(The following is a guest post by James Sweany, head of Local History and Genealogy in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division.)

The best way to preserve your family history is to write it down. By publishing your family history, you are able to capture and preserve the stories, pictures and genealogical data, making it available for other family members and future generations. A history of your family will make a wonderful gift for your relatives, and you may find that your family becomes inspired to help you seek out additional family branches.
As my colleague Anne Toohey wrote in her blog post on Christmas Day, by writing your family history, you are taking the known names, dates and places of your ancestors, and providing a historical context in a story-like form. This way, your ancestors become much more than names on a pedigree chart. They become people who lived during an earlier time, who had experiences through which you and others can get to know them through your narrative. If you include photographs and images of vital records or other significant events, the text will come alive and will be much more interesting for the reader.
The key to making your family history useful to others is the organization. A table of contents and an index of names and places used in your history will take additional time, but these added details will be very useful to future researchers consulting your history. Also, it is very important to document your research. By compiling and publishing a family history, you are inviting others to continue your research. Cite your records and document your sources. With documentation, others can build upon on the work you have done, and your history is more credible. There are various style manuals that can assist you with citation styles for footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies. If you decide to distribute your family history outside of your immediate family, be sure not to include personal information about people who are still living in order to protect their privacy.
The Library of Congress can help you find books about writing and publishing your family history. For example, how-to guidebooks that will help you organize your family history and resources on how to find a publisher can be identified in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. We invite you to seek guidance from our reference librarians through Ask a Librarian. For assistance with resources that may be found in your local area, consult your public or nearby university library to search other library catalogs. Local genealogical societies and historical societies are also great resources for additional guidance.
When you write your family history, you may only be doing so for your relatives. However, we also invite you to consider sending a copy to the Library of Congress. Compiled genealogies and U.S. local histories are very important to the international research clientele who frequent the institution. The Library seeks to collect all published and self-published works available on these important topics. Through generations of such gifts, the Library has assembled the leading book collection of genealogy and local history information in the world.
And who knows, perhaps not yet discovered relatives will be led back to your family line through your sharing of your family story!
Comments (18)
good ideas to keep for life
Almost comlete with family history do I send a comleted copy of family to you
I have been consumed with my telling my family story for over a decade and recently published an adaptation of my Swiss explorer great-great-granfather’s never-before-seen travel mémoire through the Americas of the 1850s.
How complete should the story be? I only have a sketchy outline of my “trunks”, and I haven’t started gathering proof (birth/death/marriage certificates, etc), but I’d love to finally discover if we are related to the Presidents Adams like my grandmother always said we were!
I have my family history and how do I published it to the library of congress.?
o
I have written two books. The first contains family history including stories of several generations back as well as stories by an uncle growing up in small town Alabama in 1900s and 1910s. He describes the way of life in the family, school, church, community, the clothes they wore, the games that played ( and made).The second is about me growing up in rural Mississippi and Alabama in the 1940’s and ’50’s as a P. K. (preacher’s kid). Would the Library of Congress want copies of these books and how can I submit them?
Copies of works deposited for copyright registration or in fulfillment of the mandatory deposit requirement are available to the Library of Congress for its collections. The Library reserves the right to select or reject any published work for its permanent collections based on the research needs of Congress, the nation’s scholars, and the nation’s libraries.
I would like to do my family, but don’t know how to start. I want to do a book on my family tree. I started writing some of my down on paper.
I have birth death & marriage documents and some military documents, should I include them as most I paid for and then they could be copied?
Since I paid for most of the documentation I have should they be included for others to copy?
GREAT IDEA… THANK YOU.
I’m glad I came across this – I’ve just started working on a project with
the idea of possibly publishing it later.
Kate Turner – were you able to connect to the Adams? My project includes parts of that family. Let me know! I’m on facebook 😉
One of the often overlooked issues when self-publishing genealogies, is an “About the Author” page.
When acquiring a digitization of a genealogy, I often discover the author wasn’t identified beyond their husband. And since these genealogy often stop with the grandparent generation, it take detective work to determine if the author was even connected to the family.
Their connection provides extra insight into what will be 1st hand knowledge. (And where to expect privacy & reputation related omissions.)
So I generate @ append 2 pages: the “About the Author” page & an approximation of a catalog page from the LoC (with Copy&Paste citation example text at the end.)
If I sent a pdf of my document for copywright registration, with dedication to the public domain on the title page (and assuming that it is accepted into the LoC collections) — will it then become downloadable by the general public from the Library of Congress?
Hi John,
I’m not a copyright expert, so please check with the Copyright Office. You can do it online at this link: https://www.copyright.gov/help/.
Good luck!
-n
Will the Library of Congress store online Life Histories that are sent as computer files, that have not been formally published? How may such computer files Life Histories be accessed?
Hi there,
Our “Ask a Librarian” service can put you in touch with the technicians who can answer this for you! You can reach them here: https://ask.loc.gov
Best,
Neely
Thank you, I am thrilled I came across this. I have many family stories passed down by my great grandmother. Pioneer stories, 1800’s.