details beyond where and when.

21. Write about surname origins. If your findings conflict with what you know or believe about your ancestors’ homeland, highlight the puzzle and try to piece together a plausible answer to it.

22. Resist writing about your search–unless you’ve got a great search story! (Tweet this)

24. Profile the community where your ancestors lived (especially if they stayed for more than a generation in one place).

25. Write about questions you have without pressure to supply answers. ( Tweet this )

More Content & Substance

27. Write about pets, hobbies, or personality traits. ( Tweet this )

28. Type up family recipes (along with associated food memories). If you can, ask the person handing down the recipe where it came from.

29. Contrast lives of two very different ancestors who lived in the same time period.

30. Write about generational patterns you notice–attitudes, beliefs or sayings. ( Tweet this )

31. Ask living relatives if they are named for anyone. (This might not be obvious, especially if they are named for a non-family member!)

32. Write what you can infer about relationships. If a clipping lists your relative among a group of unfamiliar names (out-of-town wedding or funeral attendees, for example), see if you can draw connections to others listed.

Even MORE Content & Substance

34. Interested in genetics? Find a list of dominant and recessive traits and see how far back you can trace yours.

35. If your ancestor got political, write about a controversial issue of the day. ( Tweet this )

36. Write about a law that may have impacted your ancestors. ( Tweet this )

37. Interested in medical mysteries? See if you can WebMD a “diagnosis” for a sickly ancestor (but be sure to delineate between fact and speculation).

38. Use prompts to generate more ideas. Geneabloggers has over forty day-of-the-week prompts to get you started and The Armchair Genealogist is a treasure trove of helps for the family chronicler.

Get Creative

39. Read up on creative nonfiction techniques and try applying them to your family history.

41. Write a poem or song about an individual in your family tree. ( Tweet this )

42. Posing questions with answers you know, write an imaginary interview with your ancestor.

43. Got a frustrating ancestor with hardly any paper trail? Pen a tongue-in-cheek madlib-style profile and celebrate those maddening blanks for once.

44. If you feel you don’t have enough to say, make brevity the goal and format your stories for Tweets, Facebook posts, or 3×5 index cards.

Collaborating & Sharing

45. If an older generation isn’t forthcoming with stories, make it easy for them. Ask what they remember about ONE photo, person, or place.

46. Think about how to share your writing, whether via blog, CD’s, expensive bound photo books or photocopied printouts in a binder.

48. Ask a sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle to write out their version of a well-known family story. Compare notes and see if your relative highlights additional details or remembers it just a bit differently.

Words to the Wise

49. Take on a writing challenge (such as the Family History Writing Challenge in February or #52Ancestors in a year) to stay motivated.

50. Don’t plagiarize.

52. Do a little at a time. It’s easier to write a 500-word ancestor profile than it is to “write your family history.” ( Tweet this )

53. Stick with the facts, but don’t feel compelled to cram every detail you’ve learned into one article if they don’t support the story you’re telling.

(If Grandma is embarrassed by her father’s stay at the state penitentiary, realize that what’s interesting to you might have been awful for her.)

55. Don’t wait to get started. ( Tweet this )

56. Don’t be afraid to suppose (but clearly state as much, so your assumptions don’t come off sounding like facts).

Looking for more like this?

Read posts about family history tools, tips and tactics here!

Share your best angles, tips and prompts for writing your family history in the comments below!

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6 Replies to “57 Angles, Tips, & Prompts for Writing Your Family History”

Fantastic! I’ve been on a brief blogging hiatus, and this is all great inspiration for getting started again. Thank you.

Awesome, glad to hear it’s helpful! Sometimes all we need is a fresh approach! 🙂 (And welcome back to the blogosphere!)

Thanks Brandy for these great tips, I have been doing #22 and #23 on the research I did while touring Ireland. But I did break the story into 4 or 5 posts about my convict relative Rebecca Jackson.

Here is link to my blog, would be great for some feedback.

http://suewyatt.edublogs.org/tag/rebecca-jackson/

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The Non-Writers Writing Guide to Write Your Family History

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• ancestral stories , family history , family stories , preserving discoveries , story crafting , storytelling

I’ve heard from many of you that you don’t write your family history because you either don’t feel confident with your writing skills or aren’t sure how to start.

You aren’t alone. Many other family historians have felt the same way, including me. 

Genealogy documentaries have set a bar high for storytelling. They explore rich, exciting histories and tell them in the perfect setting. How can you compete with that?

And that old saying about “everyone has a book inside them”? Pffft. You aren’t sure you have enough to fill a Christmas card. 

A few years ago, I decided to put together a “This is your life” heritage book for my mother. Knowing that writing wasn’t my strong suit, I had multiple contributors lined up to share their stories. This book was going to practically write itself.

Four weeks before B-Day, most of the people who agreed to write something pulled out. I had no stories, and I’d never written anything longer than a multiple page letter. I wasn’t up for the task. However, I promised my siblings we’d have a book for Mum’s birthday, so we were going to have a book.

The next few weeks weren’t pretty, but we handed Mum a 188-page hardcover book in a custom slipcase on her birthday.

The hardest part is starting. I probably never would have if I hadn’t made a promise to deliver a book to Mum.

You can do it too. Even if you:

• think you’re not creative
• haven’t written more than a Christmas card in years
• don’t consider yourself a writer.

Techniques to use to write your family history

As a non-writer full of self-doubt, I tried every shortcut I read about it, even those AI writing sites. None worked. Why? Because the story comes from you. 

It’s the knowledge you’ve gained from years of research, the theories you’ve developed and the insight you have after hours of analysis that creates the story. U nfortunately, there is no AI writing app or “fill-in-the-blanks” template that can do that for you.

However, there are different techniques you can use to share what you’ve discovered and create a book, a blog or a binder of stories for your descendants to enjoy.

The first step is to reframe what you tell yourself to take the pressure off. Don’t aim to be a writer, instead consider yourself a storyteller. As a storyteller, you don’t need to be a writer; you’re just documenting what you’ve discovered to share with others.

The next step is to experiment with these three options to write your family stories.

Commit to trying at least one but preferably all of them. You don’t have to show your work to anyone until you are ready. The best way to gain confidence in a skill is to practice.

1. Say it out loud

Skip the writing step and tell yourself the story while using a voice-to-text app to record it.

You want to feel comfortable while talking and for the story to come out naturally. So, if it feels a bit weird talking to yourself, then tell the account to a relative, pet or even your favourite plant. The critical part is that you use your computer or phone to record and convert each word to text as you say it.

Voice-to-text software isn’t perfect, so expect to see some errors in the draft that is created. Mistakes usually happen when the AI misinterprets what you’ve said, mainly when talking too fast, using slang or local colloquialisms. So rather than fixing the issues on the go, finish the draft and correct any errors in editing.

Be sure to speak slowly and clearly so that the microphone picks up your voice, and the AI can interpret and convert each word as you say it.

You don’t need any fancy apps or software to get started. Instead, try any note-taking app on your phone, hit the microphone icon near the space bar, and start talking.

Speak the punctuation that you want to include, such as:

• question mark
• exclamation point.

To include quotation marks, you’ll say:

• close quote.

For single quotes, you’ll say:

• open single quote
• close single quote.

To move to the following line, say either:

• new paragraph.

Depending on the app you use, saying “new line” or the alternatives may exit you from the voice-to-text functionality. If that happens, press the microphone icon again to keep “typing”.

Note-taking apps for writing from your smartphone

Look for an app that saves the document in the cloud (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive etc.) so that you can easily access it from any device or computer. Such as:

• Microsoft Word

2. Summarize each discovery as you make it

Don’t overthink the process and build your ancestor’s story by crafting a summary of each discovery you make.

Everything you uncover represents an event that happened in your ancestors’ life, from being born, getting married, moving house or enrolling in the military. So capturing your interpretation of that event builds their story one discovery at a time.

Your ancestor’s story isn’t only repeating the facts you discovered, such as date of birth, place of marriage or their final resting place. It’s also your interpretation of the discovery and how that event connects to the other things that you know about them. That includes your thoughts, theories and questions that come up as you’re reviewing each discovery.

If you already have an analysis process for your genealogy research, re-purpose the summary you’re already writing for each discovery. 

Not summarising your discoveries? Start now. Review what you know about each ancestor and write a few paragraphs on it, using the questions below to prompt you.

• When did this event happen?
• Where did it take place?
• What happened?
• Which other ancestors were involved in the event?
• How does this discovery answer any of the questions you have about this ancestor?
• How does it connect to what you already know about them?
• What was your key learning?
• What new questions do you have after reading this discovery?
• Does this confirm any existing theories or inspire new ones?
• What new clues do you have to research?

Don’t overthink it; write your thoughts for each question. When you’re done, that’s a block of text towards the draft of your ancestor’s story. 

Find out more about discovery analysis and crafting summaries. 

3. convert your ancestral timeline into story format.

Your ancestral timelines are the story outline of your ancestor’s lives.

If you’re not already using timelines, this is a great time to start. Of course, your genealogy software will already be creating one as you log each discovery. But it’s also easy to create your own.

Create a timeline in Microsoft Word, Google Docs or your favourite app. Any note-taking app will work as long as you can create a hierarchy using headings, body text and bullet points.

Don’t overthink the process because that overwhelms you and stops you from writing your ancestor’s story. Keep it simple and try something like this process:

• Add each year of your ancestor’s life
• Underneath each year, including the date
• After the event date, add the event’s name (for example, death of father, left school etc.)  
• Use bullet points to summarise what happened

Don’t have any events? Include general historical events such as war, major financial or weather events instead. You can also include this type of information even if it’s a year where you have events in your ancestor’s life.

Once you’ve finished with the outline, go back through each event, and convert the facts into paragraphs. Be sure to include any theories or questions this event raised for you so that your reader can go on the journey with you.

When you’re done converting each event into a few paragraphs, you’ll have a draft of your ancestor’s story.

You can write your family history even if you’re not a writer

You don’t need to be Stephen King, Nora Roberts or Agatha Christie to write your family stories. Your family history is your story to tell and should be done in your voice.

