Writing the Book, Part Three

This is the third post in a series describing the steps I went through in writing The Descendants of Isaac Casbon in America. Others who are considering writing a family history book might find these posts helpful. So far, I’ve discussed the initial stages: the decision to write and scope of the project; and gathering the information needed to write the book. Today’s post discusses the process of composing and writing the text.

I should also mention that this is my first post as part of the Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS—what an acronym!) Blog Challenge. The challenge is for GOONS members to write 10 blog posts within 12 weeks in 2020. Since this is my first post of 2020, I’m starting the challenge here.

There were two distinct aspects of writing the text. The first was the process of extracting data from my genealogy software (FamilyTreeMaker®) and putting it into the format needed for Register style (described in my first post).

To review, Register style is a well-known, standardized method for presenting genealogical information in an efficient manner. It includes a numbering system that allows family members to be traced from one generation to the next. The basic unit of Register style is the family sketch.

My genealogy software was able to produce a report that contained the main elements of Register style, including complete family sketches, lineage, child lists, and most importantly, the numbering system.

Had I wished, I could have just used the report from my software verbatim, but it also contained extraneous information and some elements that weren’t arranged in the right order (date before place instead of vice-versa), so some manual tweaking of each sketch was necessary. Once edited, these sketches formed the basic framework of the book, with each generation of descendants forming a new chapter.

I could not create the Register style report until I had received the family information forms from living descendants (described in the previous post) and entered the data into my software. Otherwise the identification numbers assigned to individuals would need updating every time I received new information. This was why I set a deadline of May 31^st for returning the forms to me.

The second part of writing was creating all of the narrative material that was not a part of the basic Register format. There were two types of narrative content: additional biographical information to be added to the family sketches (described as “middle of sketch” in the first illustration, above, and placed between the main sketch and the child list); and additional sections of the book that were not part of the formal genealogy. These latter sections, as seen in the table of contents, include those sections before the first chapter (“front matter”), the first chapter, the three appendices, and some of the sections at the end of the book (“back matter”).

I was able to start writing the narrative content much earlier, starting in February or March. This was an enjoyable but time-consuming process. I added footnotes and endnotes as I wrote, using Microsoft Word. Thus, the Notes section was created automatically and required only a little editing and formatting.

Once the Register style sketches were completed, I combined them with the additional information that I had written in narrative style. These biographical, or “middle” sections of the sketches were very lengthy in the earliest generations. For example, the middle section of Thomas Casbon’s sketch in Chapter 3 was 12 pages long. In later chapters, the middle sections were shorter, often only a paragraph or two, or a few sentences from an obituary. The last few chapters, describing mainly living descendants, had little or no additional narrative content.

There is one other issue worth mentioning here: privacy. How does one protect private information about living people in a family history? As a genealogist, I strive to connect the dots between the living and the dead by gathering as much information as possible. But when it comes to publishing, it’s important to recognize that I don’t have a right to publish everything I know. I discussed this a bit in the previous post when I explained how I sent permission forms to living descendants.

Those permission forms determined what I wrote about living individuals. Most people gave me permission to print complete information—names, dates and locations of births and marriages. When I wasn’t given complete permission, I tried to follow their preferences to the letter when writing their family sketches. Thus, some sketches have only partial names, incomplete or missing dates or places. In some cases, I omitted previous marriages.

What about those people who didn’t give permission to print their information? Most of these were people I was unable to contact or who did not return family information forms to me. Only a few people told me they did not wish to be included. The basic assumption I made when I did not receive explicit permission was that I could not print any private information about them. I ultimately decided to list them in the child lists of their parents, replacing their names with the word “Private” and giving no further information about them.

Thus, the later chapters of the book are “incomplete” from a genealogical standpoint, but still allow most family members to trace their ancestry.

Another situation involving living people was the issue of divorced spouses. The format for register style allows for multiple marriages, including names, dates, and parents. I had to assume that just because I had permission to print an individual’s information, didn’t mean I had the permission of a living divorced spouse. I took a middle ground in this situation, listing the surname of the spouse but not the first name and omitting information about their births and parentage.

I took additional measures to protect privacy during the publishing and distribution stage of the process. These will be discussed in a later post.

By late October I had a complete draft, including illustrations and print layout. I’ll discuss those aspects along with proofreading and editing in the next post.