best format for written genealogy

[gilbertdh]

I'm thinking or "writing" the genealogy of my family. In my research I've used several published genealogies, some easy to use, some difficult. I'm looking for a good model.

In your experience what is the best published genealogy you have used? I'm interested in writing and formatting styles. Is there a reference work or style guide for this? Not for sources, footnotes, and bibliography, but for the text itself.

Thanks,
David

[Wilfred Allan]

Re: best format for written genealogy

In your experience what is the best published genealogy you have used? I'm interested in writing and formatting styles. Is there a reference work or style guide for this?

You won't go wrong using the Register format of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. There are style guides. Here's a link to a template;

http://www.americanancestors.org/register-template/

[kmgenealogy]

Re: best format for written genealogy

You won't go wrong using the Register format of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. There are style guides. Here's a link to a template;
http://www.americanancestors.org/register-template/

This is for MS Word. However, if you no longer use MS Word, much of it can be done in Pages (you can open the Template in Pages once it is downloaded). Not sure about the Macros though.

To me, I would think doing a Reunion Register Report for the oldest ancestor you want to start with would be the way to start. Open it in your word processor and tweak it from there. Pages has many word processing abilities, including footnotes and endnotes, so you can do just about anything in it.

Let us know what you ended up doing. Especially if it is different from suggestions.

[Wilfred Allan]

Re: best format for written genealogy

To me, I would think doing a Reunion Register Report for the oldest ancestor you want to start with would be the way to start. Open it in your word processor and tweak it from there. Pages has many word processing abilities, including footnotes and endnotes, so you can do just about anything in it.

Some good advice here. If you have the data you want to use already entered in Reunion then it would likely be less work to open the document in Register format and then use your processor to tweak the information. For me that usually means a whole lot of tweaking but much easier than starting with an empty template.

I would use Pages, unless I wanted a paged index which unfortunately Pages cannot do. To create an index with page numbers I then revert to Word and use its indexing features.

In addition to the template I linked to in my previous note, there are Register style guides available.

Yes, do let us know what you decided to do. All the best.

[gilbertdh]

Re: best format for written genealogy

Thank you for all of these suggestions. I've actually found the Register template quite useful and have typed in about three pages of text using it.

Although I find Word to be one of the worst applications every designed (if it was designed, I think it was actually created by 10,000 monkeys), Pages has too many limitations for my normal word processing work.

I'm finding this exercise incredibly helpful. So far I've been retyping the entries, which I also find useful, but I'll certainly import data from Reunion once I get into the third generation. I've already come across several incidents where it has struck me, "How exactly do I know that? Don't I have a source for this?" Which has driven me back to Shown Mills for language to express levels of certainty: apparently, possibly, probably, likely, etc.

Thanks again,
David

[donworth]

Re: best format for written genealogy

David,

I have self-published a couple of books on my and my wife's family. I generally use the Notes fields to write up a biography of the major players. I have notes to myself, census transcriptions and such after the biography with the text "RESEARCH NOTES:" preceding them so they can be quickly deleted away when I publish.

My approach has been to run out a Register Report for those lines I have pretty well covered (most of the descendants of an ancestor). I also usually write a free-form narrative that covers the historical context for the main families - documenting and summarizing the chronology from the original ancestor forward and describing the migrations and major events and occupations of the line of descendants I am interested in. It usually sits as a preamble to the register report. For some of the female lines that i haven't done much with, I just do an Ahnentafel so that my readers can at least trace back the direct ancestry of that line. So I end up with various "chapters" - some following a common ancestor forward (Register report with preamble) and some that are the Ancestry of so-and-so, following that backward (Ahnentafel).

I use MS Word to edit the text thus produced to clean up problems and inconsistencies.

I then paste up each chapter as a separate file using Adobe InDesign (I prefer it to Pages). Once the text is in, I gather all the photographs and maps and illustrations I can find and begin inserting them into the text, moving through the file, flowing the text around them and adding caption and attributions. I like a LOT of illustrations (for some people who get my books, that's all they care about anyway - that and the preambles I mentioned).

Finally, I run the result out of InDesign to a PDF using the LULU.COM printer template and upload it to lulu where my relatives can order a copy.

The one I did most recently is here:

http://www.bishir.org/lee

If you click on one of the links on that page to the book's order page, you can click on Preview under the book cover image to see a few pages. I put the URL above on the back cover of the book so that if someone sees the book and wants their own copy, they can find out how to order one.

Don

EDIT: W/re to indexing, I just use the indexes generated by the Reunion reports. They aren't page indexes, but do help you find a person in the book pretty quickly by looking at the person numbers.

