For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History - Softcover

Kempthorne, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0867093811 ISBN 13: 9780867093810

Publisher: Heinemann, 1996

Synopsis

Family history writing can take many forms--a short essay or narrative introduction to a collection of family letters, long captions comprising a family photo history, a biography of parents and a narrative of their life together, an autobiography, or even a family newsletter. This sensible and accessible book is for those who want to do a little writing as well as for those who want to do a lot.

Kempthorne shows how easy it is to write family history and how much fun it can be. He illustrates in detail how to:

write narratives and dialogue

use physical details in a scene to make it come alive

create suspense

use many other techniques frequently employed by historians and novelists.

By the end of the book, readers will not only gain a thorough understanding of how to write family history, but will have completed a number of sketches to entertain and enrich their families.

About this title

About the Author

Charley Kempthorne, a former teacher, is the founder and editor of LifeStory Magazine, an interactive workshop by mail for family historians. He also teaches workshops in journaling and writing family history through his LifeStory Institute in Manhattan, Kansas.

Reviews

The author, a former teacher and magazine editor and publisher who specializes in teaching family history, has combined his talents to produce this work. In four chapters, he discusses family history and its importance, includes techniques for writing family history, provides forms, and explains the methods of printing and publishing the histories. Part 3, "Forms of Family History," for example, not only addresses writing biography, autobiography, and family newsletters but provides an especially useful illustration of how to incorporate letters and cookbooks into family history. The print and publishing chapter looks to be just as useful for general works as for family history publications. Ultimately, Kirk Polking's Writing Family Histories and Memoirs (Betterway, 1995) is probably more useful to genealogists, as Kempthorne's work emphasizes writing in general. But it adds an exciting new dimension to writing modern family history that seeks to place our ancestors in a larger framework of family, neighborhood, and history. It suffers from the lack of an index but otherwise is recommended as source both for writing modern family history and for writing in general.?Judith P. Reid, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"You need to bring your family history to life by recreating it," admonishes the author of this unique handbook on writing--with emphasis on the word writing one's family history, as opposed to simply compiling the usual chartlike family tree. His book stresses the presentation of family history in narrative form; and to that end, he addresses such topics as the various ways in which family history might be recorded, including keeping a journal, conducting interviews, writing captions for photo albums, compiling biographies of current family members, and composing one's own autobiography. Finally, he discusses publication of family history, either by self-publishing or by commercial publisher. Equal parts how-to and inspiration, this is a perfect public library purchase. Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Heinemann
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0867093811
• ISBN 13: 9780867093810
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150