RLP 141: Writing Compelling Family History Stories with Annette Gendler

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 141, Writing Compelling Family History Stories. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (45s):
And welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hey Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (50s):
I’m doing great. How about you? What have you been working on?

Diana (53s):
I’ve just been getting started on a client project, working on steady group projects. And I have been reading a really interesting new book and we’ve got the author, Annette Gendler here to talk with us about that today. And it’s called How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History. We love writing and as well as writing research reports and commenting on the records, we also love to write stories about our ancestors, so I’m so excited to talk to Annette. Hi, Annette.

Annette Gendler (1m 24s):
[inaudible]

Nicole (1m 25s):
You’re so welcome. So let me just give a little bit of an intro. I’m just going to read the little snippet on the back of Annette’s book to introduce her to everyone.

Diana (1m 37s):
And then we’ll let her talk a little bit about what she does. Annette is the author of Jumping Over Shadows, the Memoir of a German Jewish Love that Overcame the Legacy of the Holocaust. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Tablet Magazine, Bella Grace, and Gaveller among others. She lives with her husband and three children in Chicago. I just wanted to ask you what inspired this book? this book came out in 2019, How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History, so maybe you can just tell us a little bit about what you do and your inspiration for writing the book.

Annette Gendler (2m 10s):
I’ve been teaching memoir writing at StoryStudio Chicago since 2006, for the, I want to say the last 10 plus years I’ve been teaching their advanced memoir workshop, which I sort of created. And it’s all people who are very interested, very dedicated to writing them. Now a memoir doesn’t necessarily have to be about family history, but I have found that that is what I am most interested in myself before I even started teaching. I was working on my MFA and my MFA thesis project was a collection of essays on my father’s family, from the, what is now the Czech Republic.

Annette Gendler (2m 52s):
I am, that really stemmed from a visit to their hometown in 2002. You know, I’d never been there before, and I just felt many undercurrents in that place. I felt so connected and I knew milestones of the family history, but I never really, you know, I could not have retold it. Let’s put it that way. Like, I didn’t know all the details and how have people had felt about it. So, thankfully, my grandfather was a writer. He was, he was a poet and he wrote drama, audio drama for what was then the German radio station in Prague. So he was a really good writer. And thankfully he sat down in the late fifties to write his memoirs.

Annette Gendler (3m 33s):
And there’s a chapter in there called My Sister. And that really retells the story of her sister who married a Jewish man before World War II. And that plunged the family into all kinds of complications once the Nazis took over their hometown. And then I ended up marrying a Jewish man in Germany and I converted. And so history repeated itself. I was very aware of that, but I had never really put all the pieces together in a diligent way. And so after that trip, I asked my sister to take out my grandfather’s memoirs and actually sat down and read them.

Annette Gendler (4m 13s):
You know, it’s not a book-length manuscript. And the chapter about his sister that detailed, what I was looking at was 15 type pages. So it was very dense, but very informative. And so for my master’s thesis, I sort of extrapolated and wrote about different aspects of that, that interested me and that I know impacted my life. And so I was sort of launched on that process of making something of my own family history. And so the product of that based on my master’s pro project became jumping overshadows because one of my masters advisors said, well, you know, the story of the past is all fine and good, but nobody’s really going to care about that unless you show, how did it impact the present based on that experience of writing my memoir based on a large part of family history and looking at how that resonated in my own life and how the family history influenced my own decisions.

Annette Gendler (5m 13s):
I started putting together a workshop after Jumping Over Shadows came out four years ago, sort of helping people do exactly what I had done. You know, how to convert family history into a compelling story. And because I’ve been teaching for a long time, I ended up giving this workshop and all kinds of writing festivals and different conferences in different places around the world. And I got the question one too many times, do you have any materials based on this? I can’t attend your workshop, but do you have any notes to share? And so I caught that question one too many times, and I thought to myself, there’s a book there. I should put that together.

Annette Gendler (5m 53s):
So that’s what in the end became How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History. It was more of a challenge than you would think it was because my workshops are very interactive and they, I certainly have a syllabus, but to translate the very interactive conversations and discussions I have with my students into a book, books are very linear. That was actually a greater challenge than I thought it would be.

