Nicole and Diana interview Rebecca Shamblin, genealogist, speaker, author, and blogger, about turning your family tree into a book. Rebecca gives an overview of her two books, “Leaving a Legacy: Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book” and “Building a Legacy: A Guide to Combining Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker.”
The hosts and Rebecca discuss the five phases of creating a family history book: planning, researching, writing, printing, and distribution. They talk about choosing a subject and the technical aspects of the book in the planning phase. In the research phase, they cover using Family Tree Maker and interviewing relatives. For the writing phase, they discuss using the Family Book Creator plugin and its features, such as adding images and creating a table of contents. In the printing phase, they talk about using Lulu.com and the choices involved in printing. For the distribution phase, they cover pricing, copyright, and selling the book. Listeners will learn how to turn their family tree into a family book.
This summary was generated by Google Gemini.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 343, turn Your Family Tree into a Book with Rebecca Shamblin. 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 authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.
Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone and Welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today?
Nicole (51s):
I’m doing really well. How are you? And What are you working on lately?
Diana (55s):
I am working on RootsTech presentations and I have one that’s brand new that will be fun, which is all about artificial intelligence and locality guides. It’s for the advanced track and so I am having fun thinking of how to show people how best to use artificial intelligence for making a locality guide. So it should be fun. How about you?
Nicole (1m 16s):
I haven’t really started making my syllabi, but they’re topics that I’ve done presentations on before, so I’m hoping that it won’t be too difficult to put everything together and I’m really looking forward to putting together the artificial intelligence information and prompts that I’ve learned and like to use. So it will be a fun conference to talk about that.
Diana (1m 38s):
It will be, you know, last year we had a few talks on artificial intelligence, but this year I think they’re going to be a lot and I think it’s exciting. It’s so fun to have a brand new tool, something new for us to talk about and to discover, help us to make more progress on our research. So I’m looking forward to attending some of those classes I hope as well.
Nicole (2m 2s):
Absolutely. Well this month our next Research Like a Pro webinar is going to be Tuesday, February 18th and it will be about Texas Migration Patterns and DNA Connect Lucinda Wright Rinker to Her Father, presented by Cathy Duncan. We’re really looking forward to this. She’ll talk about Texas, tax Records, court, land, all these wonderful record types and of course DNA. And please register to join us if you haven’t already registered for our webinar series. Then of course our upcoming conferences, RootsTech, we already mentioned March 6th through 8th, and then the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference May 23rd through 26th and we are looking forward to seeing many of you there as well.
Diana (2m 46s):
Thank you for those. Well, today we’re excited to have a guest on and this is Rebecca Shamblin. Did I say that right, Rebecca? Welcome.
Rebecca Shamblin (2m 55s):
Yes, you did. Hello. Thank you.
Diana (2m 57s):
We, we always like to make sure we can pronounce our, our guest names correctly. So Rebecca is a Genealogist, a speaker, an author, a blog and has courses. So we are excited to have her come on as an expert in turning your family tree into a family book. But first of all, Rebecca, can you just tell us a little bit, how did you get started as a Genealogist and this whole idea of creating a book?
Rebecca Shamblin (3m 23s):
Yeah, I actually started about 20 years ago. We were coming up on a family reunion and my mother literally has about 50 1st cousins and I just wanted to understand who everybody was so that I could speak confidently when I met them. And so I sat down to make a little tree and things kind of got outta hand and 20 years later, here we are.
Diana (3m 44s):
That sounds kind of like our story. You became intrigued and addicted to it as well. So I think all ll just kind of share that story of getting excited about it. Well you have published two books, one is Leaving a Legacy: Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book, and the other is Building a Legacy: a Guide to combining Ancestry.com with Family Tree Maker. So can you just give us a quick overview of both books and then we’ll dive into how we do this?
Rebecca Shamblin (4m 14s):
Absolutely. So during the Pandemic I found myself really diving deep into my genealogy and wanting to produce something more, wanting to do something more than just having it on my computer and wanting to leave something behind. And so I wrote my first family history book about the ancestry of my great-grandfather and ended up writing a second book as well for my great-grandmother. And when I shared them online, people got pretty excited. It was a little something new and they kept asking how I did it and I ended up doing a Zoom and a blog post and eventually I wrote an entire book. So this first book, Leaving a Legacy, walks people through my full process from planning the book to researching and collecting content, to actually doing the writing and then getting it printed and finally getting it out into the world because we don’t want our family trees to just be stuck on our computers, we want them on bookshelves and we want them on other people’s bookshelves as well.