[kmgenealogy]

Re: best format for written genealogy

I have just found out about Apache OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org). This is a free program and seems to be a very viable substitute for Microsoft Office...especially now with MS' new pricing for their Mac version (see http://www.macworld.com &, especially, TONYOR's comment). Although I love, and use, Pages, mostly, I have been concerned that it is missing some processes that might be needed...such as indexing. Apache OpenOffice seems to have an indexing component but I haven't tried it yet as I just downloaded the program. Also seems to have a pretty good extensions (free) community.

Has anyone used OpenOffice's word processing component (Writer) as their Reunion word processor for reports &/or charts?

[gilbertdh]

Re: best format for written genealogy

There are a couple of these open source office suites now. Open Office at first was complicated to run and start. That led to NeoOffice which is native under the Mac OS. I recently switched from Neo to Libre Office because it starts faster than Neo, but they are all pretty satisfactory. They all have the traditional MS menu system rather than the "ribbon". One place to find all of these with reviews is: www.macupdate.com

David

[Jan Powell]

Re: best format for written genealogy

LibreOffice is really good and is quick.
I use Scrivener for biography writing and assignments. It is very good and has templates for a large range of documents from scriptwriting to academic documents, fiction and non-fiction books, poetry

[Tom Robinson]

Re: best format for written genealogy

Has anyone used OpenOffice's word processing component (Writer) as their Reunion word processor for reports &/or charts?

LibreOffice is the way to go:

http://www.libreoffice.org/

Sun and then Oracle mismanaged development of OpenOffice until most of the developers left and formed LibreOffice, then in a fit of pique gave the naming rights to Apache. OpenOffice releases are close to stagnating.

NeoOffice was great while OpenOffice didn't support OS X, but it's almost irrelevant now, and
they're squeezing money out of the few people who do use it.

LibreOffice supports indexing, table of contents, and master documents--plus much more. From my experience with a 130 page book with lots of graphics, and what I've read, it beats Word for reliability.

Some learning curve, as some functions aren't as intuitive as they could be, and it has the look of a port rather than native app. Of course you can't beat the price* of open source software ;-)

*Having said that, I've made donations.

[Susan Freas Rogers]

Re: best format for written genealogy

This comment has more to do with book design and layout, as opposed to "format." The book will be more readable if you follow some basic design rules, such as, if your page size is 8 1/2 x 11, do not run your text in a single column clear across the page. The eye cannot follow such a long line in a typical 12-point font and easily make the jump back to the beginning of the next line. There is a mathematical formula for how large a font should be (for readability) compared to the line length, and I don't know what that formula is, but the fact that it exists should (I hope) serve to demonstrate that it's something to pay attention to.

Most magazines solve the problem by using a 3-column format, often with a sidebar serving as one of the columns. I'm working on writing up one line on my mother's side, and plan to use sidebars to give historical context (U.S. and worldwide) to the time period being written about in each section. I'll probably just list dates and what happened, i.e. "1803 - Napoleon sells all the prairie lands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains to the U.S. for $15 million; the Louisiana Purchase nearly doubles the nation's land area" or "1878- Thomas Edison invents the incandescent light bulb. The first electric street lighting appears, in London."

I think this sort of thing vastly increases how interesting a family history can be, by giving the reader a much better idea of what was happening culturally and politically at the time. And, it has educational value in its own right (who can remember all this stuff from school?). It's not difficult to find these sorts of lists, and a book called "What Happened When" (covers U.S. only) can be purchased used on Amazon for one cent plus shipping.

Susan

[kmgenealogy]

Re: best format for written genealogy

Susan, Thanks for the info and ideas. Never thought of any of them!

[B Jansen]

Re: best format for written genealogy

You won't go wrong using the Register format of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. There are style guides. Here's a link to a template;
http://www.americanancestors.org/register-template/

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I'm wondering if Reunion now has the capability to just run a New England Historical and Genealogical Register formatted Register report.

[donworth]

Re: best format for written genealogy

Have you looked at the Define Layout in the Register Report? Under miscellaneous, for example, you can append the ancestry to person names. You can probably edit the settings in the Layout to set it up the way you want.

[B Jansen]

Re: best format for written genealogy

Have you looked at the Define Layout in the Register Report? Under miscellaneous, for example, you can append the ancestry to person names. You can probably edit the settings in the Layout to set it up the way you want.

Thanks but this is more than defining layouts, and defining of the layouts I think is beyond current capabilities.