Writing quick Ancestor biographies

Here’s a quick tip to stop one revising and spending editing time on every sentence written. Get the draft written by voice.

• Open your timeline of research on an ancestor, whether it is in your genealogy software, in a spreadsheet or an online database.
• On your phone open a Google doc or any notes app or Office and tap the microphone.
• Talk about each fact in the timeline adding as little or as much as you want.
• Now you have a draft document you can return to, edit and enhance later.

This works for me, have you tried it? 

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

Hippo sized hints

Hazel hones our histories.
Hazel’s hints help.

What works as a title? I settled on Hippo Sized Hints for this post.
I’m practising what I’ve learnt today. Three word titles  - preferably with some contrast or a conflict of ideas. This was just one example of the hints and tips received by an enthusiastic audience at Cooroy Library this afternoon.

Hazel Edwards, an Australian author of over 200 books presented an entertaining and informative session on Writing a Non Boring Family History.  Anecdotes, book promotion, writing hints and techniques were interspersed with practical exercises each limited to 2-3 minutes. These were designed to ensure that family historians should concentrate on avoiding “chronological boredom.”

In small groups of three we took the role of an ancestor and were interviewed by the others to relate that ancestor’s story in the first person. This provided an excellent focus for revealing gaps in known information. Other exercises had us concentrate on including all five senses in describing a place or room of significance.

Whilst I will probably never aspire to actually publish a family history, I came away with some excellent ideas for improving my blog posts. By the way, I can’t ever imagine a hippo providing me with hints but the hippo is a very famous character in “There’s a hippopotamus on our roof eating cake”
Writing a Non Boring Family History is available as an ebook from Hazel’s online store.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2016/05/hippo-sized-hints.html