Rebecca Shamblin (5m 6s):
My second book, Building a Legacy, is not actually about writing a family book at all, it’s about a particular feature of Family Tree Maker, which is the genealogy software that I use and that feature is called Web Search and it’s a way to search Ancestry.com records from within a Family Tree Maker, which has a very handy dandy button to merge records directly into your tree and it saves so much time and effort and as I was teaching about my first book, I found out so many people who didn’t even know about this feature at all and I thought this is so extremely useful, we need to get this out into the world. So that’s why I ended up writing my second book.
Diana (5m 44s):
Oh that’s great. Well I use Family Tree Maker and I’m excited to do this discussion because I have not created a book from my Family Tree Maker, nor do I use Ancestry from within Family Tree Maker. I just do my tree on Ancestry. So I’m excited to kinda dig in and learn a little bit more about this. So this is perfect timing.
Rebecca Shamblin (6m 7s):
Wonderful. I remember the day I found web search, I was actually kind of angry because I realized how much time I had been wasting toggling back and forth between them. So I’m excited for you, you have fun things on the horizon.
Nicole (6m 21s):
Well let’s talk about when you’re planning to write a family history book, kind of what we need to consider. Can you tell us about that?
Rebecca Shamblin (6m 29s):
Absolutely. Some of the things I recommend considering is what kind of book you’re going to write. Are you writing about ancestors or about descendants or a mix of both? I tend to write about ancestors because I’m more interested in the older stories. A really important decision is who your root person is going to be. So some people assume it should be themselves. I’m writing this book, this should be about my ancestors. But that’s actually a really big task to take on, especially for your first book. And if you think about it, let’s say I choose myself as the root of my book and I get started and I write about all of my father’s ancestors. I’m still only halfway done with this book. I have another half to go to write about my mother’s.
Rebecca Shamblin (7m 11s):
If I had chosen my dad as the root person, I would be done. And you can take this farther. If I had chosen my grandfather as the root person, that would’ve been a quarter of the work as choosing myself. And so each time you go back a generation, you’re cutting your workload in half, which makes the project so much more achievable and manageable and honestly it’s just so much more motivating to get something done and have something on your shelf and that helps give you the energy and the the structure that you need to continue. So my ultimate goal is eight books, one for each great-grandparent. I’ve got two down working on number three and if I had made myself my root person, I think I would still be toiling away.
Rebecca Shamblin (7m 54s):
So I think that’s one of the most important decisions to make as well as how many generations to cover. So I usually write biographies for the first three generations back and then I have some basic data for the fourth and that’s it. It’s really important to draw some guidelines and make sure you are keeping that this project achievable and not too overwhelming.
Nicole (8m 15s):
I love that. It’s so good to consider how you can divide up your work into multiple books and smaller chunks are just so much easier to manage than trying to do everything at once. Absolutely. So great idea.
Diana (8m 27s):
So you mentioned that you use Family Tree Maker. Can you tell us a little bit more just about some of the technical things that we have to be aware of? Why did you choose Family Tree Maker?
Rebecca Shamblin (8m 38s):
Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s one really specific reason I chose it actually, and that is because it has plugins that work with it. So there’s this particular plugin called Family Book Creator that I discovered a few years ago. I knew I wanted to produce a book and I was actually also going to start my family tree entirely over from scratch. I had been working on my tree for 20 years and I had not been particularly careful or dedicated to making sure I had sources for everything and I was validating all the information. So I decided I would start fresh. And so I had a great opportunity to choose new software and I did my research. I’m very much a research person and when I discovered the plugin Family Book Creator, I knew that was the right one for me and it only worked with Family Tree Maker.
Rebecca Shamblin (9m 25s):
So that made that decision very easy for me. If I wanted to use that plugin, I needed to use Family Tree Maker and that’s where I ended up. Plus, I really liked the history, you know, Family Tree Maker has been in the business for a very long time and it’s just a wonderful way to keep control over your data. When you keep your tree solely in an online tree run by a different company, you don’t really have control over it. Anything could happen. And I really love knowing that my tree is safe on my own computer and backed up in other places and it’s always there for me no matter what kind of internet connection I might have.
