Somehow, Saturday has arrived yet again and I like Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for us this week:
1) Have you written or made a genealogy or family history book for your family, for eBooks, or for book publication? How did you do it?
I’ve actually written several genealogy books/booklets/articles through the years.
First, I spent about a decade researching my husband’s great grandmother’s Williams family. By June 2001, I had “completed” my manuscript and was ready to publish my book. I used a small printing/binding company in Southern California that specialized in binding aster’s degree theses and PhD dissertations.
The cost was reasonable and I sold copies by pre-payment before printing and added about five extra copies. I was determined I was not going to be that person with 500 excess books sitting in my garage forever. I charged about $70 for a book and figures out I made a “profit” of perhaps $2.50 per book for my ten year labor of love. I definitely wasn’t in it for the money!
The Williams Family of Cumberland County, Virginia and Their Westward Migration, Being the History of the Descendants of Roger Williams and Brothers, Thomas and Matthias Williams from 1720 to 1865. was also donated to the FamilySearch Library, the DAR Library in Washington, DC and a few other repositories.
I am very proud of the fact that it was so well documented that the DAR genealogists referred Williams descendants to my book for clues to prove their own family lines.
On a much small scale, I wrote booklets – perhaps 20 or so pages – on my Loyalist James Astle and his descendants, my husband’s Miller family from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky and a much lengthier compilation of all the descendants I could prove of my Loyalist John Adams from Fairfield County, Connecicut to New Brunswick, Canada.
All of those booklets have been donated to various repositories so hopefully will be accessible long after I’m gone.
Lastly, I wrote an article for the Kentucky Genealogical
Society’s Bluegrass Roots proving the ancestral origins of John Whitmer of Frederick County, Maryland, Botetourt County, VA and Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.
The article was entered in their writing contest and I won second place! It was published in Bluegrass Roots, volume 20, no. 2, Summer 1993.
Because of these books, booklets and articles, I’ve been contacted through the years by many descendants.
There are a couple of other family lines I’m considering for new booklets, but, for the time being, I’m sharing stories and research discoveries on this blog.
The Wayback Machine visits this website regularly now so, again, when I’m no longer here to author new posts, others will be able to use the Wayback Machine to read my posts.
Thanks, Randy. This is a different, fun challenge.
Having people contact you because they have read your research is one of the great benefits, I think, of publishing your family history. I hope you have been able to learn more information to add to your own research from those contacts.
Congratulations on publishing some books! Have you considered uploading the books to the Internet Archive? I am thinking of doing that with what I write in the future. It’s probably a good way to preserve the writing and I don’t have to spend money printing books.
That’s another great idea. I’ll have to think seriously about that when I’m done updating all of them in my Word docs.