Organizing Your Information
While there are many theories to biographical writing, it's generally best to begin chronologically. An outline chronology of your ancestor's life will provide a framework around which the biography can be written. Another writing aid may be an alphabetical listing of individuals known to be involved in your ancestor's life (parents, spouses, children, neighbors, witnesses to documents, etc.). Organizing your information in this fashion will also help to point out gaps and holes in your research.

Getting the Details
The amount of information you are able to obtain will vary greatly from one ancestor to another, from one time period to another, and from one geographic area to another. Vital, census, church, probate, court, and land records may provide many details of your ancestor's life. Published county histories and genealogies may also provide details, and there are many other sources that can be utilized. Some details may have to be inferred from documents. One may speculate on an ancestor's occupation based upon items listed in an estate inventory. But speculation must be done carefully; for much of our nation's past, owning one cow does not make the person a farmer! Most of the records you currently have may include information on your ancestor's vital events (birth, marriage, and death), but remember that other documents may provide additional clues on your ancestor's life.

Finding Your Sources
In the ideal world, each record copy in your possession will have a bibliographic citation. However, some of us obtained information before we had been converted to the "school of documentation." Try to locate the original source of this undocumented information. If there is a document for which you are unable to locate a citation, consider whether to include the information. If the biography is informal and intended to assist you in researching further and uncover new leads, perfect citation is not as important. Just remember that if you intend to publish your ancestor's biography, some publication media may want a complete citation. The citation is even more crucial if the source contains information not obtained elsewhere.

Obtaining the citation may be helpful in its own right. While preparing overheads for a presentation, I discovered that I had a document with absolutely no reference. I granted myself a certain amount of leeway; I had obtained the document when I was sixteen years old. Given the document and the individual it focused on, an hour of research was all that was needed to obtain a specific citation. While re-researching the item in question, I discovered additional information on the family involved. I might never have discovered the information if I had not backtracked to locate the source of the document.

Writing the Story
Your chronology and list of ancestral acquaintances should provide a good framework from which to write the biography of your ancestor. It is probably best to stick to the facts as much as possible . . . after all, when writing an ancestor's biography, you usually are not writing fiction. You may wish to speculate on certain items, but be certain to clearly indicate that you are speculating and not speaking from established fact.

Background Information?
You may wish to add information about your ancestor's ethnic group or the historical time period to the story. Bear in mind that not every member of an ethnic group necessarily practiced the same traditions in exactly the same fashion. Be cautious in assuming that your ancestor did everything in the "typical way." Some families followed traditions more closely than others.

While researching one of my families in the late 1800s, I learned that my widowed ancestor had remarried. Court records reveal that her second husband had little say in the day-to-day operations of the farm. In fact, she is listed as the head of household in the 1880 census, and her second husband is listed LAST in the family entry—something beyond the norm. While reading a book about the ethnic group to which these individuals belonged, I read a statement that said that women who "brought property into a marriage" frequently retained control over the property. This more fully explained what I had discovered in the court records, and so the two pieces were tied together with the idea that the practice "probably" explained the information in the court records and the family's listing in the census.

Reading local, regional, and ethnic histories may provide some additional tidbits to use in your sketch. Be careful that you do not use the material to put more details into your ancestor's life than were really there.

In your first draft, you don't need to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Get your thoughts down. Rewriting and editing are valuable tools, and the process of re-writing may cause you to pick up on genealogical clues that were not originally noticed.

But I Don't Have Much on My Ancestor!
There are many of us in that situation. Writing is a good way to uncover "new" leads, and new leads are most frequently needed on individuals for whom we have little information. Writing up these ancestor's tales, even if they are short, may help us utilize new sources or make connections and conclusions we were unable to make before. Just creating your ancestor's chronology and acquaintance chart may get your research jumpstarted.

What Else Will the Story Do for Me?
You may also wish to share what you have written with other researchers. Keep in mind that once you publish the information (whether in print or electronic media), anyone who sees it can use the facts you have included in your write-up. You may wish to simply submit a copy of your manuscript to a local historical or genealogical society, which may even be interested in publishing it in a quarterly journal. In this way, you have preserved the information and created the potential for contacting new family members and relatives. If the journal is received by the Allen County Public Library, your article will be indexed in the Periodical Source Index, or PERSI, as it is more commonly referred to (available to Ancestry.com subscribers and for purchase on CD-ROM). PERSI allows those who do not subscribe to various journals to learn of the article's existence.

One Last Advantage
Writing one ancestor's biography is significantly smaller than writing an entire family history. It may be a more manageable task and one that you are able to actually "complete." While research on most ancestors is never "finished," the amount of material on one family member is easier to synthesize than is the information on five generations of family members.

And???
After you've written your ancestor's biography, consider writing your own. After all, most of us would dearly love to have just one page written by one of our long-since-dead relatives!

Michael John Neill, is the Course I Coordinator at the Genealogical Institute of Mid America (GIMA) held annually in Springfield, Illinois, and is also on the faculty of Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois. Michael is the Web columnist for the FGS FORUM and is on the editorial board of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly. He conducts seminars and lectures on a wide variety of genealogical and computer topics and contributes to several genealogical publications, including Ancestry Magazine and Genealogical Computing..

© Copyright 2000, MyFamily.com.

Used by the author on his website with permission