The 12 Labors of a genealogist – #11 – Publish your work

You’ve certainly thought about sharing the results of your genealogical research with your family and friends.

There are several possible approaches, each of which requires a greater or lesser amount of work on the part of the genealogist, for a more or less exhaustive result of your work.

Print pedigree trees and fan wheels

Displaying a family tree spanning several generations always has a magical effect, as it represents your family’s presence throughout the centuries.

You can, of course, fill in blank pre-printed trees available on the internet, but you will quickly discover that this representation does not allow you to present all of your work. In fact, working on a family tree is not limited to drawing trees or fan charts. Your family tree tells a story, and as with any story, the characters, places, and dates are brought to life by the narrative of events.

Publish your data on the Internet

You can publish your data on a specialized website and give your family and friends access to this information.

These sites are useful for formatting your information and presenting files by person or by family, but they are not designed to present a narrative, as changing pages can quickly cause you to lose track of the information. You should also be careful not to include information about living or recently deceased people.

Writing your family history

This is why you may be tempted to write an exciting monograph: your family history.

Your work can recount the information and facts you know about your ancestors in chronological order, indicating key dates, places, but also the trades and occupations of your ancestors and – who knows – the famous people they might have rubbed shoulders with!

For the best results, don’t forget to include the following in your history:

• Information on your ancestors’ lineage.
• Information on the main events: birth or baptism, marriage(s), death or funeral.
• Sources of information, i.e. proof demonstrating the veracity of the information (birth certificate, diploma, work certificate, etc.). This evidence must be referenced.
• Places, cited in a form indicating the territorial division (commune, department, region and country). The nomenclature of places used can be either that of the time of the events or that in force at the time of writing your document.

Remember to add referenced illustrations (captions) throughout your story, and index tables for surnames, places, trades, etc. at the end of your document.

You’ll need to do a lot of layout and editing! You probably won’t be able to update this document frequently, even though some software programs can produce an outline from your data exported in GEDCOM format.

Once you’ve finished editing your document, you can have it printed by self-publishing sites to achieve a professional result.

Prepare your data

Whichever solution you choose, don’t forget that preparing your data is crucial to producing accurate, complete, documented and, above all, error-free results.

As a minimum, we recommend that you carry out the following checks:

• Look for people who are present more than once.
• Check data validity and consistency.
• Verify the completeness of the data and the presence of quoted evidence.