In the first place you will have to decide which branch of your family tree you are going to focus on. Will it be a branch on your father?s side or a branch on the distaff side? Where did your parents live? Did they spend time abroad? The father of a friend of ours nearly got cooked in a cannibal?s pot ? but he got wind of it and escaped in the nick of time! That incident alone has made their story very special!
Some people call this compiling a chronicle while others think of it as scrap-booking. But no matter what we might call it, we need to decide where we start. It?s very helpful to find out which branches of your family tree have already appeared on privately generated genealogy web sites. Sometimes we can find tree-owners who have already done a lot of the spade work for us, and most of them will be only too happy to share their findings with us.
This can work well for both parties, for as your researches expand you will come across primary data which will help to confirm the accuracy of their findings as well as your own. You are likely to know more about people on the branches of the tree nearest to you. You may have a photo of a person who is just a distant name to them.
So what shall we put into our chronicle? Basically everything that is factual and helpful to build up a picture of a person, a family and a community. There may be diaries still in existence, and probate wills to help confirm who belonged to that particular nuclear family. Since the same names crop up again and again you have to be sure which branch to slot them into. Some of us have photos going back to the early 19th century and maybe we have an ancestor who painted his own portrait in the 18th century. This visual side of our ancestral record greatly enriches our enjoyment of the whole endeavour.
The whole exercise can develop in with quite a modest input, or it can develop into a major publishing venture. If your ancestors were pilots, naval engineers or merchantmen for example there would be a lot of material available about conditions at sea in that era which you can build into your history. Lots of interesting facts can be found in the nearest Maritime Museum and much can be discovered about the life of pilots and in earlier times. And if there was smuggling going on, did they have a part in it? You have to be ready to take on board the good and the bad, the noble and the less-than-noble. Your ancestors won?t have been saints in every aspect of living any more than the current generation would ever claim to be!
Eventually you will have a lot of material about the periods under review. There will be images of all kinds, charts of the family tree, presented in sections and carefully labelled, with notes on ?side-shoots? [i.e, interesting In-laws who are not in the blood-line]. There might be extracts from diaries and wills, coats of arms, family crests, maps of family locations, and much more. Above all it will be your own, personal, unique record of a group of people whom you have come to know, and hopefully to respect and love. You will discover a unique bond that no one else can experience or savour as well as you, for you have come to realise that they are part of you, as much as you are part of them.
Compiling Your Family Tree Chronicle
This article may be reprinted free of charge provided that the article remains unchanged, and the author?s resource box is included in the reprint.
Stephen Taylor is an ardent genealogy enthusiast who would love to inspire others to take up this fascinating hobby.
For more great information visit: http://www.familyhistorysecrets.com/compiling-a-chronicle/
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