Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Have You Written/Made Genealogy Books?

 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?

2)  Write your own blog post, or leave a comment on this post, or write something on Facebook.

Here's mine:

1)   I started doing genealogy research in 1988, and by 1994 I had done enough research and identified many of my ancestors, and recorded the information in Family Tree Maker.  I wanted a book to present to my mother for her 75th birthday in July 1994.  I used Family Tree Maker to make an ancestors report for eight generations, saved it as a Word document, added a cover page, title page, dedication, preface, Table of Contents, Introduction and some family photographs.  I added notes but no sources or index.  I printed the pages on my dot matrix printer and took the stack of pages down to the local UPS Store.  They quickly printed 5 copies with one-sided pages, put them into a comb binding with a thick stock cover and back, and I was all set.  The Ancestry of Betty Virginia Carringer by Randall J. Seaver was born!  My mother was beyond thrilled.  I gave a copy to my two brothers also.   I kept the other two copies and used one for corrections and additions.  

2)  I decided to do the same thing for my father's ancestry, which is more extensive than my mother's because mot lines go back to the 1600s.  So I wrote a 4-generation ancestor report for my father's ancestry, and then 8-generation reports for all of his great-grandparents, in Family Tree Maker.  I saved them as word files, printed them out on the desktop printer, and put them in three-hole notebooks, but I did not publish them.  I have a set of these reports from 2002, plus another for my wife's ancestry.  

3)  In 2012, I created ancestor reports for my mother's ancestry, my father's ancestry, and Linda's ancestry, and descendants of my Seaver, Dill, Carringer, Auble, and Vaux lines, again using Family Tree Maker desktop software, but for a Book.  I did them all with names, dates, places, spouses, and children in ahnentafel order, with sources and an index, but without notes, and saved them in PDF format as eBooks.  I uploaded them to the free Scribd website, and they are still there - searchable in Google.  You can read them (and/or download them) at   https://www.scribd.com/user/43095920/Randy-Seaver.  

4) I have done a lot more research in the past 11 years, and have started to update these eBooks to include everything I have about my ancestral families back to about 1600.  I will use Family Tree Maker 2019 desktop software for a Book because the formatting is better than RootsMagic 9.  I will put them on Scribd again as eBooks (and delete the old reports) and perhaps try to put them in the FamilySearch Digital Library.  

My experience is that no one in the family is interested in genealogy and surname books and reports, but they know that they will be on my computer system, on the FOREVER subscription site, in Ancestry Member Trees, MyHeritage family trees, and FamilySearch Family Tree.  

That's my plan - tell me yours!! 

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Copyright (c) 2023, Randall J. Seaver

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