An individual that is inspired to write about their family will usually select themselves to write about for their first history and that is a wise choice, as we know more about ourselves than anyone else. In writing your own history, you will learn the important things that should be included in other histories. The information that was important and interesting in your history should be your outline for writing the histories of your parents, grandparents and other ancestors that you decide to write about later.
Your own history, however, is the only one that you can include the emotions and feelings you had about events and experiences, good or bad, in your life. With other histories, you will only be able to provide whatever details you can find about the person and where they lived. You would be very fortunate to find letters and or stories that they had written that could be incorporated into your history of them.
There are timelines, professionally prepared, that will give you historical facts and events that were taking place at the time your ancestors lived in a given community. These events from recorded history should be used selectively in describing their environment and the area events that probably affected their lives.
The size of your project will depend on how much you know or can find in your research about an individual and how interested you become in their story, as well as your writing skills. Some histories may be several hundred pages long and some will only be one or two pages long, depending on the above circumstances.
Whether you are a prolific writer or not should not be the determining factor in whether you accept the responsibility to make sure an ancestor’s life is not totally lost to their descendants, including your own. They say, “When a man dies, they bury a book!” Let us exhume as many of those books as we can. Ancestral histories are the only link that we have to the past and to those who broke the trail and bridged the rivers of life that we cross over every day, usually, with little thought to their hard work and bravery.
The importance of writing our own story and the histories of our kindred dead is what will keep our memories alive and the memory of our ancestor’s existence alive. Someone said that it puts clothes on their spirits so that we can see them in our mind’s eye and know who we should be grateful to for the preparations they made for our turn on earth. Knowledge of our predecessors tends to humble us, as we even question whether or not we could have endured what they did for us. Humility is a by-product of a grateful heart and it is a virtue that we should all aspire to, in order to find that special connection to our past even while we are living in this privileged time and life.