52 Reasons to Write Your Story

Some of you may be new to genealogy. Welcome to the club! You'll be assimilated into the cult of family research in short order. The secret password is "ahnentafel".

Some of you may have been climbing your family tree for a while now, but you've yet to catalog information on the easiest person to research: yourself! You've been so busy tracking down your great-grandfather's birth records that you've neglected to enter your own into your database.


Still others of you have been chasing names, dates, and places for decades, but your family's history reads like a county register book - all fact and no context. A family tree without leaves (and, let's be honest, a few nuts) is a spindly thing indeed.

One solution to address all three problems is the "52 Questions in 52 Weeks" list compiled by Steve Anderson over at the FamilySearch Blog. I recently came across this set of queries and I think it's great!

As Steve says:

Each week for 1 year, take one question and write as much or as little as you want. You can write 1 paragraph or you can write several pages for each question. Page count is not important; it’s the information that matters. ...

Unlike so many people who die and are forgotten within only a few generations, those who make the effort to answer this simple list of questions will be remembered by their posterity for countless generations to come. Why? Because they will have taken the time to write something about their life and passed it on to their posterity. It’s that simple. What a simple, yet wonderful legacy to leave for future generations.

That's the crux of what I'm pursuing with Narrative Genealogy: to write a compelling story that will be cherished by generations to come.

Won't you join me in working through these questions in 2015? Even answering just one may prove to be invaluable to your descendants.

Photo Credits:

Secret by John Cali 

Towering Nature by Ryan McGuire