Keep the process simple, and don’t overthink it, as that’s when the doubts creep in. All you need to do is tell your reader

• what you’ve discovered
• your theories
• questions you have
• how it connects to other things.

“Inside each of us is a natural-born storyteller just waiting to be released.” Robin Moore, Awakening the Hidden Storyteller

Experiment with different ways of creating the first draft.

• Use voice-to-text functionality to convert the story to text as you talk.
• Analyse and summarise each discovery to build the draft one block at a time.
• Convert your ancestral timelines into paragraphs to capture your ancestor’s story.

The best advice I have is to start. You don’t have to ever show those first few paragraphs to anyone. You may surprise yourself, though. Once you see the sections adding up and the story coming together, then you’ll be keen to share it with your loved one.

After all, stories are written one sentence, one word at a time.

Ready for your next step?

Ready to dive deep into my non-writers writing formula and convert your research into engaging stories? Learn more about the Ancestral Stories course . 

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Does the thought of writing your family history send you straight back to bed to hide under the covers? You’re not alone. Most family historians agree that they enjoy research the most. What if there was an easier, more manageable way to share your family history, while telling the life stories of your ancestors in an interesting and factual way? There is. 

Tell It Short: A Guide to Writing Your Family History in Brief comes to the rescue, guiding and inspiring you to craft family history essays—the nonfiction version of the short story. Tell It Short gives those interested in writing their family history an alternative to the all-encompassing book by exploring the creative nonfiction essay form. This guide will show you how to share the stories of your ancestors’ lives in a completely factual yet compelling manner. You will learn about 

• key elements of effective nonfiction storytelling 
• ways to put ancestors into historical context without fictionalizing 
• methods for using appropriate speculation 
• several categories of family history essays: memoir, personal, humor, travel, food, and literary journalism 
• strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading.

Tell it Short contains helpful instruction, examples, and ten sample family history essays by Dinty W. Moore, Rebecca McClanahan, Sonja Livingston, and more. This guide will help you take your family history writing beyond the traditional begats into short works your family will enjoy reading.

Carmack is a professional genealogist of the highest caliber and has long focused on teaching that craft…. She organizes her book in two balanced parts: (telling) writing instruction and (showing) example essays. While much of her writing advice will appear as chestnuts to those in MFA programs (‘A story needs conflict.’), her advice is well-spoken to the would-be family historian. To this, she adds concerns from a genealogical perspective (cautions about speculative writing, about revealing details of the living) which is apt for any creative nonfiction work. She focuses in on subgenres: the literary journalism essay; the personal essay; and essays focused on humor, travel, or food. In each case, she illustrates her points using specific examples from the included essays. Readers will flip back and forth between the sections as they read. Brief chapters on the mechanics of writing (overcoming writer’s block, revising) conclude her first section. The second half of Tell It Short includes 10 previously published essays from six authors. All are enjoyable and one, “Switched at Midlife,” originally appeared in Hippocampus Magazine . Two of the other essays, authored by Carmack, are distinguished by the extensive footnoting characteristic of a certified genealogist holding to a higher standard than traditional creative nonfiction requires.

—Tony Kapolka, Hippocampus Magazine

Meet Sharon

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack is an independent scholar who writes historical biographies, family histories, and guidebooks. The author of twenty-eight books, she holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and is part of the English adjunct faculty for Southern New Hampshire University. After thirty-five years, she is a retired Certified Genealogist who is now pursuing an MA in History. Her work has appeared in almost every major genealogical journal, as well as Brevity , Creative Nonfiction , Portland Review , Hippocampus Magazine , Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art , Steinbeck Review , and Literary Hub , to name a few.

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How to Write a Family History

Writing a family history is an enlightening process that will help you form an appreciation of your heritage and the characters who helped forge it. On one hand, you’re playing detective: immersing yourself in research and stumbling upon discoveries. On the other, you’re a storyteller: gold mining for the ingredients of a rich narrative through the lives of your ancestors.

It is a highly rewarding exercise both for you and for your next of kin, who will benefit from your findings. That said, the act of writing your family history isn’t all glamor. Not all genealogists have a natural knack for storytelling. In unpacking how to write a family history, we wish to present a simple structure to serve as a guideline for what we promise will be a worthwhile process.

Do Your Research

Before you can start the process of writing your family history, you must immerse yourself in family research. Depending on the amount of ancestral data that you have access to, you may want to grab from a number of sources and throw yourself into a variety of records, archives, and articles in order to piece together the puzzle of your heritage. Genealogy records that you might want to search when tracing your family history include:

• U.S. Census records
• Newspaper archives
• Family stories and diaries
• Court records
• Congressional records for private claims
• Military records
• Passport applications

Newspaper archives are an invaluable resource for finding facts and stories about your ancestors that have been lost over time. From marriage and birth announcements to long-lost family photos to articles about local events, you’ll learn more from old newspapers than just names and dates. In newspaper archives you can also find obituaries to learn more details about your ancestors’ lives, and many obituaries include photos and mentions of related family members.

Another powerful genealogy resource for compiling data for your family story are U.S. Census Records . The Federal Census can help track down valuable information and serve as a direct tool connecting you to deceased relatives.

Additional Records for Writing a Family History

Government records are another centerpiece to tracing your family history. Understanding your family timeline through clues deducted from land deeds or cemetery maps is a key research tool. Also, finding widows’ claims or war pension records can help to decipher accurate dates and length of life.

Choose a Writing Style

When documenting family histories, writers tend to adopt one of two major writing styles: descendancy or ahnentafel. Descendancy (otherwise known as register style) is the most common. This is a linear chronological story starting at the point of immigration to the United States, documenting through generations until reaching your contemporaries.

Alternatively, some family historians prefer ahnentafel style as their methodology: a reverse documentation starting with the most recent generation and tracing the lineage of couples back in time. This follows a numeric system that increases per generation. For example, where you might be “1,” your parents would be “2,” grandparents “3,” and so forth.

Consistent Use of Abbreviations

Ease tedious repetition by adopting commonplace genealogy abbreviations. This will greatly increase the flow of your writing and allow you to quickly work through laborious details and organize your thoughts. Use our guide explaining family tree relationships to help make sense of who is related to whom.

• Div. – Divorced
• Bap. – Baptized
• D.Y. – Died Young
• unm – Unmarried

Write Your Family Story

When writing your family history, be sure to document the facts, details, and stories that captured your attention. Chances are, they will interest your wider family too. Quirky details or anecdotes of relatives are always a pleasure to discover. Stories breathe life into the endless cycle of dates and statistics; the great responsibility of genealogy enthusiasts is to be accurate, and to make sure we treasure and value these stories for generations to come.

• Resources for Genealogists, The National Archive – retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/research/genealogy/census/online-resources

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How to Create an Outline for Writing an Interesting Family History

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You might approach writing with a mixture of caution, excitement and dread. On one hand, you look forward to sharing sweeping tales about your ancestors, the journeys they have taken and the triumphs and trials they have faced.

On the other hand, though, writing can be downright hard. The saying goes that the pen is mightier than the sword (or, in our digital world, the laptop or other electronic device). But when you struggle to find the right words to describe a person who means a great deal to you, the pen might feel like little more than a blunt stick.

In fact, because family stories are so personal, writing about them can be harder than writing about something more scientific or technical. You may know more about Grandma Ethel and her childhood than anyone else—but you know so much that you fear you will gloss over something important. Every time you sit down to write about her, nagging thoughts arise: what if I’m not doing her story justice? What if I’m leaving out important details or homing in on the wrong details? What if I’m just not the writer for the job?

Fortunately, writing doesn’t have to feel like a long, uncertain battle. You can break the writing process down into manageable parts, turning it from stressful slog into an illuminating journey.

Creating a handy outline can help. Below are some strategies to guide you in creating an outline that covers all you want to share about your family history.

What Is a Writing Outline?

A writing outline is a tangible plan in which you lay out:

• what you are writing
• about whom or what you are writing
• the structure or organization of your work

Outlines take many different forms. Some may be linear, plotting out exactly what happens from the beginning to the end. For example, a story of your grandfather’s immigration to America may begin with the moment he left his homeland and end with him stepping foot on unfamiliar land.

Other outlines have a more stream-of-consciousness structure; you simply write whatever comes to mind as you brainstorm and use your notes as your guide. In this case, you might highlight specific descriptions or moments of your grandfather’s voyage, but don’t connect the dots, at least right away.

This article focuses mostly on structured outlines. But the “right” outline is whichever feels the most useful to you.

And whatever outline you create, nothing in it has to be set in stone. Even if you map out Grandpa’s life perfectly from its humble start to its glorious conclusion, you may decide as you write to change some parts around, to add details or to omit entire swaths of time and text altogether.

That’s okay. What makes the writing process so rewarding is uncovering old fond memories that you thought had turned to dust or making new, startling epiphanies that enliven your story.

Every time I write something new, be it a story or article or essay, I end up writing something very different than what I had initially envisioned. Even the final draft of this article looks quite different from my outline. I embrace these differences, and I also embrace my outlines for carrying me to the end.

Types of Outlines

What does an outline look like? Below I highlight several common types and provide examples of each. Your outline might look entirely different, or blend elements from several varieties. What’s important is that you find an outlining strategy that helps you write your family history the way you want.

The Alphanumeric Outline

The alphanumeric outline is exactly what it sounds like: It uses a combination of letters (lowercase or uppercase) and numbers (Arabic or Roman numerals) to denote hierarchies in your thought process.

For example, you might identify three main topics you want to highlight in your family history and number them 1, 2 and 3. Then you can expand upon a main topic with supporting, more-specific “sub-topics” that you label a, b and c under the main idea. To put it another way, the main topic serves as an “umbrella” over those sub-topics.

You’ve probably used this outline to write structured essays in school—ones with a clear introduction and thesis statement, a cohesive body and a compelling conclusion. The alphanumeric outline is ideal if you’re looking to write a chronological family history that has a clear order to your thoughts.

