Saturday, January 9, 2010

Publishing your family history

Today's Computer Interest Group [CIG] focused on publishing your family history. Jill Morelli did a fantastic job of describing the process she used to publish a book on 3 generations of her Swedish ancestors, working backwards from her immigrant ancestors. I'm guessing at least half of those in attendance have already checked out http://lulu.com/ to see how it works!
Jill's book is absolutely gorgeous. She designed it for her "cousins" who aren't really into genealogy, so there are no computer-generated family reports, just a couple of pedigree charts at the back of the book. There are lots of photos, maps and descriptions of her ancestors' lives and locations. It's a very professional looking volume--complete with its own ISBN--that I dearly wish was on my family!
For those of us who aren't quite ready to write an entire book, the idea of writing a series of short stories on individual family members or events--as John Phillip Coletta recommended at last Spring's seminar--was mentioned. Speaking on behalf of our Director of Publications, SGS would love to get more member submissions of articles about their ancestors, brick walls that have been surmounted, research techniques that yielded results, descriptions of unusual records, and Pacific Northwest transcribed records. The quality of our Bulletin is directly related to the quality of the submissions SGS receives. Have you got an article in you? Please consider submitting it to sgspublications@gmail.com.

I hope that by now all of you have taken the SGS Long Range Planning Survey. If not, please take a few minutes and answer the questions at:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22A3YRU8WME
We'd love to get responses from at least half of all SGS members. Please let us know your thoughts.

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