Diana (10m 0s):
Yes, I think I have preached that same story to many different people. Have your own tree on your own desktop software, but it’s so great because Family Tree Maker does sync with Ancestry and as you talked about, your second book talks all about how to use Ancestry’s tools within Family Tree Maker. So you, you basically get the best of both worlds, right?
Rebecca Shamblin (10m 24s):
Absolutely, yes. So Ancestry is a, is a great source for records and I usually preach pretty hard to use real records and evidence rather than just other people’s trees. I say other people’s trees are very helpful as a finding aid but really look for the records on Ancestry and other places like Family Search. But with Ancestry it’s so simple in Family Tree Maker when you find the record you just hit the merge button and everything is done for you. The the images are saved on your computer and the sources are all put in there and it’s just, it’s such a time saver.
Diana (10m 54s):
So if someone already has a really great tree but they’re over on Roots Magic or, you know, another program, would you recommend that they create a GEDCom and then upload that to Family Tree Maker so they could use Family Book Creator? Because I know a lot of our listeners use other programs.
Rebecca Shamblin (11m 12s):
Yes, that’s the exact advice that I generally give people. Although if your tree is already on Ancestry or a Family Search for that matter, there is a feature in Family Tree Maker that lets you download the tree directly into Family Tree Maker, which is again a time saver. So if you’re on Ancestry already, it’s very simple to start on Family Tree Maker and then you can keep your trees synchronized. So any change that you make on your computer or on Ancestry.com gets reflected back in the other tree. So no matter where you are in the world, you’ve got one tree that’s got consistent information.
Diana (11m 44s):
I love that. So great. Well you’ve kind of hinted a little bit at trying to get the facts correct. So do you have some tips on making sure you’ve got correct information? Because if, obviously if you’re going to be printing this book, you wanna have have accurate facts and that can be kind of a challenge.
Rebecca Shamblin (12m 4s):
Absolutely, yeah. As I mentioned, not relying on other people’s trees I think is really step one, finding primary sources and having good reason to believe the facts that you’re putting in your book. But one thing I often talk about is that the, there really is no one particular truth or correctness, right? All we can do is evaluate information based on what we know already and based on the source and give our best guesses. So especially when you’re working with family, family legends and things like that or somebody’s memoir, it’s really important not to say things like, here is what happened. I say things like, Ralph remembered the family doing this. And so instead of saying no one in 1900 spoke English in the household, I’ll say no one was reported to speak English in the 1900 census ’cause we don’t know what really happened back then.
Rebecca Shamblin (12m 53s):
All we can share is what we found and where we found it and then our best guess is as to how accurate it’s
Diana (13m 1s):
Ooh, I love that. Well you also talk quite a bit in the book about interviewing relatives and photos. So photos can be a big thing, but some tips on those two items.
Rebecca Shamblin (13m 15s):
Yeah, they’re amazing. I was extraordinarily lucky in that I had my great-grandmother with me until 2008. So I had actually gone to interview her, I’d borrowed a camera from my grad school and interviewed her. So I had a lot of firsthand stories from her. And then her sister was actually with us until earlier last year. So I had an amazing trove of firsthand stories to use. And some of the things to keep in mind when you’re interviewing is, one, try to have a plan, have a list of questions with you and I try to sort of generally group them by topic because generally interviews kind of bounce all over the place and if your grandmother suddenly starts telling a story about school, you wanna be able to go with that flow and still make sure you’re hitting everything.
Rebecca Shamblin (13m 58s):
It can be helpful to invite other family members to the interview. So if, you know, I would, my grandfather’s brother, I was interviewing him and his daughter came along and she was fantastic. She was able to prompt him when he didn’t remember certain things or he would say something and then she would say, oh Dad, didn’t you have Scarlet Fever that one time? And he would say, oh yeah. And he would tell me an amazing story. And so she knows his family, his story, his life story and she was able to prompt him in ways that I couldn’t have because I didn’t know. So that was very helpful when doing interviews and definitely record them whenever you can. Video is great obviously, but even audio is really, really helpful. Plus then you have their voice in your head as you’re writing and I think that makes a big difference.