Diana (6m 19s):
I think that happens so often that we start with our own experiences. Then we start teaching others and then we decide to get it out there so the public can use it. And I have been reading your book and I love how it’s got so much detail in it, but yet it’s simple and it’s accessible. And I really love how you have prompts through it to get you thinking. So I commend you on a job well done. It’s really exciting to have another resource to use when writing our own family stories.

Annette Gendler (6m 52s):
Thank You.

Nicole (6m 52s):
Let’s talk a little bit more about this idea of writing stories based on our family history while applying it to ourselves now to make it more meaningful in the present. So tell us more about why you think that idea is important.

Annette Gendler (7m 10s):
Family history really shapes who we are, right? Like, and it’s not just what happened in the past. It’s also how it impacted the people who raised us when it could be something that happened to your great-grandparents, let’s say they made the decision to immigrate from Poland to the United States. Well, that’s a momentous shift in the family history. You are a different person than you would have been had your family stayed there and your experiences would have been very different. So I think that understanding family history helps us understand who we are. So in the example of my family, know my grandparents and my father, my father was 13 at the time, were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II, when all people of German heritage, whether they had been Nazi supporters or not, or expelled from the Eastern territories that changed the whole trajectory of our family.

Annette Gendler (8m 5s):
You know, my family suddenly they became refugees in what would then be, I think the Federal Republic of Germany? I ended up being in a generation that didn’t have that rootedness that my grandparents have had. And my father ended up shipping off to the United States to get a PhD, met my mom, married an American. So the generation of myself and my siblings, you know, we, we grew up with two passports, two languages. So we were everything but rooted. But I think that understanding what happened in the past and how the people that raised us were shaped by it and the decisions that they made really, really makes us who we are.

Annette Gendler (8m 45s):
And so I think family history is a great tool in helping us understand who we are, which is, I think something that any halfway introspective person spends their lifetime doing. And then the other thing is that I do think that family also helps us live our lives. As an example, I seem to have inherited my grandmother’s hips. All right. Which means I have a nice figure, but it also means as I, as I aged my hips started deteriorating and I didn’t really realize that whole connection until I started having hip problems. And one of the surgeons he asked me, is there any family history of any problems? And first I said, no, cause my parents don’t have it.

Annette Gendler (9m 26s):
And then I remember Grandma had two hip replacements in the seventies. Oh boy. You know, and then I thought about it and I’m like, I’m shaped like her. I don’t have my mother’s figure, I have hers. So that’s one thing to know where that history comes from, but what I was more interested in, how did she manage with that? You know? And I wish I could ask her now and be like, when did you make the decisions to do those hip replacements? How did you deal with the pain? That was my main interest. You know, how did you live with that? How did you manage through your days? And so I think that just so many examples of what we inherited has a big impact on our lives and the people that came before us could really help us.

Annette Gendler (10m 8s):
And I think the current pandemic is another great example, you know, where we sort of turn to our forebears and look at how did they manage through the Spanish flu? And we wish, you know, someone in 1920 had kept a journal of what everyday life was like. And maybe that would have given us some insight on how to deal with, with the current upheaval.

Nicole (10m 30s):
Yes. I loved your discussion of the hip problems. And I think knowing the traits we inherit from our forebearers is very fascinating and it does bring up curiosity about how they dealt with it. So that’s a really compelling reason to learn more about our family history, especially while our parents and grandparents are here and we can talk to them and, and ask them questions.

Annette Gendler (10m 54s):
Right? Yeah. You know, my grandmother lived a very long life for her generation, she died when I was 29, but unfortunately a lot of things happened much later, you know, I’m, I’m pushing 60 now. And so my grandmother is not going to be around anymore and I can’t ask her. So that’s, I think why it is so, so wonderful. If someone took the time to write a diary, to write letters that we can turn back to and look at and be like, how did they deal with this problem that I’m facing?

Diana (11m 24s):
I love that idea that we can turn to their diaries and letters because we know our parents, our grandparents, generally through the eyes of a child or, you know, a younger adult. And as we age and we come across similar situations to what they experienced, maybe we can gain some strength or understanding through those resources. So I, and that’s a great perspective. Well, a lot of our listeners are researchers. I would say all of our, our listeners are researchers. And I think a big question is how to turn our research, all this work that we’re gathering on facts and dates and what happened to our ancestors, how to actually turn that into a story.

