Writing Family History Made Very Easy
Go to any family history group meeting, talk to your neighbours on the microfiche machine and they will ask the same question. How on earth can you shape that mountain of material collected into a readable family story? You can sort it with a genealogical software package but have you noticed, they say, it is still there? The piles of data have not disappeared. There are practical and useful entry points into organizing your material and into writing and you can begin that exciting journey as soon as you look up from your research task, take a deep breath, and begin to re-organise, plan, interpret, create, critique, reflect, and write.
Writing Family History Made Very Easy (Published by Allen & Unwin, 2007) provides a step-by-step guide to writing family history. The book begins from the premise that writing family history is a learned skill that can be taught easily and well. The book offers easy-to-follow instructions and straightforward advice on the writing, editing and publishing process aimed directly at family historians.
The book incorporates relevant and detailed information on how to write easily and well from the many oral and written documents collected by family historians. The book includes relevant and interesting exercises to help the beginning writer kickstart their writing.
The book has information on specific writing techniques to help beat those barriers to writing well, advice on writing early and with passion, basic information on planning, organising and developing early drafts, how to write well about your characters and their place of origins, on choosing a format, about asking questions and finding ideas and strategies for successful and confident family history writing. The book also has a chapter on self publishing and advice on the use of genealogical software programs for writing, editing and publishing the family history.
Noeline Kyle is a professional historian and a family historian. She has been researching and interacting with family historians since the late 1970s and teaching writing family history to family historians for more than two decades. Noeline is the author of Her Natural Destiny: The Education of Women in NSW (NSW University Press, 1986); Tracing Family History in Australia, (Methuen, 1985); We Should've Listened to Grandma: Women and Family History, (Allen & Unwin, 1988); and The Family History Writing Book, (1993, 2001). The book Remembering Mothers edited by Noeline Kyle, Lybbie Semple and Jan Gracie Mulcahy, was launched at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival in 2005. Noeline has published a biography Memories & Dreams based on the life and work of her great grandmother Nurse Mary Kirkpatrick. She has completed research on several female convicts on her father’s side of her family. Her most recent book is A Greater Guilt: Constance Emilie Kent & the Road Murder, Boolarong Press, 2009.