Rebecca Shamblin (14m 40s):
In terms of photos, I’m actually also a professional photographer so photos are incredibly important to me and I find that they’re often the favorite part of the book. When I, whenever I hand my family book to anybody, they immediately start flipping for the photos ’cause that’s, that’s what makes things real for them. You know, we’re researchers, we’re used to seeing names and dates and, and seeing them as real people in our minds, but especially for family members who maybe aren’t Genealogists but would like to read your book photos can really help bridge that gap and bring people to life for them. And in terms of photos, I, if you’re going to take a photo of a photo, I have some tips in the book as well. Make sure you have wonderful soft lighting and you keep your camera directly above the photo and not angled.
Rebecca Shamblin (15m 22s):
Those are two things that can really make sure you’re getting great quality when you are taking photos of a photo. And honestly, photos of a photo have come a long way. I used to scan everything with my scanner and these days I often use my iPhone instead. It’s just faster and easier.
Diana (15m 39s):
I agree. And you actually can get a super great image with this technology that we have with our phones now. But I love that you do have some tips there because sometimes I’ll take a picture and then I’ll realize the angle’s off a little bit and it’s a little skewed so we, we should always be looking to see what the finished product is and redoing it if it doesn’t look quite rightly. Well those are some great tips on interviewing and photos. I love that
Nicole (16m 5s):
It’s so hard to get the right lighting sometimes when I’m trying to photograph something and I have this one place in my room where if I put the item to be photographed right in front of my window there, it gets pretty good lighting and there’s not a lot of shadows from other lights. So I’ll usually do that. But sometimes it feels like a challenge to figure out the best way to do that. And we have one of those light box things that my husband uses for his skateboard business to take pictures of things and put ’em on his website for sale. And you know, sometimes that’s a good option too. Do you ever use something like that?
Rebecca Shamblin (16m 41s):
I actually have one and I don’t use it ’cause most of the time I am on location or I’m at a research center or I’m in somebody’s home. And so honestly, window light is a really great solution for this. It doesn’t have the glare that a lamp can have and it’s very even, yeah, it’s just easier than hauling everything with me. I’m already hauling enough. I think.
Nicole (17m 4s):
So true. So true. When I was visiting the courthouse in Oklahoma recently, I took pictures of everything and the only problem was that I ran out of battery by the end of the day. So my drive home was like barely eking by with the plugin to the rental car. Like, and it wasn’t really charging that fast. So the one thing I learned was to take an extra battery or some other, you know, a portable charger or whatever.
Rebecca Shamblin (17m 25s):
That’s a really good idea and and backing up your results. So once you’re done with that trip, make sure you go home and back it up somewhere on your computer, somewhere on the cloud because you’d hate for all of that to disappear with a tech problem.
Nicole (17m 39s):
Oh, so true. Yeah, I guess I’ll make a plug for Google Photos because that’s what I use and I have it automatically set that anytime I’m connected to Wifi, it automatically backs it up in full resolution and it is, you know, you have to pay for the storage at Google when you have full resolution, but it’s well worth it to me to not have to manually back it up.
Rebecca Shamblin (17m 60s):
Absolutely.
Nicole (17m 60s):
Well these are some great tips on gathering your pictures and interviewing relatives doing the research. Now let’s talk about writing. So this is phase three of the process of creating your family book and you’ve talked about the plugin Family Book Creator. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and how it helps to write the book?
Rebecca Shamblin (18m 22s):
Absolutely. Family Book Creator is a really interesting mix of automation and customization. So it works for so many different kinds of people. If you’re someone who just wants to push a button and have the book created for you, it can do that. It will take all of your data points in Family Tree Maker and turn them into sentences that a human would say and read and actually create the book for you. It produces the structure of the book, it produces small family charts to go with each chapter. It gets everything together. It organizes the family, it organizes the generations, it does so much for you. But the real reason I was so interested is that it also allows you to produce some of your own content. So I like writing illustrated biographies for each couple.
Rebecca Shamblin (19m 4s):
So I use Microsoft Word to do that and I really like having the text next to the pictures. It makes it more like a coffee table book. And I’m a bit of a control freak, so I like controlling the layout of everything on those pages. But I didn’t wanna write the entire book like that. I didn’t wanna have to do everything myself. So Family Book Creator lets me write a chapter like that and then just have it included in the book when Family Book Creator runs, it does all of its automated things and then it includes my chapter as well. So I get the best of both worlds.