Diana (12m 11s):
So what do you think is the greatest challenge in doing that?

Annette Gendler (12m 14s):
I have found that the greatest challenge, even if you’re not a researcher, is to understand what a story is and what makes an interesting story in literary terms. It’s the easiest to think about story. If you think about how a movie is structured or when you go to the theater. So a story takes place in a specific time. So, you know, date, year, season, you need a specific place. So when you think about it, you’re going through the theater, you see the stage, right? And everything that happens in that story takes place on that stage. You might have slightly different settings, you might move, but still, you know, you have a certain place in time.

Annette Gendler (12m 56s):
You need characters, you know, you need at least one person, usually sometimes two that are interacting that become more than just puppets. You know that where we get a little bit more insight into how they think what their emotions are, what their challenges are. And then you need an inciting incident. You know, why are you telling the stories? What’s the crucial thing that happened that you feel you need to share this. And then as I mentioned, you need some action. So that usually it’s the characters interacting. And even if it’s just them talking to each other, and then most importantly, when you have all those pieces in place, there needs to be some kind of transformation, some kind of change, right. And that can be a small realization.

Annette Gendler (13m 38s):
So not all stories have to be big drama, of course many are, but you know, it can just be a small realization that you had and that you sort of put into a story. So those are the components that make a story. And so as a writer, the challenge is to learn how to sift through all the research material that you have. And then you have to start filling in, okay, I know this happened. I know it was important. I happen to know what he thought me, because it’s based on a letter that he wrote. But if you use a letter, for instance, letters tend to be pretty one dimensional, right? In the sense that one person’s writing to another person and the other person usually knows a lot of contexts, right?

Annette Gendler (14m 21s):
They know where the letter writer lives. They know that person’s circumstances. So those are the kinds of things that when you tell the story for an audience that doesn’t know the letter writer you are basing your story on, then you need to fill in all that context that doesn’t need to be all in description because that can get pretty boring. And so quite often you will lose readers because those descriptive paragraphs are boring because why would you care? So it’s better to start with the action and get the reader interested in what’s happening and then filling in the backstory as the story goes along with just very minute, brush strokes is usually what works.

Annette Gendler (15m 1s):
So there’s a certain art obviously, and that’s what my book really tries to help people with, you know, understand how to take the material that you have to figure out which stories are worth while telling, and then learning the different tools and employing the different tools to actually create a story that then people will want to keep telling.

Diana (15m 23s):
So in your experience, as you have worked with so many people, I am just guessing it’s probably hundreds, if not thousands of people and writing their family history, what do you think makes the most interesting material for grabbing that readers interest in and keeping them interested?

Annette Gendler (15m 43s):
So that, that goes back to my thesis advisors advice, which was look at where the past has an impact on the present. So as a very simple example, you serve the same fruit cake every Christmas, Great Aunt Molly’s recipe. So here you have a connection between the past great aunt Molly and the fruitcake recipe that you still serve because everybody likes a fruitcake, but maybe they don’t like it, but there’s a connection there to the past. And so that’s an opening to write a story about great aunt Molly, who was this person, you know, what do we know about her? Give us the background of that fruitcake.

Annette Gendler (16m 24s):
And there you have a story from the past an ancestor, a great aunt Molly that we would be interested in because what she did still has an impact on we are and what we’re doing, because we’re still making that fruit cake every year. That to me is sort of the sifting device that I recommend to people is, what are you still doing? Or where are you living? You know, maybe it’s a house you inherited at that, that you’re still living in that belong to your grandparents. Something like that, a connection between the past and the present. Those are the most interesting stories. And those are the stories that are really the most worthwhile telling.

Diana (17m 1s):
I love that, what you said about look for the connections from the past to the present. I think sometimes we don’t realize we have those connections, you know like the story with the fruitcake. And so we may have to really look around and be thinking of what we are doing in the present that comes from the past. So that’s a great idea. And I also liked what you said at the beginning about your family coming from Europe to the United States and how that was a major impact. Sometimes they’re so obvious, like that’s an obvious, huge change for your family, but then some of us, our ancestors have been here for a couple of hundred years and we don’t really have that immigrant story.

