My target was to complete Part 4 of my family history narrative by Christmas - and I have done it! This is in my series "James and Maria: The Story of Their Ancestors and Descendants" and focuses on thei large family of eight surviving sons and one daughter, born to my great grandparents, James Danson and Maria Rawcliffe of Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire with the ever present theme the First World War in which two sons died.
I must admit it has taken a long time to get to this stage. I was shocked to discover that Part 1 - The Rawcliffe Story was completed in 2005 - I never realised it was that long ago, followed by Part 2 - Danson Ancestors and Part 3 - Danson Sidelines. However once I discovered the exciting pastime of blogging and www.geneabloggers.com, that has tended to take over my writing energies, and the narrative went on the back burner.
The style I chose owes much to a book I came across through membership of the Borders Family History Society - "William and Christina: One Woman's Search for her Ancestors", by Hilary Forrester. I was immediately attracted by its format. The author traced the story of her great grandparents with the family living both sides of the Scottish-English border, their ancestors and descendants, the background to their lives, and the places and times in which they lived.
I recently took a PHAROS online genealogy course on "Developing and Writing Family History" which echoes this approach. The first two assignments focused on finding out background information on our ancestors' occupations and places where they lived, and for the final week, we had to draw up an action plan with an outline contents list for writing our family history. We also took part in three chat rooms (a new experience for me), to exchange views and gain ideas from one another. This I found particularly valuable and reinforced the extensive course notes. To find out more, take a look at the PHAROS website.
There is nothing like a sense of achievement to spur me on to writing Part 5 where I look at the story of my grandparents William Danson and Alice English - I just hope it does not take me quite so long to complete
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| James Danson (1852-1906) sitting merry in Poulton Stocks |
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| Maria Rawcliffe (1859-1919) |
Motivation Monday is one of many daily blogging prompts from www.geneabloggers.com to encourage writers to record their family history.
Copyright © 2012 · Susan Donaldson. All Rights Reserved
Congratulations on completion! I'm just starting to tackle narrative histories as I completed my second family history focused scrapbook last year (a much smaller project). However, I have so much NEW information that I feel I need to work on the narratives now. So again, my congratulations as I have a small idea how much work went into this... especially if this is your fourth part!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Devon and good luck with yur project. It is very satisfying to work on and will give yiou a great sense of acheivement.
DeleteCongratulations of your achievement! I'm sure your family will enjoy reading it.
ReplyDeleteThank you Coleen for your comment.
ReplyDelete