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

Front Cover
Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996 - Education - 150 pages
For All Time is a practical and accessible guide to documenting your family's history, whether you want to write a little or a lot. Author Charley Kempthorne shows how easy it is and how much fun it can be. A family history can take many forms - a short essay or narrative introducing a collection of family letters, long captions in a family photo album, a biography of your parents and their life together, an autobiography, even a family newsletter. Kempthorne discusses the many forms of family history and tells you how to keep the task manageable. For All Time also clues you in to specific techniques. Kempthorne explains how to get started, how to use dialogue and physical detail to make a scene come alive, how to mix summary and anecdote, how to be specific, and when to employ other tools used by historians and novelists. There is also a chapter on printing and publishing your family history. This book will give you a thorough understanding of how to write a family history. And peppered throughout are suggested writing topics; when you're finished, you'll have had the opportunity to write several sketches that can be used as a beginning.

From inside the book

Contents

PART 3
61
PART 4
121
Resources for the Family Historian
141
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1996)

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.

Bibliographic information