Diana (19m 35s):
Well that is really neat and I am looking at your book and I just wanted to mention to everyone listening that Rebecca’s books are really helpful with the technology. Like she, you have given us the specific things to click on within Family Book Creator and what to select. And that’s so helpful because when I have used Family Tree Maker, and I don’t have this plugin, so when I have used Family Tree Maker sometimes I’m not sure what to click on. It’s kind of like a foreign country in there. And so I love that your books are super specific. That is so helpful.
Rebecca Shamblin (20m 14s):
Yes, I definitely have screenshots everywhere and I try to call them out and the, the great thing about Family Book Creator is that its default settings are so strong to begin with. So somebody who knows nothing about it can go in and press a few buttons and just start playing with it. But it’s also powerful enough to let people like me who’ve been using it for a while who really have specific needs go in there and customize everything to my heart’s delight.
Nicole (20m 38s):
That’s so nice. How do the sentences turn out? Are there things that come out wrong and need to be edited or are they pretty good?
Rebecca Shamblin (20m 45s):
Yeah, so the important thing there is how you use Family Tree Maker and specifically the description field. So most facts have a room for a date and a location and a description field. And so using that field consistently is the best way to get good results from the Family Book Creator sentences. For example, let’s say it’s a baptism fact. One person might use the description field to record the name of the church, another person might use the description field to record the name of the priest or the witnesses. Neither is more correct than the other, but the important thing is to do it the same every time so that when it comes time for Family Book Creator to run, you can instruct it and how you want the sentence to be. So you can tell Family Book Creator, I want you to say at Description field, or you can say, say the date and the location period and then description field.
Rebecca Shamblin (21m 35s):
So it works however you work.
Nicole (21m 36s):
Wow, that’s so cool that you can instruct it how you want it to do it. And to me, this is sounding a lot like writing with AI, You know, in some ways because when I write from my research log with AI, I have to do my research log very consistently and then in the prompt I tell it when you get to this column, this is how I want you to use this information in a sentence or paragraph. So it’s very similar.
Rebecca Shamblin (21m 59s):
Yeah, absolutely it is. One of the great things about Family Book Creator is that it actually has a free trial. So if you’re not sure it’s gonna work out for you, you can download it, install it with Family Tree Maker and use it for a full month and really see what the possibilities are and see if it’s a tool that would work for you.
Diana (22m 15s):
Well one of the things I noticed was, well from your book that you shared with me that you can do captions and working with your images, it lets you anchor the images where you want them and add the captions. And I have found that in other programs sometimes that’s such a pain and I’m just guessing that they make it easy for you because if you’ve got pictures, you’re going to want to put those all over the page, you know, in and amongst text.
Rebecca Shamblin (22m 39s):
Yeah, so there’s a couple options for pictures. So if you’re someone like me who wants to control the layout and have them intermixed with the text, it’s Microsoft Word that you would use to add those captions and do the anchoring and move them around the page. But if you don’t wanna go that far and you just wanna use the automatic features of Family Book Creator, it has a photo album feature. So after it takes all of your data points and makes sentences from them, it will have a photo album at the end of each chapter with every image that was attached to the people in that family. And it will include the captions or the descriptions or however you instruct it to work, pulled directly from Family Tree Maker. So it can do all that for you as well.
Diana (23m 17s):
Oh, wonderful. And then I noticed that it also can do a table of contents and index, which sounds fabulous.
Rebecca Shamblin (23m 25s):
Yes, the table of contents is very handy and it’s clickable. So as you are creating it in Word or PDF, you can click and go right to a chapter. The indexes are amazing. You can have an index of locations. So it’s a great way to see how many of my family members lived in this town or this county or this state or this country, and joins them all up together. You can also have an index of people. The Index of Individuals is a great way for someone who is only related to maybe a couple of people in your family. They can immediately check and see which pages their people have been mentioned on and go right to that page. It’s very helpful I think, especially as someone who’s maybe pulling a book off of the shelf at a research center to find out if this is even applicable to their family or not.