Below is an example of an alphanumeric outline I drafted up to write a piece on my own family history:

Note that my topics have different numbers of sub-topics beneath them. Your outline, too, might not look completely balanced. Some subjects might simply spur more inspiration or warrant a more-detailed discussion. I also gave my outline a temporary, working title to differentiate it from other outlines.

The Sentence Outline

Like the alphanumeric outline, the sentence outline sorts ideas and subjects into subject groups. However, each topic and sub-topic is written as a complete sentence. Sometimes, I’m so overflowing with ideas that I break the rules and end up creating a (short) paragraph outline.

While it may seem like extra work, this outline is useful. It forces you to engage with your ideas just as you would while writing your actual family history. As a result, you can potentially identify at the outline level what you need to expand upon and what you could possibly pare down. For instance, if you struggle to write even one sentence to sum up the topic, you may consider reworking the topic altogether.

Another thing I appreciate about the sentence outline is that it allows me to play with language and tone. Most sentences from the outline won’t survive to the actual written family history, but they do help me uncover sensory images and valuable details that I might otherwise overlook during the writing process.

I also may notice certain themes that emerge organically and tie my story together. For example, I found that the concept of myths and mythologizing the past threaded many of the topics in my outline together. This revelation helped guide my narrative throughout the entire piece.

Here’s a sentence outline for the first topic I laid out in my alphanumerical outline:

The Mind Map

If the outlines mentioned above feel too academic or rigid for you (or you just want something more visual), then the mind map may be right for you. The mind map usually begins with a single “seed” of a topic—something general, like “My Family History”—then branches off into many separate topics that intersect or sprout their own “sub-topics.” (It goes without saying, then, that a tree is an apt metaphor for the family history mind map!)

The mind map can help you visualize where your ideas are in relation to one another. As you add new ideas to your mind map, it grows, as does your understanding of what you are writing about.

Here’s a mind map outline that I created using a free version of Coggle:  

Most mind-mapping tools allow you to create several free mind maps and use basic mapping capabilities. The paid versions of these tools offer unlimited maps and more complex features (for example, color-coding, more bubble shape options, etc.).

Here’s a quick breakdown of five different mind-mapping tools: Coggle , GitMind , Microsoft Visio , MindMeister and Miro . You can review this chart for number of free maps, free features offered, paid features offers and price.

Beyond the Outline: Family History Writing Organization Strategies

You might want jump right into writing once you’ve got an outline. By all means, go ahead! But if you’re still apprehensive, here are tips that will help you ease into the writing process, both before and after you start drafting an outline.

Before the Outline

Determine the form and length of your project.

Few writers can accurately predict how many words a piece will be, so it’s okay if you’re unsure about the length of your family history. However, your outline will be more helpful if it reflects the scope of your project: how deep you plan to go into your family history and what kind of form it’s going to take.

For example, are you writing a book-length memoir that captures snapshots throughout an ancestor’s life? Or are you weaving a narrative that has a clear beginning, middle and end? Is your family history going to be a cohesive narrative, or (like mine) a collection of shorter essays or stories tied together by a theme?

Determine Who You are Going to Write About

This might go without saying, but you’ll need to know who is going to appear in your written family history before you start outlining it. With that decided, you can spend the outlining stage sketching an accurate portrait of the person(s).

Determine Where You Fit into the Story

When you read a book (especially a work of fiction), the narrative point of view is usually one of the first pieces of information you receive. Who is telling the story?

Your family history isn’t fiction, of course. But you’ll want to decide how personal your storytelling will be. Will you let readers get a closer look at who you (the author) are, through personal memories? Or will family stories be told from the point of view of an omniscient, impersonal narrator? There’s no right or wrong answer, but deciding on an approach will help you build your outline.

After the Outline

Organize and integrate research.

Once you have your outline in hand, you can start incorporating your research into it. This is more challenging than it first seems, since you probably have decades of research and plenty of facts that you want to share. It can be tempting to dump all of that information on the page during the outline stage, but I get less overwhelmed if I write my outline first , then match details and facts to specific topics mentioned in my outline.

Make sure that the research you include is relevant to the story and reflects your overall vision. You don’t want your narrative to be bogged down in unrelated details.

Identify Common Images and Narrative Threads

I mentioned above how, during the outlining process, I recognized and embraced the theme of mythology that had emerged from my outline. As you study your own, look out for those such motifs. They might not be broad (such as connections to mythology) or subtle (such as memories of the sky, sea or birds).

Of course, you shouldn’t force such imagery into your writing if it feels unnatural. But concrete images can enrich your story and provide an emotional connection that your readers will respond to.

Find Photos, Heirlooms and Other Items That Can Help Strengthen Your Story

Consider looking through your family photos and keepsakes to find any objects that will help bring your story to life. While colorful descriptions of Grandma’s kitchen at Christmas can help readers visualize the scene (a flour-covered counter, or the smell of freshly baked cookies), an actual photo can transport them there.

For example, my Yia Yia kept a journal that dates to when I was just a baby. In it, she recorded notable milestones, stowed away some fun projects we did together and described some of our trips to church. I could describe this journal to you in great detail, but that probably wouldn’t be as interesting as seeing it for yourself!

Final Thoughts

Outlines don’t force your family history into a prescribed, write-by-number template. Instead they guide your thoughts, spark memories and move you through years of joys and sorrows. You can always deviate from your outline—you don’t have to commit to a certain topic just because your outline says so. The outline is only a foundation that you can build higher or reshape as you see fit. Keeping that in mind will leave you open to your own treasured memories: how peaceful you felt when you walked with your grandpa through the woods; the touch of his weathered hand in your own; the sound of his wise, booming voice; how his shadow disappeared into those of the trees.

A version of this article appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of Family Tree Magazine .

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How to Write an Essay About My Family History

A family comprises of people living together that form a social group within a community. The people creating this group are subject to relationships either by birth or blood, and it comprises at least two adults as parents and grandparents, together with young children. The family members have a mutual connection between them. Therefore, an essay about family history is a synopsis of an individual's social identity and the reciprocal relationship(s) he/she shares with the people living together. Learning family history is vital to understand our social status, humanity, and diversity. History keeps our memories for generations to understand who they are and their geographic origin. Having a good knowledge of family background lets you appreciate the things or sacrifices made before by grandparents to experience better things in life. An individual's roots and origin bring a sense of self-discovery. Also, writing about your family history is one way of preserving its heritage for future generations.

How to Start A Family History Essay

Outline writing, tips concerning writing a family history essay introduction, how to write body paragraphs, how to write a conclusion for a family history essay, essay revision, essay proofreading, make citations, catchy titles for an essay about family history, short example of a college essay about family history.

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When writing an essay, there is a logical structure you must follow in giving out your arguments. A proper outline will produce an exciting presentation of every section, and it will fascinate the reader. The standard structure of an essay has an introduction, body, and conclusion. Here is an excellent example of an outline for a family history essay:

• Introduction
• Short family background information
• Importance of writing about the family
• Body (paragraphs)
• Family members; grandparents, parents, and children
• The community in which family resides
• Form of livelihood
• Conclusion (a summarizing paragraph)
• Restating your contention
• Summarize your key ideas
• Provide a final comment or reflection about the essay

When writing a presentation about family history, you need to provide a hook to the readers, to make them interested to know much about the family. You can start with facts or anecdotes about grandparents; for example, how they met on the first date and opted to make a family together, you can as well describe the circumstances. You can also provide an insight into a situation by your ancestors that impacted your life experience—the other thing to include in the short background information about your family. Remember to provide a clear and debatable thesis statement that will serve as the roadmap for your discussion in the paper.

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The body paragraphs contain the arguments one needs to discuss the subject topic. Every section includes the main idea or explanatory statement as the first sentence; the primary purpose is a debatable point that you need to prove. The length of a paragraph depends on the accurate measurement of ideas. In most cases, a section has about five sentences; but it can be as short or long as you want, depending on what you discuss. A paragraph has the main statement, supporting sentence(s) with evidence, and concluding sentences. When crafting the body, ensure a clear flow of ideas, connecting from one argument to the other. Transitional words, when used accordingly, can provide a nice transition and flow of ideas from one paragraph to the other. The commonly used transitional words or phrases include moreover, also, therefore, consequently, hence, thus, finally, etc.

A conclusion is as crucial as the introduction; it is the final recap of what your essay entails. The ending paragraph contains three main parts that form a full section. First, remind the audience of your thesis statement and show its relation to the essay topic. Second, provide a summary of the key arguments that you discussed in the body paragraphs. Third, it is advisable to add a final comment or general reflection about the essay. It's important to state that you should use different wording in the conclusion when restating statements and arguments. Also, remember to use signal words at the start of concluding paragraphs like in conclusion, finish, etc.

Revision is an opportunity for a student to review the content in his/her paper and identify parts that need improvement. Some students start revising as they begin drafting their essays. During revision, you need to restructure and rearrange sentences to enhance your work quality and ensure the message reaches your audience well. Revising gives you a chance to recheck whether the essay has a short main idea and a thesis statement, a specific purpose, whether the introduction is strong enough to hook the audience and organization of the article. Also, you check if there is a clear transition from one paragraph to another and ascertain if the conclusion is competent enough to emphasize the purpose of the paper.

Nothing is more frustrating than submitting an essay to earn dismal grade due to silly common mistakes. Proofreading is an essential stage in the editing process. It is an opportunity for reviewing the paper, identifying and correcting common mistakes such as typos, punctuation, grammatical errors, etc. Since proofreading is the final part of the editing, proofread only after finishing the other editing stages like revision. It is advisable to get help from another pair of eyes; you can send the paper to your friend to help you in the same process. There are online proofreading tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway, which you can use to proofread, but you should not only rely on grammar checkers. Remember to proofread the document at least three times.

Making citations is an essential way of keeping references for the sources of content you used. As you are editing, you may make several changes to the document. Do not forget to correctly provide citations for every fact or quote you obtained from other sources. There are different citation formats such as APA, MLA, etc.; therefore, you need to ensure correct usage of quotes depending on the requirement by your professor. The sources you cite present the list of references or bibliography at the end of your essay for easy reference.