Diana (17m 42s):
So we’ve got to look at something else in our past to find that transformative stories for our own family history. So really interesting to think about what we can find to write about in our family history. Right?

Annette Gendler (17m 56s):
I can give you a very mundane example. 12 years ago, we bought property in Northwest Indiana. And one of the first things we bought was a tractor because we realized you can’t really have a big piece of land without a tractor. And so we got this tractor and as we’re sort of, you know, learning how to use this thing, my husband says to me, we have that tractor because of your grandfather. And I looked at him like, what do you mean? And he said, well, you used to work on a tractor with your grandfather. So for you, it was completely natural that we needed to buy a tractor. And so that stuck with me, wow, I never saw that connection. And then I realized totally true.

Annette Gendler (18m 36s):
I mean, I only really spent one vacation because I grew up in Germany and my mom’s parents lived in Michigan, but I really only spent one long Easter vacation, 3weeks on my grandparents, farm is a bit of a misnomer because they really didn’t farm, but it was a big country property and they were building an A-frame house and they had a tractor and, you know, we were there in early spring. And so my grandfather was out all the time working on this tractor and he took me along. And so I have memories of pulling stumps out of the wood with that tractor and feeling awesome sitting on the, on the stoop there on the wheel. So there was a connection of, you know, my, my American grandfather who sadly died two years after that visit whom I didn’t have that much interaction with, but he was a connection to, to what I was doing in my life and how it sort of was very natural for me to, yeah, you have country property, you get a tractor.

Annette Gendler (19m 33s):
And then you work in the woods and you pull stuff out of the woods and you work with the trees, et cetera. So I wrote that story of that connection and how that sort of dawned on me. So it can be every day life type of things

Diana (19m 46s):
That gives us all hope that we can all find something to write about.

Annette Gendler (19m 49s):
For sure. Once you start looking, you’ll find way more than you ever thought there was.

Nicole (19m 53s):
Yeah, it sounds like it. So what tips do you have for people who maybe don’t know where to start with writing their family history?

Annette Gendler (19m 60s):
So I think the most important thing is to start small because it can be quite overwhelming, particularly when you’ve done a lot of research, you have so much material and you start small, you know, it takes something and objects are great for that. So, you know, if you have a, a vase that you inherited from your grandmother, write the story about your vase. I have a student who I posed the prompt, you know, write about a family heirloom. And he wrote about a tea cart that his mother had inherited that ended up being this whole family genealogy story, almost, just based around that tea cart. So that also gives you some focus and you can package a lot of family connections around that one object that keeps it interesting and focused.

Annette Gendler (20m 42s):
The other thing is that something is better than nothing. So write something, you know, don’t feel like you have to write a polished story, you know, going back to the diaries and the letters and our day and age, you know, we don’t write letters anymore. There’s very little physical evidence of our lives, unless we take the trouble to, for instance, save and print out a long WhatsApp exchange or a series of emails or something like that. So I think that in our very digital age, it’s, it’s important to take some time and, and organize those materials and anything you do that’ll make the family history or your life and your experiences more accessible to the next generation, I think is really, really useful.

Nicole (21m 25s):
What a good idea to just start small and to just do something, to make that family history accessible.

Annette Gendler (21m 31s):
Yeah. I mean, my grandmother didn’t really write much, for instance, she was a great storyteller. So there, there was a lot that I had to rely on my own memory of what she had told me, but she only wrote, handwritten, which is another challenge because you have to be able to read it, but she had written about 20 pages of her childhood. A lot of it was uninteresting to me, but on a, on a subsequent visit to the Czech Republic, my sister and I went to visit the family mill, which is now abandoned and ruined, but in those 20 pages or so that she had written, she had written about what summers had been like at that mill. And that gave us information about the area. And she was, she talked about a hill that she would always run to.

Annette Gendler (22m 15s):
It had like a hundred steps leading up to a chapel and that’s through there. So that was a beautiful way of allowing us, my sister and me in this case to connect to her childhood and how she had perceived this landscape landscape still there. So we can sort of step into the past almost. So anything that you can do to capture what you went through, even if it’s just a photo album will be really, really valuable to someone in the future. I can guarantee that.

Diana (22m 45s):
I think a lot of our listeners can really relate to letters. I know I just brought home a few boxes from my mother’s estate and what do we do with the letters to me that is sort of an overwhelming thing letters and the journals and diaries, there can be so much information in there. So any ideas for us?

