Bibliography of Family History Writing Guides

An abundance of print resources are available to help you write your family history. A Bibliography of Family History Writing Guides offers a wide variety of helpful books to get your started. Many of these books are available at your local library, favorite bookseller, or online at www.amazon.com.

Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Your Family History
by Lynda Rutledge Stephenson and Joan R. Neubauer
A fun, easy-to-follow guide giving basic instruction to researching your past and writing it down in a way that present and future generations will enjoy reading over and over.

Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian
by Elizabeth Shown Mills
A very useful and "user friendly" guide specifically written for family history researchers and genealogists regardless of their experience levels.

For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History
by Charley Kempthorne
A practical guide to documenting your family's history whether you want to write a little or a lot

How to Write Your Own Life Story: The Classic Guide for the Nonprofessional Writer by Lois Daniel - Using the method of writing bits and pieces as you remember them rather than chronologically, the author gently encourages you to write your story whether you believe you are a writer or not.

Legacy: A Step by Step Guide to Writing Personal History
by Linda Spence
Through a series of thought-provoking questions about each phase in human life, the author helps the readers record their personal history, think back to feelings that any number of snapshots could never capture, and reflect upon their lives.

Meals and Memories: How to Create Keepsake Cookbooks by Kathy Steligo - Start a keepsake cookbook to record my family's food-related traditions.

One Memory at a Time: Inspiration and Advice for Writing Your Family History
by D.G. Fulford and Bob Greene
This book offers indispensable guidance and encouragement on writing family and personal histories.

Only a Few Bones
by John Philipp Colletta
While this book is not a "how to" book on writing a family history, it's an excellent example of how to turn your genealogical research into a page-turning narrative.

Producing a Quality Family History
by Patricia Law Hatcher
The author guides you through the steps required to create an attractive - and functional - family history report. Learn how to organize your work, how to write the narrative, choose type faces, grammar styles and punctuation.

To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come by Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford - A step-by-step guide to creating written and oral personal histories for preserving family history and passing it on to future generations.

Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories
by Denis Ledoux
This book provides the necessary steps to help you write your family history.

Writing Family Histories and Memoirs
by Kirk Polking
Your family and personal stories are too good, too important, to lose. Record them with the help of this book.

Writing the Family Narrative
by Lawrence P. Gouldrup
A clear and concise explanation of how to write your family history! Writing the Family Narrative will teach you how to bring all those seemingly disjointed facts you've researched together into a narrative which entertains as well as informs!

Writing a Non-Boring Family History by Hazel Edwards - This is a practical guide for those wanting to shape their family research into a readable family history. The author shows how to provide a context, and craft even the driest facts into a dramatic story.

You Can Write Your Family History
by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack
There's no reason a fully documented family history can't read like a page-turning novel. In this concise and accessible book, Sharon DeBartolo Carmack shows genealogists, history buffs, and writers at all levels exactly how to record the fascinating tales of their ancestors.

Your Life as Story:  Discovering the 'New Autobiography' and Writing Memoir as Literature  
by  Tristine Rainer
Blending literary scholarship with practical coaching, Rainer shares her remarkable techniques for finding the essentials of story structure within your life's scattered experiences.