• Generation to Generation
• The Origin of My Family
• Our Circle and Family Heritage
• A Lifetime of Love
• Because of Two Lovebirds, I Am Here
• The Family Archives
• The Family Ties
• Branches of The Family Tree
• The Generational Genes
• Forever as a Family
• It All Started with a Date
• Bits of Yesteryears

Would you want to know how it all started until here? My grandpa told me that he met my grandma at a concert where one of the greatest artists was performing during one of the summer holidays in New York City. As he was dancing alone, my grandpa approached a beautiful lady (who would become his soulmate) to ask her to dance together. They later agreed to meet for a dinner date. Our family lives in New York. Undoubtedly, this is the best family, and it's an honor to be part of it.

Every person has two sides within his/her family; my paternal side originates from Canada, while the maternal side is from America. Although my great grandfather comes from Canada, my grandpa and grandma live in New York. My grandfather is Afro-American who worked as a bartender, no wonder he loved concerts! My father works as a conservationist for aquatic fauna while my mother works in the bakery. My mother and father met in a supermarket when they were both doing shopping.

Although we live in the same city, my grandparents have their apartment, a distance from ours. We live as a family of five; dad, mum, and three children. As we all live in the same city, we (me and my two sisters) occasionally visit our grandparents during the weekends to spend some time with them; grandpa and I were doing some gardening while my sisters and grandma do cook and other house chores. The bond between our great parents and ours is very excellent.

At Christmas, all my children, mum, and dad travel to our grandparents for a whole week. During the new year, we get together at our house, my parent's house, to welcome the year as an entire family. Sometimes during the weekends, we usually spend most of our time on the beach swimming, except on church days. As a family, our favorite food is deep-fried fish, rice, and vegetables. However, my grandpa likes chicken hash.

In conclusion, the social co-existence between us is excellent, which has created a robust mutual bond for the family. From visiting each other, spending time on the beach, having to get together meals to usher the new year, and celebrating Christmas as a family, the bond keeps growing. I am privileged to be part of such a great family.

How to Get the Best Family History Essay?

Every student would want to produce the best essay possible to earn a better grade. One way of getting information is through previously written materials such as essay samples. Pre-written essay samples have become popular recently among college students due to the vital information they offer. There are several sites, such as Essay Kitchen, that provide pre-written essays on family history at affordable prices. Students can use the essay samples to obtain enough content and idea about paper outline the professor expect; thus, producing a quality article.

Essay writing is a daunting experience for most college students. The academic pressure, coupled with a lot of other activities, makes the whole experience an ordeal. Some students have a lot of responsibilities and find themselves with limited time to handle their academic essays. Consequently, the students use online essay writing service 12 hours at Edu Jungles to write my essay for me at an affordable rate.

Knowing your family history is very important. It enables one to self-discover himself within the society and appreciate the lineage. When you learn about your family's past, you will understand the things you see and experience today. Writing an essay on family history requires a lot of understanding and attention to the aspects you need to describe. The critical factor being family background, then understanding how you need to structure and jot down your ideas.

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Humans naturally seek belonging within families, finding comfort in knowing someone always cares. Yet, families can also stir up insecurities and mental health struggles.

Family dynamics continue to intrigue researchers across different fields. Every year, new studies explore how these relationships shape our minds and emotions.

In this article, our dissertation service will guide you through writing a family essay. You can also dive into our list of topics for inspiration and explore some standout examples to spark your creativity.

What is Family Essay

A family essay takes a close look at the bonds and experiences within families. It's a common academic assignment, especially in subjects like sociology, psychology, and literature.

So, what's involved exactly? Simply put, it's an exploration of what family signifies to you. You might reflect on cherished family memories or contemplate the portrayal of families in various media.

What sets a family essay apart is its personal touch. It allows you to express your own thoughts and experiences. Moreover, it's versatile – you can analyze family dynamics, reminisce about family customs, or explore other facets of familial life.

If you're feeling uncertain about how to write an essay about family, don't worry; you can explore different perspectives and select topics that resonate with various aspects of family life.

Tips For Writing An Essay On Family Topics

A family essay typically follows a free-form style, unless specified otherwise, and adheres to the classic 5-paragraph structure. As you jot down your thoughts, aim to infuse your essay with inspiration and the essence of creative writing, unless your family essay topics lean towards complexity or science.

Here are some easy-to-follow tips from our essay service experts:

• Focus on a Specific Aspect: Instead of a broad overview, delve into a specific angle that piques your interest, such as exploring how birth order influences sibling dynamics or examining the evolving role of grandparents in modern families.
• Share Personal Anecdotes: Start your family essay introduction with a personal touch by sharing stories from your own experiences. Whether it's about a favorite tradition, a special trip, or a tough time, these stories make your writing more interesting.
• Use Real-life Examples: Illustrate your points with concrete examples or anecdotes. Draw from sources like movies, books, historical events, or personal interviews to bring your ideas to life.
• Explore Cultural Diversity: Consider the diverse array of family structures across different cultures. Compare traditional values, extended family systems, or the unique hurdles faced by multicultural families.
• Take a Stance: Engage with contentious topics such as homeschooling, reproductive technologies, or governmental policies impacting families. Ensure your arguments are supported by solid evidence.
• Delve into Psychology: Explore the psychological underpinnings of family dynamics, touching on concepts like attachment theory, childhood trauma, or patterns of dysfunction within families.
• Emphasize Positivity: Share uplifting stories of families overcoming adversity or discuss strategies for nurturing strong, supportive family bonds.
• Offer Practical Solutions: Wrap up your essay by proposing actionable solutions to common family challenges, such as fostering better communication, achieving work-life balance, or advocating for family-friendly policies.

Family Essay Topics

When it comes to writing, essay topics about family are often considered easier because we're intimately familiar with our own families. The more you understand about your family dynamics, traditions, and experiences, the clearer your ideas become.

If you're feeling uninspired or unsure of where to start, don't worry! Below, we have compiled a list of good family essay topics to help get your creative juices flowing. Whether you're assigned this type of essay or simply want to explore the topic, these suggestions from our history essay writer are tailored to spark your imagination and prompt meaningful reflection on different aspects of family life.

So, take a moment to peruse the list. Choose the essay topics about family that resonate most with you. Then, dive in and start exploring your family's stories, traditions, and connections through your writing.

• Supporting Family Through Tough Times
• Staying Connected with Relatives
• Empathy and Compassion in Family Life
• Strengthening Bonds Through Family Gatherings
• Quality Time with Family: How Vital Is It?
• Navigating Family Relationships Across Generations
• Learning Kindness and Generosity in a Large Family
• Communication in Healthy Family Dynamics
• Forgiveness in Family Conflict Resolution
• Building Trust Among Extended Family
• Defining Family in Today's World
• Understanding Nuclear Family: Various Views and Cultural Differences
• Understanding Family Dynamics: Relationships Within the Family Unit
• What Defines a Family Member?
• Modernizing the Nuclear Family Concept
• Exploring Shared Beliefs Among Family Members
• Evolution of the Concept of Family Love Over Time
• Examining Family Expectations
• Modern Standards and the Idea of an Ideal Family
• Life Experiences and Perceptions of Family Life
• Genetics and Extended Family Connections
• Utilizing Family Trees for Ancestral Links
• The Role of Younger Siblings in Family Dynamics
• Tracing Family History Through Oral Tradition and Genealogy
• Tracing Family Values Through Your Family Tree
• Exploring Your Elder Sister's Legacy in the Family Tree
• Connecting Daily Habits to Family History
• Documenting and Preserving Your Family's Legacy
• Navigating Online Records and DNA Testing for Family History
• Tradition as a Tool for Family Resilience
• Involving Family in Daily Life to Maintain Traditions
• Creating New Traditions for a Small Family
• The Role of Traditions in Family Happiness
• Family Recipes and Bonding at House Parties
• Quality Time: The Secret Tradition for Family Happiness
• The Joy of Cousins Visiting for Christmas
• Including Family in Birthday Celebrations
• Balancing Traditions and Unconditional Love
• Building Family Bonds Through Traditions

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Reach out to our skilled writers, and they'll provide you with a top-notch paper that's sure to earn an A+ grade in record time!

Family Essay Example

For a better grasp of the essay on family, our team of skilled writers has crafted a great example. It looks into the subject matter, allowing you to explore and understand the intricacies involved in creating compelling family essays. So, check out our meticulously crafted sample to discover how to craft essays that are not only well-written but also thought-provoking and impactful.

Final Outlook

In wrapping up, let's remember: a family essay gives students a chance to showcase their academic skills and creativity by sharing personal stories. However, it's important to stick to academic standards when writing about these topics. We hope our list of topics sparked your creativity and got you on your way to a reflective journey. And if you hit a rough patch, you can just ask us to ' do my essay for me ' for top-notch results!

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FAQs on Writing an Essay about Family

Family essays seem like something school children could be assigned at elementary schools, but family is no less important than climate change for our society today, and therefore it is one of the most central research themes.

Below you will find a list of frequently asked questions on family-related topics. Before you conduct research, scroll through them and find out how to write an essay about your family.

How to Write an Essay About Your Family History?

How to write an essay about a family member, how to write an essay about family and roots, how to write an essay about the importance of family.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

How to write an introduction for a history essay

Every essay needs to begin with an introductory paragraph. It needs to be the first paragraph the marker reads.

While your introduction paragraph might be the first of the paragraphs you write, this is not the only way to do it.

You can choose to write your introduction after you have written the rest of your essay.

This way, you will know what you have argued, and this might make writing the introduction easier.

Either approach is fine. If you do write your introduction first, ensure that you go back and refine it once you have completed your essay. 

What is an ‘introduction paragraph’?

An introductory paragraph is a single paragraph at the start of your essay that prepares your reader for the argument you are going to make in your body paragraphs .

It should provide all of the necessary historical information about your topic and clearly state your argument so that by the end of the paragraph, the marker knows how you are going to structure the rest of your essay.

In general, you should never use quotes from sources in your introduction.