Rebecca Shamblin (24m 7s):
And those indexes even have color coding that’s taken from Family Tree Maker, which is very helpful.
Diana (24m 13s):
And I’m noticing we also have an option for citations because you know, as professional Genealogists we’re all about having whatever you’ve written cited. So I’m guessing it works well with that too.
Rebecca Shamblin (24m 27s):
Absolutely, it does all of the citations for you. You have a choice between footnotes and endnotes. For me, I chose endnotes because the primary audience for my book was my grandmother, and she’s not a researcher. She doesn’t really care which census particular fact came from. I wanted that information in the book for other researchers who might come along behind me, but I knew that it wasn’t a priority for her and I also didn’t want it taking up room on each page. Again, I wanted to control my layouts. So I use the EndNote feature in Family Book Creator, but all of those are done for me. And the really cool thing is when I have citations in my narrative biographies that I wrote by hand and did the layout for in Word Family Book creator is able to merge those into the total book.
Rebecca Shamblin (25m 13s):
So the and the citations are all renumbered and the, the pictures are all renumbered when Family Book Creator runs, which means that my individual chapters are just blended so seamlessly into everything. And then Family Book Creator also does a bibliography for you as well. And we know that good research has good support and we want to make sure that our books are credible and that it’s easy for other people to follow in our footsteps and find out more. So citations are key for that.
Diana (25m 39s):
That’s really neat. Thanks for explaining how that works. And I love the integration with Word because I like to write in Word. So this is great to to hear that you can do that. Well now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. The New Year is the perfect time to start or restart your genealogy research with fresh eyes and new goals. Dig even deeper into your family history with Newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive, if you’re a Genealogist, you know old newspapers help you find forgotten stories and fill in the gaps between vital records. That’s where Newspapers.com comes in. A subscription to Newspapers.com gives you access to over 1 billion pages of historical newspapers from across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond.
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Nicole (26m 55s):
Well great. Now that we have talked about preparing, researching, and writing, let’s move on to phase four, which is printing. So tell us about how we can print our books and what program you recommend.
Rebecca Shamblin (27m 8s):
Absolutely. So printing is a really important part of the process because the point behind a lot of this was to get these family histories off of our computers. So you can print at home if you like, but I actually recommend people use something called Print on Demand. And that’s a relatively new technology. It didn’t used to be around, it used to be if you wanted to have your book printed on a real printing press, you had to order a minimum number, 500 or a thousand copies. You know, it was just not reasonable for Genealogists with small families. But nowadays you can have your book printed in a very professional way and you can order as few as a single copy of the book. That just blows my mind. And the, the printing quality is really quite impressive. It feels like a real book. It feels like something you would see on a coffee table or on a bookshelf.
Rebecca Shamblin (27m 52s):
And there are many options out there. I’ve tried several of them. The one that I like the best is called lulu.com, L-U-L-U. They don’t sponsor me or anything, I just think they’re really amazing and the quality is high and the cost is very reasonable. They have a, a cost estimator on the website you can play with, but people are just constantly shocked at how little it costs to have something beautiful created from the work that you’ve done. And it’s a very straightforward website to use in terms of uploading your PDF that you’ve created and then choosing different kinds of covers. And you can even design your cover on their website. They have a cover designer with some templates that makes it very straightforward.
Rebecca Shamblin (28m 34s):
I’ve been using them for years. Another great thing about Print on Demand is that it makes it so easy to share your work. So once you’ve created your book on the lulu.com, it’ll give you a URL that you can share with your family members. And if they wanna go to that URL, they can order a copy of the book themselves. They pay the printers directly, and the printers ship it directly to them, which means that you’re not the middleman. And anyone who’s trying to organize a a group order of anything in the past knows how complicated that can be. And you know, we would rather spend our time researching and writing, not organizing orders of books. So print on demand like lulu.com is a really easy way to make your work available to anybody.
Nicole (29m 16s):
Oh, I love that you said that. And I think sometimes people are nervous to ask us too, like, oh, can I order some more of your book? And then the next day they decide they want another one and they feel weird reaching out and saying, oh, I actually want another one. And so it gives them the freedom to do it on their own time-frame and whenever they feel like they can order more if they need, if they wanna get one for all their kids for Christmas, you know, it gives them that flexibility too. Absolutely. So I love that. And I have never used Lulu, so I’m just thinking about like, I need to sign up for your course because it just sounds so fun to have a dedicated time to just sit and work on this, make a book, and get, go through all the steps and get it printed because it’s such a good feeling.
