I believe in the paper book especially when it comes to leaving a lasting legacy of our family history. Don’t get me wrong, I own an e-reader, and I love technology, but paper books remain for me the best choices to record our family history stories. Paper has proven to stand the test of time, and it remains the best option for leaving a legacy for future descendants.
Who knows where technology will lead us in the years to come. I do know that printed books have been around for thousands of years, and despite our advancements in technology they continue to hold on. You do not have to worry about whether your stories will be found in the vast world of internet or whether your information saved on your computer or CDs can be opened and accessed by your descendants. Books don’t require any special technology to read them.
However, I also believe that we need to consider today’s technology for reaching out to our living relatives. I hear it over and again. Family historians tell me how their family is not interested. But we need to consider how and where we are delivering these stories.
E-books, blogs, e-newsletters, and Facebook are just a few ways we can convey our stories to our living relatives.
To reach out to our children and grandchildren, we need to deliver our stories to their laptops, tablets, and smartphones. We need to address our family, particularly the younger generation where they live – online. We need to distribute our family history, in short, digestible stories, that fit today’s fast-paced lifestyle.
Enter blogging, an excellent tool for providing your family history stories in small, easily digestible snippets for today’s generation.
However, blogging has an added advantage. Not only can you use it as a tool to entertain and educate your living family, but you can also curate those blog posts into a paper book to leave for your descendants. Family history blogs give you the advantage of addressing today’s generation but also leaving your stories in a printed format for tomorrow’s generation. We need to focus on both so that our descendants will find our stories.
Family history blogging offers a variety of benefits for family historians and should be taken seriously as a means of bringing your family history to the online world and in a printed book.
Here are 20 benefits you can gain from blogging your family history book.
- Simplify an overwhelming project–breaking down the task of writing a book into small blog posts.
- Organization – short blog posts help you to organize your book into chapters, isolate themes, and ancestors to focus on.
- Establish a writing routine – learn to write on a regular schedule compiling a collection of narratives.
- Develop your writing skills –with each post your writing will improve. (I promise)
- Find an audience for your book – introduce yourself as a writer to not only your family but a worldwide
- It’s free – write a blog for free. Work out your stories before you invest in printing costs.
- Get feedback from readers on your stories.
- Create an email list of readers who may want to buy your future book
- Draw out distant cousins and find new leads on brick walls.
- Promote your genealogy skills and or business.
- Develop your social media skills.
- Produce material to share with your social media networks.
- Test book ideas before you invest a great deal of time in writing them.
- Build your authority as an expert in your field.
- Reach a younger generation where they live – online.
- Leave a legacy online for future generations to find.
- Increase your income.
- Attract an agent or publisher.
- Attract media to your business.
- Accountability and deadlines – hold yourself accountable to an audience to produce content in a timely and consistent manner.
Do you want to learn how to write a family history blog? Join our Family History Blog Writing Course, our first online course in The Family History Writing Studio. Learn to write and publish your family history one post at a time!
Family History Blog Writing Course
This intimate, hands-on workshop will assist you in outlining and writing content for your family history blog for the purposes of curating your stories into a family history book.
Begins Jan 3rd. 2017, Registration now open.