Introduction paragraph structure

While your introduction paragraph does not have to be as long as your body paragraphs , it does have a specific purpose, which you must fulfil.

A well-written introduction paragraph has the following four-part structure (summarised by the acronym BHES).

B – Background sentences

H – Hypothesis

E – Elaboration sentences

S - Signpost sentence

Each of these elements are explained in further detail, with examples, below:

1. Background sentences

The first two or three sentences of your introduction should provide a general introduction to the historical topic which your essay is about. This is done so that when you state your hypothesis , your reader understands the specific point you are arguing about.

Background sentences explain the important historical period, dates, people, places, events and concepts that will be mentioned later in your essay. This information should be drawn from your background research . 

Example background sentences:

Middle Ages (Year 8 Level)

Castles were an important component of Medieval Britain from the time of the Norman conquest in 1066 until they were phased out in the 15 th and 16 th centuries. Initially introduced as wooden motte and bailey structures on geographical strongpoints, they were rapidly replaced by stone fortresses which incorporated sophisticated defensive designs to improve the defenders’ chances of surviving prolonged sieges.

WWI (Year 9 Level)

The First World War began in 1914 following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The subsequent declarations of war from most of Europe drew other countries into the conflict, including Australia. The Australian Imperial Force joined the war as part of Britain’s armed forces and were dispatched to locations in the Middle East and Western Europe.

Civil Rights (Year 10 Level)

The 1967 Referendum sought to amend the Australian Constitution in order to change the legal standing of the indigenous people in Australia. The fact that 90% of Australians voted in favour of the proposed amendments has been attributed to a series of significant events and people who were dedicated to the referendum’s success.

Ancient Rome (Year 11/12 Level)  

In the late second century BC, the Roman novus homo Gaius Marius became one of the most influential men in the Roman Republic. Marius gained this authority through his victory in the Jugurthine War, with his defeat of Jugurtha in 106 BC, and his triumph over the invading Germanic tribes in 101 BC, when he crushed the Teutones at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and the Cimbri at the Battle of Vercellae (101 BC). Marius also gained great fame through his election to the consulship seven times.

2. Hypothesis

Once you have provided historical context for your essay in your background sentences, you need to state your hypothesis .

A hypothesis is a single sentence that clearly states the argument that your essay will be proving in your body paragraphs .

A good hypothesis contains both the argument and the reasons in support of your argument. 

Example hypotheses:

Medieval castles were designed with features that nullified the superior numbers of besieging armies but were ultimately made obsolete by the development of gunpowder artillery.

Australian soldiers’ opinion of the First World War changed from naïve enthusiasm to pessimistic realism as a result of the harsh realities of modern industrial warfare.

The success of the 1967 Referendum was a direct result of the efforts of First Nations leaders such as Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Gaius Marius was the most one of the most significant personalities in the 1 st century BC due to his effect on the political, military and social structures of the Roman state.

3. Elaboration sentences

Once you have stated your argument in your hypothesis , you need to provide particular information about how you’re going to prove your argument.

Your elaboration sentences should be one or two sentences that provide specific details about how you’re going to cover the argument in your three body paragraphs.

You might also briefly summarise two or three of your main points.

Finally, explain any important key words, phrases or concepts that you’ve used in your hypothesis, you’ll need to do this in your elaboration sentences.

Example elaboration sentences:

By the height of the Middle Ages, feudal lords were investing significant sums of money by incorporating concentric walls and guard towers to maximise their defensive potential. These developments were so successful that many medieval armies avoided sieges in the late period.

Following Britain's official declaration of war on Germany, young Australian men voluntarily enlisted into the army, which was further encouraged by government propaganda about the moral justifications for the conflict. However, following the initial engagements on the Gallipoli peninsula, enthusiasm declined.

The political activity of key indigenous figures and the formation of activism organisations focused on indigenous resulted in a wider spread of messages to the general Australian public. The generation of powerful images and speeches has been frequently cited by modern historians as crucial to the referendum results.

While Marius is best known for his military reforms, it is the subsequent impacts of this reform on the way other Romans approached the attainment of magistracies and how public expectations of military leaders changed that had the longest impacts on the late republican period.

4. Signpost sentence

The final sentence of your introduction should prepare the reader for the topic of your first body paragraph. The main purpose of this sentence is to provide cohesion between your introductory paragraph and you first body paragraph .

Therefore, a signpost sentence indicates where you will begin proving the argument that you set out in your hypothesis and usually states the importance of the first point that you’re about to make. 

Example signpost sentences:

The early development of castles is best understood when examining their military purpose.

The naïve attitudes of those who volunteered in 1914 can be clearly seen in the personal letters and diaries that they themselves wrote.

The significance of these people is evident when examining the lack of political representation the indigenous people experience in the early half of the 20 th century.

The origin of Marius’ later achievements was his military reform in 107 BC, which occurred when he was first elected as consul.

Putting it all together

Once you have written all four parts of the BHES structure, you should have a completed introduction paragraph. In the examples above, we have shown each part separately. Below you will see the completed paragraphs so that you can appreciate what an introduction should look like.

Example introduction paragraphs: 

Castles were an important component of Medieval Britain from the time of the Norman conquest in 1066 until they were phased out in the 15th and 16th centuries. Initially introduced as wooden motte and bailey structures on geographical strongpoints, they were rapidly replaced by stone fortresses which incorporated sophisticated defensive designs to improve the defenders’ chances of surviving prolonged sieges. Medieval castles were designed with features that nullified the superior numbers of besieging armies, but were ultimately made obsolete by the development of gunpowder artillery. By the height of the Middle Ages, feudal lords were investing significant sums of money by incorporating concentric walls and guard towers to maximise their defensive potential. These developments were so successful that many medieval armies avoided sieges in the late period. The early development of castles is best understood when examining their military purpose.

The First World War began in 1914 following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The subsequent declarations of war from most of Europe drew other countries into the conflict, including Australia. The Australian Imperial Force joined the war as part of Britain’s armed forces and were dispatched to locations in the Middle East and Western Europe. Australian soldiers’ opinion of the First World War changed from naïve enthusiasm to pessimistic realism as a result of the harsh realities of modern industrial warfare. Following Britain's official declaration of war on Germany, young Australian men voluntarily enlisted into the army, which was further encouraged by government propaganda about the moral justifications for the conflict. However, following the initial engagements on the Gallipoli peninsula, enthusiasm declined. The naïve attitudes of those who volunteered in 1914 can be clearly seen in the personal letters and diaries that they themselves wrote.

The 1967 Referendum sought to amend the Australian Constitution in order to change the legal standing of the indigenous people in Australia. The fact that 90% of Australians voted in favour of the proposed amendments has been attributed to a series of significant events and people who were dedicated to the referendum’s success. The success of the 1967 Referendum was a direct result of the efforts of First Nations leaders such as Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The political activity of key indigenous figures and the formation of activism organisations focused on indigenous resulted in a wider spread of messages to the general Australian public. The generation of powerful images and speeches has been frequently cited by modern historians as crucial to the referendum results. The significance of these people is evident when examining the lack of political representation the indigenous people experience in the early half of the 20th century.

In the late second century BC, the Roman novus homo Gaius Marius became one of the most influential men in the Roman Republic. Marius gained this authority through his victory in the Jugurthine War, with his defeat of Jugurtha in 106 BC, and his triumph over the invading Germanic tribes in 101 BC, when he crushed the Teutones at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and the Cimbri at the Battle of Vercellae (101 BC). Marius also gained great fame through his election to the consulship seven times. Gaius Marius was the most one of the most significant personalities in the 1st century BC due to his effect on the political, military and social structures of the Roman state. While Marius is best known for his military reforms, it is the subsequent impacts of this reform on the way other Romans approached the attainment of magistracies and how public expectations of military leaders changed that had the longest impacts on the late republican period. The origin of Marius’ later achievements was his military reform in 107 BC, which occurred when he was first elected as consul.

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Nine Tips to Start Your Family History

If you are just beginning to research your family history, be sure to take advantage of the resources listed below. They will provide you with a solid foundation as you build your family tree.

• Download and save a free NGS Pedigree Chart and NGS Family Group Sheet . These free charts will help you keep information organized. Get a notebook for written notes or preserve notes in Word or Google Docs, or use a mobile friendly app like Evernote. Back up everything as you work digitally.
• Recommended guide book: NGS’s Paths To Your Past : A Guide to Finding Your Ancestors, 2018 Edition.  
• Write down and keep track of all surname spelling variations (surname = last name).
• Talk to your relatives. Start with the oldest ones first. Be sure to take written notes or record your interviews.
• Ask family members for permission to see certificates and make a record of family birth, marriage, death, and burial records (known as vital records) in your free Pedigree chart and Family Group Sheet. Also ask if family histories, Bible records, and ancestors’ photographs exist.
• Document your findings so you will know the exact sources later. NGS can help you: See our Family History Skills course and Mastering Genealogical Documentation .
• Get to know your local library, reference librarian, and especially its collections and digital resources for genealogy research.
• Network: Join a local genealogy and/or historical society.
• Learn how to search the large primary databases— Ancestry , Family Search , Findmypast , and MyHeritage —and get to know their resources.

Welcome to the National Genealogical Society. Login or create a free account.

• 2024 Elections

Fact-Checking False Claims About Kamala Harris

T he announcement that Vice President Kamala Harris will seek the Democratic nomination for President is inspiring a wave of false claims about her eligibility and her background. Some first emerged years ago, while others only surfaced after President Joe Biden’s decision to end his bid for a second term.

Here’s a look at the facts.

Harris is not an American citizen and therefore cannot serve as commander in chief.

Completely false. Harris is a natural born U.S. citizen. She was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to a copy of her birth certificate, obtained by the Associated Press.

Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.

Under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, anyone born on U.S. soil is considered a natural born U.S. citizen and eligible to serve as either the Vice President or President.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” reads the amendment.

There is no question or legitimate debate about whether a citizen like Harris is eligible to serve as President or Vice President, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.

“So many legal questions are really nuanced—this isn’t one of those situations,” Levinson told the AP on Monday.