Annette Gendler (23m 9s):
Yeah. I agree. Letters are a treasure trove, but also a huge challenge. So the first thing I would recommend is to sit down and re type those letters, and that serves a couple of purposes. First of all, if you retype someone else’s writing, you get into their head because you’re mimicking their voice writing the way they wrote. And I think that helps you a lot to understand what their emotions were because you sort of put yourself into the shoes of actually producing that text rather than reading it as a recipient. So I think that helps a lot. Secondly, obviously you’re also providing a service to whoever else would, might, want read those letters because handwriting, even though it’s wonderful to preserve it, and there’s so much character in a handwritten letter, it’s still a huge challenge because the next generation has to be able to read it.

Annette Gendler (23m 57s):
So, and then I think the next step, if you wanted to do something with that letter is to start filling out and creating the letter writer and the recipient as characters and figuring out what’s the interaction. Why are they writing the letters? What is the content of the letter? And that’ll give you something to work with. You know, I based the most pivotal chapter of Jumping Over Shadows on a letter that my grandfather wrote about the actual deportation experience. In his memoirs he never wrote about the most pivotal experience in the family’s life. Subsequently I found this letter that he had thankfully typed and sent to what I think were a circle of friends, because it wasn’t an onion skin copy that I have, you know, it gave me the blow by blow of what had happened, but it didn’t give me the broad historical context that where people mentioned, obviously that I didn’t know.

Annette Gendler (24m 54s):
So that’s where your research skills come in. Cause then you have to start filling out the context to actually create that story. You know, I did archival research and, or like looking up the weather report, cause I knew exactly the date of when that deportation happened. And nowadays, you know, it’s very easy to provide that physical and more sensual context, create the story that then will be engaging for a reader.

Diana (25m 20s):
I really love that. You talk about discovering the connection between the letter writer and the letter recipient. That is something I had not really considered their relationship and why the letters being written. How does a really interesting facet of thinking about figuring out a story from a letter? Love that. Yeah.

Nicole (25m 42s):
And what should we do if we have a situation where we just don’t know very much about an ancestor, there isn’t that much information. Do you have any tips for how to go about that?

Annette Gendler (25m 52s):
Yeah. So people come across that a lot, including me. And there’s often an ancestor who you’re really intrigued by, but you just have very sparse information. So in that case, you really want to write about that person. So I would make the discovery and your own research, your, your quest into figuring out what you can’t figure out and also sharing why you’re interested in that person. You know, cause that gives the story energy. People always say, why am I bothering? Why am I reading this? So if you share that with your reader, then they will care. The other way to go about this is to write historical fiction. I think a lot of historical fiction comes from this very conundrum that you find an interesting story in your own family’s past or someone else’s past that you just find so compelling and intriguing, but the material is too sparse to write a proper biography or a proper memoir.

Annette Gendler (26m 49s):
And so you read historical fiction, you know, then that’ll be a story based on a true story, but a great idea. So many of us have the same problems who knows a great universality in all the frustrations and all the joys that come with researching your family history. If you share that a, you might give people ideas of research that you’ve done, that they maybe didn’t think about, but at the very least, you know, like, oh, I’m not alone with this just to share and connect with like-minded soul.

Diana (27m 20s):
Those are such great ideas. Well, I know that there are probably a lot of people wondering about the family secrets because inevitably as we researched the family, read the letters, the diaries, the journals discover things in documents or newspapers, we’re going to find some family secrets and things that maybe just were hushed up in the past. And we don’t talk about those. How do we deal with that?

Annette Gendler (27m 47s):
When you stumble across a secret? I think there are a couple of things to consider. First of all, you have to ask yourself, why was this kept a secret? And they’re usually at least in my family, they usually very compelling reasons, often, you know, due to the political situation. And so you have to think about whether a, it is safe to add that secret. But secondly, I think that in airing secrets, I think we have to sort of reign ourselves in a little bit because it’s obviously very exciting and the first impetus is to, you know, go around and share it. But I, I think it behooves us to question that a little bit and look at what our own motivations are to airing it.

