You should write your family history now because it helps you understand where you come from, it becomes a record that your descendants will value, and it keeps the stories that a family tree of names and dates cannot hold. It is more than a hobby: it is a legacy.
If you have ever researched your ancestry, or found yourself curious about it, you may enjoy going one step further and writing down your family's history. How to write your family history explains how to go about it. Here are the reasons why you should start right now.
1. You will understand yourself and your family better
Learning about the lives of your ancestors can make you feel wiser about many things, and closer to your older relatives. Along the way, you may also discover ancestors you never knew existed.
2. A family history is an important historical record
The reason is simple. When you research what you can and put it all together, you help your descendants when they decide to take an interest. The stories will feel new to whoever reads or hears them for the very first time.
3. If you have something to pass on, start writing now
You don't have to be famous to leave a legacy, and writing your family's story down is a service to the community as well. It does not matter how big or small that legacy is: an individual voice from the past is valuable, far more than someone else's guess at what happened.
4. You never know how many people your family has touched
You never know how one life can touch so many others. The Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life is built on exactly that idea. In the future, people may want to trace their own links to you and your family, so leave behind something they can hold in their hands.
5. A family tree is only names and dates
Stories and short biographies add depth: what went on in people's lives, the important decisions they made, and what lived on after them. That is what matters. From a family tree or a list of names, all you may get is the year each person was born and the date they died.
Start now, check later
Writing your family history is not an obsession or a way to pass the time. It has practical benefits, and what you put together can help more than one person in the future. Writing your family history, part 2 has more ideas for the writing itself.
When you have written everything down, run the text through the Spell Checker so that anything you overlooked can be corrected. Check names and dates yourself as well: a spell checker cannot know how your great-grandmother spelled her name.