Nicole (29m 60s):
You know, the times in the past when I’ve made a family history book, I just love the feeling of having a completed book that I can then share and then having it on my bookshelf and showing it to my family. It’s so wonderful.
Rebecca Shamblin (30m 13s):
There’s really nothing like it. The pride that you feel when you open that book or when you hand it to someone and show them for the first time. I really recommend having a video camera set up if you can, when you’re showing your book to family members for the first time, I have a recording of me giving it to my grandmother and it’s just priceless. The, the way she reacted the the memories that it sparked for her as she was turning the pages. It was an amazing experience.
Nicole (30m 37s):
Oh, that’s such a good idea. How fun.
Diana (30m 39s):
Well, the very final phase of all of this, of course, is distribution, getting it out to people, letting them know about it. And so do you have some ideas for that?
Rebecca Shamblin (30m 49s):
Yeah, so the first person that I always wanna give my book to is gonna be my family members. It’s gonna be my grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins and all of that. And so often I, at times I do end up handing that out in person or sharing that URL I mentioned for print on demand. But one thing I really wanted to do from the beginning was donate my book to some local history centers. The original idea that I had to create this book was actually inspired by someone who had written something similar. I met them at the Luxembourg American Cultural Center, which is in Belgium, Wisconsin. I had been researching there and she heard me mention a name and she said, wait, do you know a lot about him? I said, not really, I know his, his birth year.
Rebecca Shamblin (31m 29s):
And she walked away and came back with an entire book on this man. And it was so mind blowing that someone could do this, that it was amazing to me. So the very first thing I wanted to do when I finished was donate a copy back to the Luxembourg American Cultural Center so that other people could have the same experience that I did. So definitely look for historical societies who might value your book. And then I also like to share links on both on my personal trees. So I keep my tree public on ancestry.com and you’ll find links to these books on the profiles of the, of the main direct ancestors. But also if you go on, say FamilySearch.org or WikiTree and other cooperative trees, you’re also gonna find links there whenever possible, because I like to believe breadcrumbs for other researchers to find me.
Rebecca Shamblin (32m 15s):
And maybe someday they’ll reach out and they’ll have more information or even photos. The ultimate win is for someone to have another old family photo that you’ve never seen before. So the more you can distribute your book and get it out there in the world, the more you have the possibility of finding this extra gold.
Diana (32m 32s):
I love that. Those are all such great ideas. And I had never even thought about putting a link on your tree. That’s amazing. What a great idea.
Rebecca Shamblin (32m 40s):
And I, I like to tell people it’s not just self-serving, it’s a way to connect with other people and think how excited you would be to find a link to an entire book about your ancestor one day when you were just researching. So I try to think about that excitement for other people too.
Diana (32m 55s):
I love that. That’s great. Well, I’m looking at your website. I wanted to do a shout out to your website, RebeccaShamblin.com, and I’m noticing that you’ve got courses for this, and can you just tell us a little bit about your course?
Rebecca Shamblin (33m 11s):
Yeah, I would love to. I’m just kicking off the third round of my Family Book Creator Workshop. So what we do is each month we meet for Zoom and I present new information about one of the phases we talked about today. So the first month is planning and research. The next month is Family Book Creator basics, and then we get a little fancier and then we talk about printing. And because it’s once a month and it’s spread out like that, it’s a way for people to focus on one aspect at a time and really get comfortable with all of those elements. And it honestly, I get people signing up who are already familiar with the software, but they want the structure. They want the motivation and the the scheduling.
Rebecca Shamblin (33m 52s):
They want to be accountable and have sort of optional homework every month so that by the end of the workshop they actually have something produced. It’s not just sitting in the back of their mind. It’s not just something they’ve been meaning to get around to or they’re gonna do someday it gets done in five months, that first chapter is done and you have the tools you need to keep going after that.
Diana (34m 11s):
I love that. That’s exactly what I need because I get so busy doing everything else. Oh, I love that idea. Wow. That’s exciting.