Still, social media posts making the debunked assertion that Harris cannot serve as President went viral soon after Biden announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the race and would back Harris for President.

“Kamala Harris is not eligible to run for President,” read one post on X that was liked more than 34,000 times. “Neither of her parents were natural born American citizens when she was born.”

False assertions about Harris’ eligibility began circulating in 2019 when she launched her bid for the presidency. They got a boost, thanks in part to then-President Donald Trump, when Biden selected her as his running mate.

“I heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” the Republican said of Harris in 2019.

Harris is not Black.

This is false. Harris is Black and Indian. Her father, Donald Harris, is a Black man who was born in Jamaica. Shyamala Gopalan, her mother, was born in southern India. Harris has spoken publicly for many years, including in her 2019 autobiography , about how she identifies with the heritage of both her parents.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, social media users are making erroneous claims about Harris’ race.

“Just a reminder that Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris isn’t black,” reads one X post that had received approximately 42,000 likes and 20,400 shares as of Monday. “She Indian American. She pretends to be black as part of the delusional, Democrat DEI quota.”

But Harris is both Black and Indian. Indeed, she is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as Vice President. This fact is highlighted in her biography on WhiteHouse.gov and she has spoken about her ethnicity on many occasions.

Harris wrote in her autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey , that she identifies with the heritage of both her mother and father.

“My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots,” she wrote. “Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture.”

In the next paragraph, she adds, “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters.” Harris again refers to herself as a “black woman” in the book’s next chapter.

Harris got her start by having an affair with a married man, California politician Willie Brown.

This is missing some important context. Brown was separated from his wife during the relationship, which was not a secret.

Brown, 90, is a former mayor of San Francisco who was serving as speaker of the California State Assembly in the 1990s when he and Harris were in a relationship. Brown had separated from his wife in 1982.

“Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago,” Brown wrote in 2020 in the San Francisco Chronicle under the article title, “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”

He wrote that he supported Harris’ first race to be San Francisco district attorney—just as he has supported a long list of other California politicians, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Harris, 59, was state attorney general from 2011-2017 and served in the Senate from 2017 until 2021, when she became Vice President . She has been married to Doug Emhoff since 2014.

Harris’ critics have used the past relationship to question her qualifications, as Fox News personality Tomi Lahren did when she wrote on social media in 2019: “Kamala did you fight for ideals or did you sleep your way to the top with Willie Brown.” Lahren later apologized for the comment.

Trump and some of his supporters have also highlighted the nearly three-decade old relationship in recent attacks on Harris.

An Inside Edition clip of television host Montel Williams holding hands with Harris and another woman is proof that Harris was his “side piece.”

The clip shows Montel with Harris and his daughter, Ashley Williams. Harris and Williams, a former marine who hosted “The Montel Williams Show” for more than a decade, dated briefly in the early 2000s.

In the clip, taken from a 2019 Inside Edition segment , Williams can be seen posing for photographs and holding hands with both women as they arrive at the 2001 Eighth Annual Race to Erase MS in Los Angeles.

But social media users are misrepresenting the clip, using it as alleged evidence that Harris was Montel’s “side piece”—a term used to describe a person, typically a woman, who has a sexual relationship with a man in a monogamous relationship.

Williams addressed the false claims in an X post on Monday, writing in reference to the Inside Edition clip, “as most of you know, that is my daughter to my right.” Getty Images photos from the Los Angeles gala identify the women as Harris and Ashley Williams.

In 2019, Williams  described his relationship  with Harris in a post on X, then known as Twitter.

“@KamalaHarris and I briefly dated about 20 years ago when we were both single,” he wrote in an X post at the time. “So what? I have great respect for Sen. Harris. I have to wonder if the same stories about her dating history would have been written if she were a male candidate?”

Harris promised to inflict the “vengeance of a nation” on Trump supporters.

A fabricated quote attributed to Harris is spreading online five years after it first surfaced.

In the quote, Harris supposedly promises that if Trump is defeated in 2020, Trump supporters will be targeted by the federal government: “Once Trump’s gone and we have regained our rightful place in the White House, look out if you supported him and endorsed his actions, because we’ll be coming for you next. You will feel the vengeance of a nation.”

The quote was shared again on social media this week. One post on X containing an image of the quote was shared more than 22,000 times as of Monday afternoon.

The remarks didn’t come from Harris , but from a satirical article published online in August 2019. Shortly after, Trump supporters like musician Ted Nugent reposted the comments without noting they were fake.

A video shows Harris saying in a speech: “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today, so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.”

Harris never said this. Footage from a 2023 rally on reproductive rights at Howard University, her alma mater, was altered to make it seem as though she did.

In the days after Harris headlined the Washington rally, Republicans mocked a real clip of her speech, with one critic dubbing her remarks a “word salad,” the AP reported at the time .

Harris says in the clip: “So I think it’s very important—as you have heard from so many incredible leaders—for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights nonprofit whose president also spoke at the rally,  livestreamed  the original footage. It shows Harris making the “moment in time” remark, but not the “today is today” comment.

The White House’s transcript of Harris’ remarks also does not include the statement from the altered video. Harris’ appearance at the event came the same day that Biden announced their reelection bid.

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Why did JD Vance change his name?

Jd vance's name changes tie back to his maternal grandparents, and the ohio background that spawned hillbilly elegy and an eventual vp nomination.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has gone through numerous changes − from comparing former Donald Trump to Hitler to accepting a place on Trump's ticket, from bestselling author to Silicon Valley to the stage of the Republican National Convention.

It's not just Vance's beliefs or career trajectory that has changed, but his name as well.

Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, a town halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati. Following his parents' divorce, Bowman's middle name was changed David.

James adopted his stepfather's last name for some of his teenage years, with his 2003 senior yearbook identifying him as James Hamel. This was also the name used during James' military service from 2003 to 2007, where he served as a Corporal in the Marines.

Marriage to JD Vance's wife Usha

In 2014, Vance married his wife, Usha , and decided to take on his maternal grandparents' surname. In his bestselling novel Hillbilly Elegy , and in his congressional bio , Vance has repeatedly emphasized their importance in his upbringing, and thanked his grandmother in his Senate victory speech, and in his vice presidential acceptance speech , causing the RNC audience to chant "Mamaw! Mamaw!"

Vance's family history is central to his name change, and equally critical to his selection as vice president.

Vance's association with blue-collar, rust-belt America, a place he characterizes as "cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class in Washington," could prove pivotal in helping Trump flip back crucial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Cy Neff reports on Wyoming politics for USA TODAY. You can reach him at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter,  @CyNeffNews

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This author wrote a children's book about family medical history after discovering gene mutation

Ashley Dedmon’s parents always told her knowledge is power.

Discussions about health, she says, were the norm growing up. “They were educators,” Dedmon says of her parents. “They were always wanting my brother and (me) to have all the knowledge that we needed.” And so, they stressed openness about family medical history. It’s a practice that’s long given Dedmon the courage to advocate for herself in medical spaces, where Black people’s pain has been historically underestimated .

Because she knew the illnesses that were prevalent in her family, Dedmon underwent genetic testing to assess her risk for disease at 21 years old. She tested positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation , which increases the risk for breast, ovarian and other types of cancers, per the Mayo Clinic . And this set Dedmon on a health journey she'll likely be on for the rest of life.

Now 38, Dedmon and her husband have maintained the same practice as her parents when it comes their two daughters. They stress the importance of their girls monitoring their bodies. Recognizing changes in themselves, Dedmon tells TODAY.com, is vital. They know the difference between signs, something you can see, and symptoms, “something that mommy and daddy may not be able to see, but you can feel.”

“I’m empowering them to talk about their own personal history and sharing that information not only with us, but even when we take them to the doctor,” Dedmon explains. Self-advocacy, Dedmon adds, gives children agency over their bodies and their futures. This way, down the line, they’ll have the courage to share it with those who need the information most — their own families.

This is precisely what Dedmon’s most recent children’s book aims to tell readers. “ The Big Family Trip: Helping Families To Share Their Family Health History ,” offers guidelines to kickstart and then navigate conversations with loved ones about their health early on.

Those who came before her

In 2003, Dedmon’s mom tripped and fell. When she went to have her subsequent back pain examined, doctors told her she had stage 4 metastatic breast cancer — the very disease Dedmon’s grandmother and great-great grandmother also had.

Dedmon’s mother received treatment at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where she had hormone therapy, chemotherapy, radiation, "and I believe she was also offered a clinical trial,” says Dedmon. After a few years of treatment, her mother died in 2007.

Then, just as Dedmon was preparing to graduate from university she got a call from her father. He’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “I was at the library,” says Dedmon. She remembers the fear that washed over her body. “I was scared for my life.”

She didn’t want to be next. So, she brought this information to her own doctors.

Using history to protect yourself

Dedmon credits the conversations with her parents and her role as their caregiver for instilling the drive to look after her own health. “Going with them to their visits, their appointments, different screenings and scans and treatments really put me in a position to learn — learn how to interact and engage with persons in the health care system,” Dedmon says.

When she felt compelled to investigate her own health, she knew exactly what to do.

She started first with her OB-GYN, the same physician who treated her mother, who connected Dedmon with a high-risk oncologist, who began monitoring Dedmon’s breast and ovarian health. The tests the oncologist ran called Myriad’s MyRisk hereditary cancer test showed Dedmon was positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation. “That was the beginning of my risk management, knowing that I am a carrier,” explains Dedmon.

Next, she assessed her options, which included hormone therapy, early initiation to screening, and prophylactic or preventative procedures. “And after exploring all of these options, the early initiation to screening was the best route for me,” she said. Then began Dedmon’s regular mammograms, breast MRIs, breast ultrasounds and, eventually, a preventative double mastectomy.

Dedmon had an intimate knowledge of her body and her risk. “One, I’m a Black woman,” says Dedmon.

Black women have the lowest survival rate for breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society . And while the incidence rate of breast cancer is higher in white women, Black women have a 40% higher breast cancer death rate. It’s also the leading cause of cancer death for Black and Hispanic women.

