Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)   Have you written or made a genealogy or family history book for your family, for eBooks, or for book publication?  How did you do it?

Yes, I have ‘written’ books and shared them.

My first ‘publication’ was a notebook of family photos. I created four notebooks – one for myself, one for each of my two brothers and one for my parents. Since I have three nieces and a nephew, the idea was that I would have enough notebooks for each of them.

I’m not sure which came next, but I created a scrapbook about my parents. Again four scrapbooks were created. When my first great niece was born, I switched to digital scrapbooking and created a pedigree chart for her. About that same time, I started using Shutterfly to create small photobooks for my parents and siblings. Then I got brave and used an interview with my parents and my own memories to create a book of family memories. I used Shutterfly to publish this book and purchased 8 instead of four so that my nieces and nephew could have their own copy.

In 1993, I was using The Master Genealogist as my genealogy program. With that software, I was able to easily ‘create’ books. Thus, I printed and shared ‘books’ of the descendants of my 2nd great grandparents. The printouts were put in a cover with a ‘title’ page and then shared with genealogy societies in various locations. Out of curiosity, I searched WorldCat to see if any of those ‘books’ were listed and found most of them! (Note: I could recreate these ‘books’ using RootsMagic.)

I also found a couple of them in the FamilySearch catalog.

Thanks to some prompting from a WikiTree user and a hint from a reader of this blog, I learned to use ‘Blog2Print‘ to turn this blog into a series of ‘books’. Those ‘books’ have been uploaded to Archive.org. I also have links to them on WikiTree.

While I have ‘publications’ out there with my name on them, I do not feel that I have spent the time and effort that one associates with being an author. Nor has any of my work been read by an editor. It is all self-published and freely shared.