My MyHeritage MyStories Book: "Randy Seaver's Life Stories"

 As I noted in Introducing MyStories: A New Service to Turn Cherished Memories into a Printed Keepsake Book on 6 February, I was asked to write a book about my life so it could be published when the MyHeritage announcement was made.

When you use the MyStories website, you can commit to receiving emails every week with a question about your life.  You can go onto your private MyStories page and write your stories and upload photographs.  You can answer the weekly email question or subject, or you can write about anything else you want if the question doesn't work for you.  The goal is to write, say, 40 or 50, or more, short stories about your life.  You can edit your stories, or add a new story, at any time on the MyStories website. When your book is completed, you tell MyStories to publish your book and it will be sent to you.  The cost for this is $99 for a one-year subscription.

Why would I do this?  Because my daughters and grandchildren have asked me all sorts of questions over the years about my life over the years, and I want to have "my side of the story" in writing.  I hope that they will be interested in my life challenges and experiences, and realize that I am a human person who has led a unique life, just as generations of people (their ancestors!) have for centuries.  Also that there are traditions passed down through the years to my parents, to me, to my daughters, and to my grandchildren, and will probably be passed down to the children of my grandchildren.  

I am now the "elder" in my family, so I am the storyteller, and the recipient of the books, and the giver of the books some time in the future.  

I was offered the opportunity to write my stories in mid-December, but I didn't accept the offer immediately because of the hecticity of the holiday season and my own health issues.  When I did accept in mid-January, I had only a few days to submit my stories to meet the MyStories deadline.  They sent me a list of about 50 topics to write about.  The MyStories website was not available for me to write my stories on at the time because it was still in development.  

The MyStories website is ready now for you to write your stories, and for me to write more stories in another book.  After a first look, the website looks like it is very user-friendly and I hope to write more books using it.

Fortunately, I had a number of my life stories already written.  Some of my stories were in an auto-biography that I started back in 2001 (and updated several times since then).  Other stories  were articles that I wrote on my Genea-Musings blog over the last 19 years, mainly in the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun and several other themes.   Some of my story topics are on the MyStories list of topics and questions that I received, but many of my stories are not on the list.  The stories that I included in my book are longer than one or two paragraphs, and sometimes stretch over five or six book pages. 

Over four days, I put together 38 stories in a word processing file, edited them several times, and submitted them as one large RTF file on the deadline.  I included about 20 photographs for the stories in the RTF file (now I wish I had added more!).  I tried to make the book somewhat chronological, and it definitely had a genealogical flavor to it because I think my daughters and my grandchildren need to know about my parents, grandparents and other ancestors, since those people also are their ancestors.   

Then I sent the RTF file to MyHeritage and they worked their magic (and they worked that magic for a number of other family historians!) in about two weeks time.  The announcement of the MyHeritage MyStories feature was on Thursday, 6 February, and I received my book on Friday, 7 February.  

Here is a photograph of me with my book:

I'm even wearing one of my MyHeritage jackets in the photo.  The book is 172 pages in a 7" by 9" hardcover bound book.  

Inside the book is a Table of Contents (my book has 3 content pages):

Here is the first story page - I decided to write a short summary of my life:

It continues on the next page.  It is an unfinished story but I'm pretty sure about the ending.  My daughters can tell that story in their own MyStories book.

Here is one of the photographs from the story about our wedding in 1970 (this is the second page of the story "What Is the Best Decision You Made In Your Life?"  Truth:

[Since the book is so well bound, and I didn't want to break it, I've been using the Camscanner mobile app to take these photos, straighten the image, and send it to my email, then uploaded them to this blog post.  The CamScanner app is free to use, but it puts a watermark on the images (as above). I had to use my fingers to hold down the pages as you can see in the above image.  I have no one nearby to help me do this.  Taking a photo of two pages with only two hands is difficult.]

This was an energizing experience for me.  I had tears in my eyes recalling my parents and grandparents and realizing - again - how they nurtured and cared for me as a boy, a teen, a young adult, etc.  Also, recalling the friendships of my brothers, cousins, work colleagues, church members, genealogy friends, and many more persons who contributed to my life experiences.  Recalling these times in my life, and writing them down to pass them on in my own words, was wonderful.  81 years is almost 30,000 days and over 700,000 hours (of course I've slept through about 30% of those hours).  And I've done genealogy work for about 10% of those hours in my life.  

If this is something you want to do for yourself or your family members - either by interviewing them to write their stories or by writing your own stories for your relatives - this an easy way to get started and to finally get the stories down in writing.  

What about copies of the book, and more books?  I am told by MyHeritage that there will be options available, for a cost, to order multiple copies of your book (I have 2 daughters and 5 grandchildren), order another separate book, and even be able to edit your book and add more stories or photographs, and republish your book (for a cost).  I wonder how many pages can be published?  The $99 subscription is for one year and is renewable.  They are just in the start-up phase of this product, so there may be more features and options in the months ahead.

Thank you to MyHeritage for giving me this opportunity to tell my stories to my descendants.

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Disclosure: I receive a complimentary subscription to MyHeritage, and have received other material consideration in past years. I uploaded my autosomal DNA raw data to their DNA product. I received a free MyStories book.  This does not affect my objective analysis of MyHeritage products. I am a paid subscriber to Family Tree Webinars.

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Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver

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