What is the project?
I wanted to compile stories from my family history. Last winter I had an assignment to find a grave and write about the person who died. I had to use whatever research I could, whether through Family Search, the library or old newspaper articles, to capture her story. I fell in love with that project and wanted more.
This long-term project presented me with the perfect opportunity to connect with my past and learn about my ancestors while getting to do research and write about them! I have never felt as connected to my family before. Reading about activities they did, laughs they shared and the way they lived helped humanize them in my mind. Even though they lived before me, they were real people with experiences that match mine in so many ways.
The Finished Results
The Challenges
The hardest part of the project was the time commitment. Sitting down and doing research felt like it took forever. If I was already related to these people, why didn’t I have a sense of who they were before?
It feels incredibly rewarding to have so many completed stories about people I care about, even if some of it was tedious work.
The journey
I started out the project with a list. In all my workplace settings that is my favorite way to get things organized. I made a list of all the people I might want to write about. After that, I went through and edited that list. My first deadline for myself was pretty soon after the class started, so I tried to get working on story outlines right away.
While I was drafting outlines I had a lot of back and forth. I would read a story and fall into a rabbit hole, or I would switch from story to story with very little focus on what I was reading. Getting all my information onto my paper was rough, but after I finished that, the stories started to flow.
Writing the stories felt familiar. I had heard bits and pieces of them before, but the writing process was the same as it is for anything. I tried to start with something that made their story unique to them. An interesting death, a quote from a family member, something that humanized them. After that I tried to keep it consistently chronological so that it all made sense.
In the past, I have done several design projects so I was really looking forward to getting to put all the stories together. Even though I kept the design super simple, I got to use paragraph settings to keep my text formats matching, which was super cool. Getting to use the features of InDesign is really cool.
I used pictures from FamilySearch, and occasionally google, for the project, and finalized it all.
What I learned
I began by diving into my family’s history with curiosity and a sense of connection to the past. I found where they were from, pieced together stories passed down through generations, and explored historical records to uncover details about their lives. As I dug deeper, I found both moments of triumph and challenges which made them closer to me.
Writing about my ancestors became more than just a project; it became a personal quest to understand my roots and family footprint. Each ancestor I uncovered added a layer to my own story and how I now view the world through their point of view.