Rebecca Shamblin (34m 19s):
Well, Thank you. And we do record all of the sessions for later viewing. So if you can’t make a live session, you can watch it later on. And this means even someone who misses the beginning of the workshop. So we’re starting our next one on February 10th. I’m not sure when this is going to air, but if this is after that, you can still join the workshop and just watch those previous sessions and catch up to everybody.
Diana (34m 41s):
Oh, good to know. Well, and you have done something special for our listeners. Do you wanna talk about what, what everyone can get for free?
Rebecca Shamblin (34m 49s):
Absolutely. So I have a template for my narrative biographies that I use in Word. It’s got all my fonts and my layout and my picture formatting, and it’s available for sale on my website. But anybody who is a listener of this podcast is welcome to download it for free. So the coupon code is Like a Pro 2025, so you can just use that directly in the shopping cart after you add the Microsoft Word template to your cart. Or you can go to the URL at www.RebeccaShamblin.com/coupon/LikeAPro2025, sorry, 2025. And that link I think will be in the show notes here. So go ahead, download that for free, and then hopefully sign up for my mailing list so you can hear about my future projects.
Nicole (35m 33s):
Wonderful. That’s great. I’m gonna go ahead and sign up for your mailing list so I can find out when your next course starts. This episode will come out on February 3rd.
Rebecca Shamblin (35m 41s):
Oh, perfect. Wonderful. Well, the signups are open, so head on over there and join us. We’d love to have you.
Nicole (35m 48s):
So anyone who’s listening who wants to sign up, you can start with lesson one on February 10th. Great. This has been so fun and so inspirational and helping me think about goals and what I want to do to make more family history books. And I really just, I’m excited to explore your blog more and to review the beautiful books and photographs that you have. And Thank you so much for coming on, and please let our listeners know how they can get in touch with you. Any other products you have, any final words on that?
Rebecca Shamblin (36m 23s):
My website is sort of home base for everything, so RebeccaShamblin.com is gonna have links to my books and to my courses. I also teach classes in person and online, so if you’re in the Twin Cities area or Minnesota, Wisconsin, you might see me in person, but I also like to do zooms for various genealogical societies across the country. So if you’re looking for your March speaker, reach out and let’s see what we can put together. I’d love to talk with your people.
Nicole (36m 51s):
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Well, everyone listening, I hope you had a great time hearing about making family history books today, and we look forward to talking with you again next week. Bye everyone.
Rebecca Shamblin (37m 1s):
Bye-bye. Thank you so much. Bye-bye everyone. Thanks Rebecca.
Nicole (37m 3s):
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 books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.
Links
Review of Leaving a Legacy: Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book – https://familylocket.com/review-of-leaving-a-legacy-turn-your-family-tree-into-a-family-book/
Producing a Family History Book with Family Book Creator – https://www.rebeccashamblin.com/producing-a-family-history-book-with-family-book-creator/
Introducing “Leaving a Legacy:Turn Your Family Tree into a Family Book” – https://www.rebeccashamblin.com/introducing-leaving-a-legacy-turn-your-family-tree-into-a-family-book/
Family Book Creator Workshop – Winter 2025 – https://www.rebeccashamblin.com/courses/family-book-creator-workshop-winter-2025/
Rebecca Shamblin Speaking Page – https://www.rebeccashamblin.com/speaker/
Rebecca’s Facebook Group, “Leaving a Legacy: Researching & Writing Your Family History Book” – https://www.facebook.com/groups/rebeccashamblin
Free! Rebecca’s Word Template for Narrative Biographies (regularly $4.99) www.rebeccashamblin.com/coupon/likeapro2025
Sponsor – Newspapers.com
For listeners of this podcast, Newspapers.com is offering new subscribers 20% off a Publisher Extra subscription so you can start exploring today. Just use the code “FamilyLocket” at checkout.
Research Like a Pro Resources
Airtable Universe – Nicole’s Airtable Templates – https://www.airtable.com/universe/creator/usrsBSDhwHyLNnP4O/nicole-dyer
Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference – by Nicole Dyer – https://familylocket.com/product-tag/airtable/
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge Workbook – digital – https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-digital-only/ and spiral bound – https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-spiral-bound/
Research Like a Pro Webinar Series 2024 – monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2024/
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
Thank you
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