“Two, I had dense breasts.” Women with dense breasts are more likely to have breast cancer, per the Centers for Disease Control . And dense breast tissue can make it difficult to detect cancer in a mammogram.

“Three, I had family history. Four, I’m a BRCA2 mutation carrier. With all those factors,” Dedmon says, “I knew my risks were, without a doubt, higher than the average woman."

Family medical history can start with you

Dedmon’s own experiences with her family, her work as a teacher, and parenthood inspired her to write “The Big Family Trip,” her second book.

“'The Big Family Trip' is focused on and promotes open discussions about family health history, to empower families to make informed health decisions and to share that information with their health care providers,” says Dedmon.

“When we know our family health history and we share that with our doctors, it can help identify any type of lifestyle changes that we may need to make. It can provide our doctors with recommendations for treatment or any other options that we may need to reduce our risk.”  

The book, about a family reunion where elders recount their life stories, including medical history, is resource for how to stay informed and how to show up for your family by sharing your own story.

Dedmon is careful not bring on worry, as she careful not to do with her own children. Since her youngest is just 2 years old, Dedmon hasn't given them all of the details about her family's medical history. She knows it can be complex and scary, so she's eased them in by encouraging interest in their personal health. Her oldest daughter, however, is aware of the family's history of cancer and knows about Dedmon's BRCA2 mutation.

Right now, Dedmon's aim is to empower them and help her children to speak up for themselves at their doctors’ appointments. “We always put them in the seat closest to the doctor,” says Dedmon. “And I always have the doctor refer their questions ... to them.” She and her husband will fill in the blanks when necessary. Her goal is to normalize conversations about their health so that they can advocate for themselves when they’re older and can better understand their family's health history.

Of course, says Dedmon, not everyone has access to family medical history because of adoption or estrangement. “But family health history can start with you,” says Dedmon.

How race plays a part

Dedmon chose to feature a Black family in her book because of the health care disparities that predominately impact Black people, limit health literacy and create a gap that often leaves Black families behind.

“I really wanted to create a resource that features Black characters and reflects our identities as a culture and addresses health topics relevant to our community so we can empower and engage in those health conversations in a confident way,” says Dedmon.

“We are diagnosed with more aggressive forms of breast cancer. We are diagnosed with later stages of breast cancer,” Dedmon points out. “I think ... it’s a combination of systemic racism that is in the health care system … social determinants of health (and) medical drivers that can be a barrier to our access to equitable, high-quality care,” she adds.

Because of the lack of access to care and racial disparities in the health care system, medical history might be a sensitive subject for Black people, says Carolyn Roberts , Ph.D., medical historian and professor of African American studies at Yale University.

“There’s a good amount of silence that is protective,” Roberts says. “It’s about not wanting to relive an experience when bad treatment happens when there are feelings of shame, discomfort and pain.”

Roberts describes Black people as “newcomers” to the medical industry “because we were excluded for so long.” These kinds of conversations are still being normalized, and many are clouded by misdiagnoses, and minimizing pain and illness in Black people.

For some families, agency feels accessible — family members advocate for it and have resources to lean on. While for others, these conversations still require a “profound vulnerability,” says Roberts. Still, they need to happen and thankfully, they’re becoming more common.

These conversations start at home, says Roberts, but if you have trouble accessing information about your family history, community centers and libraries are underused resources that offer details about Black medical history, she says. Even if you don’t have a family unit, you have the community.

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The ancient origins of Catholic anti-Semitism—and what we owe our Jewish siblings today

The protests over the war in Gaza that roiled many college campuses in the United States this past May and June raised once again the ancient specter of anti-Semitism. This year’s version of the prejudice arose from Israel’s vigorous response to Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Jewish fears of such prejudice are understandable, given their long history of suffering from violent anti-Semitism. But peaceful and clearly articulated campus protests against Israeli military actions are, of course, legitimate, to be expected and even welcomed.

Christian protesters, however, may not be fully aware of the bloody history of anti-Semitism that was fueled in part by Christian anti-Judaism going back to the origins of Christianity. And the Catholic protesters among them may not be aware that their church invites them in these opening years of the third millennium to a new and positive relationship with their Jewish neighbors.

Already in the b eginning

How did anti-Judaism arise among Christians? To a large extent, the answer lies in the period when the New Testament was written down—the latter part of the first century. It is often forgotten that it took 20 years after Jesus’ death circa 30 C.E. for the first Christian writings to appear—St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians in 50 C.E. Nearly all of the other books of the New Testament were composed in the form we now have in the half century that followed.

During those five “writing decades,” leaders of the Jesus movement had to explain to themselves and their fellow Jews why mainstream Judaism was not accepting Jesus as messiah and was opposing Christian outreach to Jews. In those five decades, conflict between Christians and the Jewish synagogue greatly intensified, and writers sometimes adopted the rough and tumble language of the prophets as they fulminated against opponents and presumed their ill will. Inevitably, Christian gospels and letters often reflect disappointment and frustration over their dashed hopes for Jewish acceptance.

For example, the Gospels nearly always portray the Jewish religious guides of that time, the Pharisees, as hypocritical foes of Jesus; and the Gospel of John’s use of the term “the Jews” suggests that all Jews, not just some leaders, rejected Jesus and arranged for his death. The first-century conflict was to a large extent an intra-Jewish conflict, for Jesus, his family and his earliest followers were Jews, deeply disappointed that their co-religionists did not accept what they themselves so ardently embraced.

Conflict was inevitable, for Jesus’ followers from the start gave divine honor to Jesus and interpreted the Scriptures (especially the Psalms, Isaiah and Deuteronomy) in a more urgent and immediate way than did mainstream Judaism. By the end of the first century, the die had been cast, and many Christian writings defined their movement by its differences from Judaism. Christian attitudes were woven into the already existing Greco-Roman criticism of Judaism for its distance from civic religious ceremonies.

Adversus Judaeos

It is not surprising that the Latin phrase Adversus Judaeos , “against (or ‘distinct from’) the Jews,” has come to characterize a whole body of Christian literature that responded to real or imagined Jewish accusations against Christ, Christians or Christianity. The Adversus Judaeos literature argued for Jesus’ messiahship, God’s rejection of the Jews as God’s chosen people and the rejection of Jewish law measured against a supposed new and spiritual revelation. As the scholar Andrew S. Jacobs has written in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History , “The fierce rhetoric of Adversus Judaeos was highly effective…. By the Middle Ages, the Christian image of the Jew—intransigent, murderous, misanthropic, diabolical, and deicidal—had hardened into the chilling stereotype that would eventually feed into the racialized anti-Semitism of the modern era.”

In assessing patristic authors, one must be nuanced, however. The authors regarded the Old Testament as inspired. Origen, for example, devoted enormous labor to establishing a critical Greek text, and John Chrysostom wrote commentaries on Genesis, Psalms and Isaiah as well as commentaries on New Testament books.

Unfortunately, what had been for the most part conventional Christian anti-Judaism during the first millennium changed in the second millennium into something far worse. Around the time of the First Crusade in the 11th century, Jews began to suffer violent attacks, often influenced by Christian preachers; in some places entire communities of Jews were massacred. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forced Jews to wear distinctive clothing. Once isolated, Jews were easily demonized, subject to false accusations such as desecrating the host, murdering children or poisoning the water supply. In 1556 in Rome, Pope Paul IV forced Jews into the ghetto (the Venetian dialect word for “island”).

Jews did not fare much better under the Protestant reformers. Failing to gain widespread Jewish conversions, Luther urged Protestant princes to expel them or impose restrictions. The 18th-century Enlightenment brought some toleration, but many Christian leaders, including popes, remained reactionary and aggressively promoted conversion to Christianity. In the 19th century, anti-Judaism took on its modern racist cast. Racist anti-Semitism got fully under way in Europe, coming to an unspeakable climax in the 1930s and 1940s with the Holocaust, a carefully planned genocide of six million Jews, almost two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe.

In the post-World War II mid-20th century, the shock of the Holocaust spurred many Christian leaders to re-examine the Christian anti-Judaism that fueled anti-Semitism and to make amends. One example of the change in Catholic attitudes was the 1965 “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”) of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). This declaration was the first conciliar document that expressed genuine appreciation for non-Christian religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and especially Judaism, to which it devotes the most space. It declares: “Since Christians and Jews have such a common spiritual heritage, this sacred Council wishes to encourage mutual understanding and appreciation. This can be obtained, especially, by way of biblical and theological enquiry and through friendly discussions.”

“Nostra Aetate” marked a turning point in Roman Catholic attitudes toward Jews. A fresh start in Christian–Jewish relations in the third millennium seemed possible.

A 21st-century response

Roman Catholic responses to pastoral issues often include appeals to official documents from the Vatican or other church bodies. Non-Catholics can be puzzled by such habitual attention to documents, but for a church that respects tradition as much as the Catholic Church does, such attention is a time-honored way of moving forward.

Three official documents are necessary for understanding contemporary Christian relationships to Jews. One has already been mentioned, “Nostra Aetate.” The other two are concerned with how Christians should read the Scriptures they share with Jews—the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures. The first document, “The Word of God” (“ Dei Verbum ”), is a dogmatic constitution issued by Vatican II. Its fourth chapter evaluates the Old Testament from an exclusively Christian perspective, emphasizing its predictive function with regard to the New Testament and focusing on messianic passages. It restates the scholarly consensus of the mid-20th century without breaking new ground. Chapter Four honors and appreciates the Old Testament as the word of God, but it does so largely on the basis of its foreshadowing of the New Testament.

The third document is more promising. “ The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible ” was published in 2002 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a Vatican group made up of internationally recognized Catholic biblical scholars. A striking paragraph compares Christian and Jewish reading and makes an extraordinarily important point:

Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures from the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading which developed in parallel fashion. Each of these two readings is part of the vision of each respective faith of which it is a product and an expression. Consequently, they cannot be reduced one into the other [emended last sentence of the faulty Vatican translation].

