Review of Leaving a Legacy: Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book

Do you have a goal to write family history books to preserve your research and have something tangible to share with your family? Perhaps you’ve been intimidated by the many details and experience needed to create something worth sharing. If so, Rebecca Shamblin’s new book, Leaving a Legacy: Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book, might be the resource you need to make your goal a reality. Learn more about the author and book at her website, rebeccashamblin.com.

Rebecca has taken the lessons she learned (some the hard way) in creating many family history books and given us a road map for success. In the introduction, she provides a summary of the process. Each of the following is a phase in the book.

1. Collect and organize your research using genealogy software.
2. Write illustrated biographies for each couple.
3. Produce a polished final document.
4. Get your book professionally printed.
5. Share your masterpiece.

I especially appreciate Rebeeca’s perspective that, at some point, we need to stop researching and start writing. Overcoming our fear that our research isn’t complete enough is important. Our research likely is never finished, but if we get a book written, we can always publish a 2nd edition with new information.

Phase 1: Planning

Putting adequate thought into the book will ensure we don’t waste time. Leaving a Legacy provides several items to consider, beginning with choosing the subject(s) of the book. Writing family history can take many forms, and we’ll need to specify how many ancestors or generations a book will include.

Other important choices to make in planning are technical. Leaving a Legacy focuses on using Family Tree Maker, Family Book Creator, and Microsoft Word to create the book. However, the author provides plenty of principles involved in the book creation that you can certainly transfer to other genealogy and word processing software. Rebecca clearly explains her choice of software, and after reading Leaving a Legacy, I would recommend using her suggestions. The screenshots and detailed information for the programs make this book valuable. I use Microsoft Word for my research reports and learned some great tricks and tools for getting Word to behave how I want it to.

Phase 2: Research

This section discusses the importance of having a research plan to ensure you have the facts straight about your ancestors. Part of this section also suggests protocols for naming files and using your genealogy software to organize documents. Much time is devoted to Family Tree Maker and how best to use its features. You’ll also learn tips for interviewing living relatives and finding and scanning photographs.

Phase 3: Writing

In phase 3, we learn a process for putting our research into writing. Once you have your research in Family Tree Maker, the plugin, Family Book Creator, will provide the foundation of the book. You’ll then be able to edit and add historical context. I appreciated the section on dealing with difficult subjects and determining the truth. Since our hope is to share our research, we must carefully approach our ancestor’s lives.

Leaving a Legacy provides valuable advice for working with images—editing, scanning, and adding them to the book. The sections on adding captions and anchoring an image caught my attention as I use these tools in Word for my research reports.

Your book will need a table of contents and an index, both topics covered in depth. The author explains how to use Word’s capabilities to automate these and how to create endnotes to document your research throughout the book. Ample screenshots and images illustrate each concept.

Phase 4: Printing

Once the book is created and formatted, the next step is printing, and Leaving a Legacy walks you through the steps. The author prefers LuLu.com and explains why. This section details exporting the manuscript for print and the settings to use. Creating a cover for the book is also discussed, as well as final editing.

I appreciated the details of how to add a background to all pages if you want your book to have a certain look beyond white paper. There are a lot of choices involved in the printing phase, and Leaving a Legacy walks you through creating a cover and choosing paper and bindings.

Important to any book is the editing/proofing phase, and I agree with the author’s recommendation to order a proof copy to review the printed version. Often, our eye skips over errors on our computer screen, but in print, that same error is glaring.

Phase 5: Distribution

What about pricing our book and copyright? The author covers both topics. She also gives ideas for contacting family members, donating to archives, and selling on your website.

If you’re ready to start turning your research into a book, Leaving a Legacy can give you the confidence to tackle the technology side.

Best of luck in all your genealogical endeavors!