Creating a Biographical Outline for your Family Tree
If you want to create a family tree then you’re going to have to research your family’s history. While this can be quite a time consuming task, you’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your family just by asking the right questions. While interviewing your family members is a great way to find out more about your family’s past, before you start interviewing your relatives, it’s a good idea to document your own life story.
Consider this to be like writing your autobiography, in as much or as little detail as you wish. By completing a biographical sketch of your own life, you will get a feel for the interview process when gathering information about your family members and their lives. If you make it interesting and detailed enough, it could become a personal profile that you can hand down to your descendants. This will help them to keep the family history alive for generations to come.
There will come a point when you have to decide how entertaining you would like to make your family tree. Thanks to modern day software you can add all kinds of various features outside of simple text. Whether it’s photos, documents, sound files or even video files, each one of these can definitely spruce up your presentation. Soon you will see it’s the added touch that will be intriguing to the rest of the family. You may even consider adding them to reports you create, scrapbooks or various other mementos.
While this may be true, you still need a set of guidelines to utilize. These are the questions you may want to get the answers to when holding an interview. Granted, you don’t need to use them all unless you want an in depth family tree. Most likely this will be a brainstorming session where you end up using some of your own
* Do you have any idea how you got your given name? Is your name a family name or a new creation? * Do your given names have some sort of surname that was passed on by one or more ancestors? Is it tradition? * Do you have a nickname? * When and where were you born? * Did your birth include some sort of special circumstances? (e.g. born on a train; any medical complications; during a terrible storm; while your parents were on holiday abroad) * What do you remember early on in your childhood? * Do you remember the schools you attended growing up? When did you graduate * Did you have any special achievements at school? (academic; head boy or girl; school prefect; sports team captain; music; arts, etc.)
And what have you been up to since finishing school:
* Did you go on the college or university, or do any further courses after high school? If so, what did you study? Did your receive a university or college degree? * Have you done any military service; served in any wars? Which particular service were you in, and which regiment or unit? Did you serve anywhere abroad? Where? * What do you do for a living? * What other occupations have you had? Which was the most rewarding occupation? * Did you immigrate/emigrate? From where to where? Did you travel by ship/plane/train? * Are there any events or aspects of your life that have really meant a lot to you? * If you were to write your own eulogy, how would you like to sum up your life or describe yourself?
You may find that your thoughts and memories come in a flood and end up rather jumbled. It is, therefore, a good idea to compile your biographical sketch on your computer so that you can rearrange your entries at a later stage.
When your notes are complete, I recommend uploading them to a genealogy site. While there are several out there, I’ve tried many and found Mundia.com to be the most beneficial. They will allow you to create a family tree for free and share everything you’ve accumulated with other family members. You can also invite your family members to add their own stories and build memories to your profile.
Want to find out more about drawing a family tree, then visit Mundia.com and discover how to create a family tree outline for free.
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