The document notes the continuities in Jewish and Christian readings of the Hebrew Scriptures, but it does not disguise the ruptures of the Christian reading. The document also lists significant ruptures in the course of Jewish interpretation: the Levitical priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple; animal sacrifice; dietary and purity rules; and the practice of the ban on annihilation of enemies in war. Such Jewish reinterpretation over the centuries, notes the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document, “makes clear that the shift of emphases accomplished in the New Testament was already begun in the Old Testament and constitutes a legitimate potential reading of it.” The document explains the word “potential” by a metaphor from developing photographs. “Like a ‘developer’ [the chemical solution] during the process of photographic development, the person of Jesus and the events concerning him have caused to appear in the Scriptures a fullness of meaning that could not be hitherto perceived.”

Major differences in Jewish and Christian readings remain, however. The most obvious is the New Testament’s reinterpretation of traditional monotheism by incorporating into it the divine status of Jesus, the view that human beings are created in the image of God defined by Christ (Col 1:15), and the recognition that God’s people, already in possession of an irrevocable covenant, are offered a “new covenant” (Jer 31:31) established through the blood of Jesus.

One of the virtues of “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible” is that it takes seriously early Christian interpretation within the first-century Judaism of the Sadducees, Pharisees and groups like Jesus’ earliest followers. It recognizes that Jesus and his disciples embraced the Scriptures as their own Jewish heritage and read the Scriptures using exegetical practices of their culture. Last but not least, the document acknowledges that Jesus and his followers were “siblings” of other minority groups within first-century Judaism.

Two common views that need revision today

The current view that Christianity is the offspring of Judaism–that is, the child of its parent Judaism–needs to be revised. The first reason for revising is historical. Modern Judaism took its rise from rabbinic Judaism of the second century C.E., whereas Christianity arose earlier, in the first century C.E. The rabbi-founders were Jewish sages who flourished in Palestine after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and became responsible for editing and interpreting the Scriptures.

Judaism is thus not the parent of nascent Christianity, but its sibling. Christianity should no longer be regarded as a child struggling to differentiate itself from Judaism, its parent, but as a sibling in a friendly and respectful relationship.

A good example of a sibling and respectful relationship is presented in a book co-authored by two professors at Harvard Divinity School, Kevin J. Madigan, a Catholic, and Jon D. Levenson, a Jew, The Power of God for Christians and Jews :

Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are not parent and child but siblings, sister religions whose parent was Second Temple Judaism and whose more distant ancestors were still earlier phases of the religion of Israel…. Whereas Christians have traditionally affirmed a theology in which their religion replaced Judaism, this was never the case historically. Judaism continued to live, to develop, and to spread long after Christianity appeared; and it survives, often flourishing, to this day. Moreover, Christianity can acquire an accurate view of the way their religion originated in Judaism only if they familiarize themselves with the rich Jewish literature of the late Second Temple and early rabbinic periods of Jewish history.

The second view that needs to be revised is the common description of Judaism and Christianity as two covenants and the argument about whether one supersedes or replaces the other. Rather, we ought to follow “Nostra Aetate” and join with both the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostle Paul of the New Testament in “awaiting the day, known to God alone, when all people will call on God with one voice and serve him ‘shoulder to shoulder’ (Zeph 3:9).” Focusing on the hope shared by both Jews and Christians for God’s consummation of history lifts all eyes toward God and God’s work of bringing history to its appointed goal, moving the discussion away from superiority of covenants to a commonly shared hope.

The start of the third millennium provides just such an opportunity for Catholics to appreciate their Jewish neighbors.

Richard J. Clifford, S.J., is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Boston College. Formerly general editor of The Catholic Biblical Quarterly and founding dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, he was an editor of The Paulist Biblical Commentary. Four paragraphs in this article on the history of Christian anti-Semitism have been adapted from Clifford, “Changing Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament,” Theological Studies 82.3 (2021) 509-530.

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Getting Started with Family History (By Starting at the Beginning)

Was one of your New Year’s resolutions to buckle down and start working on your family history? Or is family history something you’ve always wanted to do, but you’re just not sure how? Many people have the desire to expand their family tree but find the thought of starting to be overwhelming. If you’re one of them, here’s a secret for success: start at the beginning—with yourself.

This advice applies whether you know next to nothing about your family, you inherited stacks of family papers, or even if you stumbled across an online tree stretching back to the 1500s. While it might feel more exciting to jump in to learning about your Mayflower ancestor or your Hungarian immigrant ancestor, resist the urge— at least for now. Instead, turn your attention a little closer. Here’s why:

• That Mayflower ancestor might not be related after all. As incredible as this may sound, not every family story is true, and not every family tree is accurate. It’s up to you to start from the beginning and work backwards, making sure the connections are right.
• It’s much easier to write down what you know than it is to uncover new information so do the easiest tasks first. Also, by preserving information about yourself and your family, you ensure others won’t have to dig for it later.
• You are the expert on yourself. Nobody knows more about your life and your family than you do, and chances are nobody has better access to the correct information and records than you. Make sure this part of your tree is done correctly by doing it yourself. Besides, if you don’t collect and preserve this information, who will?

Now that you’re convinced starting with yourself is the way to go, you just need a game plan. Don’t worry—we’ve already developed one and we’re happy to share it with you:

1) Record What You Know

If you’re starting with yourself, you should start by recording your own information. The basics in family history are dates and places for births, marriages, and deaths. (Of course, you won’t be recording death information on yourself.) Next, move to your immediate family. Record this same information for your spouse, children, siblings, parents and parents’ siblings. Avoid guessing about dates and places. Instead, take time to verify things you are unsure about. If that’s a breeze, push back another generation to your grandparents.

Just gathering information isn’t enough of course. You also need to find a way to organize and preserve it so that it doesn’t just drift back into the forgotten abyss. One simple way is with the FamilySearch Family Tree . Create a free account on FamilySearch.org , and start adding your own information. With each new person you enter, Family Tree prompts you to search the existing database to see if this person might link with other trees. Keep in mind that living people’s information is always private, so you cannot connect to another tree until you get back far enough to find deceased family members. Family Tree also allows you to attach scanned documents, photos, videos, and sound clips to individual ancestors.

Besides using an online program that connects to others, you can also save your information in a program on your own computer. Many of these connect and share information with Family Tree. Three great options are Ancestral Quest , Legacy Family Tree , and RootsMagic . The basic version of each are free; the snazzier versions must be purchased. If downloading software sounds overwhelming, just stick to the online Family Tree for now.

After you get the basics about your own family recorded, reach beyond the dry facts to record family memories and stories. If you haven’t written a life history, now is the perfect time to do it. No need to feel pressure to make this the next Pulitzer Prize winning memoir; you can start with a few pages about your own life, and continue adding to it in the future. Consider doing the same thing for your parents if they haven’t written anything themselves, and then attach these histories and memories to your Family Tree.

2) Gather Documentation You Already Have

An important part of family history is documenting your information. This makes sure all information is accurate and prevents false information from creeping in. Documentation is important even at the beginning of your Family Tree, so start gathering your papers. The most obvious documentation is birth, marriage, and death certificates. However, think broadly about other types of papers that might help tell your family’s story such as letters, relevant newspaper articles, or important government, employment, school, or medical records.

Some people will quickly find themselves facing large amounts of information. Digital cameras allow us to take hundreds of photos for almost no cost, and email makes sending family updates free. Concentrate on the most meaningful papers and photos, and then make sure these important pieces of your family story are preserved by printing or saving emails and digital photos—and labeling those photos!

3) Ask Your Family for Help

Once you’ve compiled what you know and what you have in your possession, it’s time to reach out to your relatives. Ask them specific questions about information you’re missing, and let them know you’re interested in any family documents or photos they might have.

Again, it’s important to think beyond dates and documents. Ask your family members to share stories and memories with you. You can create an audio recording of their memories, or you can write them down. Be sure to contact the oldest living generation in your family to capture their priceless information and stories before they are lost. If you need help thinking of questions, check out this FamilySearch blog , and use these to prompt your relatives to share.

Ready to get started? As you begin your family history, there’s no telling where you might end up!

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Why Do My In-Laws Help Their Daughter With Her Children, but Not Me?

A reader bristles at the child care that her mother-in-law provides for her wealthy daughter, who the reader doesn’t think needs free help as much as she does.

By Philip Galanes

I am a married woman with two young kids. Our family moved to Dallas during the pandemic to be close to my in-laws — and for the help they would give us. So far, we haven’t gotten much, and I am beyond frustrated. My wealthy sister-in-law, who doesn’t work, treats my mother-in-law like a live-in nanny. She travels frequently and leaves her children with her parents. So, my husband and I, who work full time, get little help. We are exhausted! What should I do? I think my sister-in-law is taking advantage of her mother, but I feel uncomfortable asking for help because my mother-in-law is so tired. Also, my sister-in-law has access to nannies. Help!

DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

I sympathize with any parent struggling to find good, affordable child care. But unless you omitted some important details here, you and your husband seem to have misjudged the situation in Dallas. Before you moved, did your in-laws offer to help with the children? Did you ask them if they would? Because if child care was a major reason for relocating, discussing it with them was essential.

Now, I understand that you believe your sister-in-law is better able to pay for child care than you are. But you must also see that a daughter asking her mother for help may register differently from a daughter-in-law asking for the same. (Not always, but often.) And that leads to another question: Where is your husband in all this? It’s his mother whom you expect to mind your children!

I also sympathize with your mother-in-law: She is being worked to exhaustion by one adult child, while the wife of another child waits impatiently in the wings. To me, the solution is for your husband and you to talk to his mother (and, eventually, his sister) about a more equitable allocation of help with greater attention to his mother’s welfare.

Medical History as Marker of Intimacy

I was married for 39 years. My wife died four years ago. She knew about my clinical depression and was supportive during my weeklong stay on a psychiatric ward 12 years ago. Now, I am in a relationship with a woman I have been dating for two years. I moved into her home recently and put mine on the market. I have been candid with her about my depression, which is largely controlled with medication, but I have not told her about my hospitalization. Must I — even though it may risk the relationship? Or is it too much information?

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