Annette Gendler (28m 29s):
You know, is it just sort of the, the gossipy side that we all have? Is the relative still alive, you know, and if they are, you really have to consider the ramifications of spilling the beans on them. If you have a good relationship with them, you might want to talk to them about it, but maybe it’s not your place. You, you might want to mention it to someone who’s closer to them again, be careful, you know, because I think that family secrets sometimes have their reason. And you have to sort of, I mean recently, you know, with, with all the DNA research that has, you know, uncovered so many family connections, people didn’t know about and that can really, really upset the whole equilibrium in the family.

Annette Gendler (29m 11s):
And so I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. I’m just saying that you should be very circumspect about it. And the other thing goes back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, does it really help anyone? You know, is it just sort of sensationalism on the discoverer’s part or does it inform the family of something that, you know, would help them understand themselves better? That would release some tension that would explain, you know, something that before was, was a huge puzzle to everyone. So, so those are the things that I would caution everyone to think about before you go about spilling them.

Diana (29m 52s):
Those are two really good things to think about. I like the idea of thinking of what would be the importance of telling the secret, because a lot of times those things were a secret because of cultural ways of looking at things. But sometimes there are real emotional things that come down in the family that can cause a lot of issues or damaged and families and knowing past situations can help people to get a grasp on why that happened in their family and come to some understanding. So, so good to step back and really consider why you’d want to talk about this and how it could be part of healing.

Diana (30m 34s):
We’ve seen a lot of healing when some of these things are discovered and give some understanding about why grandpa was like, grandpa was, you know, so good food for thought there,

Annette Gendler (30m 46s):
Right? And I think it also, it helps if it’s done in a very considered way, it also helps us avoid the same mistakes. You know, it, it helps the family get out of whatever roundabout they might’ve been traveling.

Diana (30m 60s):
I completely agree. That’s so fascinating. Let’s just kind of end up this really interesting podcast with one final question. So your book has got so many tips. I love that I have this and I can use this as reference, but aside from purchasing your book and reading it, which I hope our listeners will do, what tips do you have in kind of our final closing moments here, whether you’re a genealogist or consider yourself one, someone who’d want to write a memoir based on family history.

Annette Gendler (31m 34s):
So my main recommendation would be to read memoirs that have done exactly what you were trying to do, try to find memoirs that deal with the same time period with the same country, with the same conundrum. In the back of the book, there’s a list of, for further reading. And those are just books you know, that I have read that I thought were really, really masterfully done, really well done because I think when you set about writing about family history, there’s so many challenges that you come across because families are so complex and people can always contact me through my website. I have read a lot of books in that direction.

Annette Gendler (32m 15s):
And so I’m happy to try to give recommendations if people are looking for books to read, but I think it just helps to see how someone else did that. And it gives you a model not only how to go about that project, but also how to tell that kind of a story

Diana (32m 31s):
That is a fabulous tip. So glad you mentioned that can read it and think, wow, I really like how they told that in the first person or I didn’t like that. You know, so many different things that you could think of as you’re reading it. So thank you. That is, that is a great tip. Well, it has just been a pleasure. Annette, talking with you and learning from your experience, you have worked with so many people and in doing your workshop and writing the book, I think you’ve got some great helps for anyone who’s interested to get started with writing. And I just want to go back to one of the things you said at the right at the beginning that we should just start small. We don’t have to write the big 500 page book.

Diana (33m 13s):
We can just write a little story and give that to everybody in the family for a Christmas present, right? We can do something small to get started.

Annette Gendler (33m 21s):
Once you start small, if then you have one story, not only do we have an end product that you can share, it also teaches you how to go about this. And once you start, you’ll start having other ideas and then you become empowered on this path. And next thing you know, you have 10, 12 stories and they might coalesce around an area or a person, and then you have a book. So that’s how you do that. That’s how you do that.

Diana (33m 46s):
Oh, that’s right. That is right. That’s so great. I just so appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. And I hope everyone listening picked up some tips. I don’t know how you couldn’t pick up some great tips from, from this interview. So thank you again, Annette. And I hope that all of our listeners will go and write something. So everyone have a great week. And thank you so much. I hope so too.

Annette Gendler (34m 12s):
Thanks for having me. Bye.

Diana (34m 15s):
Thank you. Bye-bye

Nicole (34m 51s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.