Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. 4:30, last session, busy Thursday afternoon. I really hope you're ready for one more, that you haven't taken in so much that you're saturated. So we're going to look today about choosing the details, the secret to telling compelling stories. My grandmother wrote down stories all her life about her family and her relatives. And in one that was particularly memorable, she told about how she and my great-great-grandfather rescued a buck that had gotten trapped between tree saplings. And decades later, she wrote about it. And what they had done was they had wrapped my great-grandpa's suspenders around the deer's rack, and they had pulled his nose down into a hat full of water that my grandmother held. So this is what she wrote about her grandfather decades later. "His face was dripping with perspiration and he was almost completely exhausted when he finally got the deer's head down. I still remember how quiet and deadly serious grandpa looked as he tried to hold his pants up and pull the deer's head down at the same time." Ladies and gentlemen, as we write about the past, we document it. But sometimes we want to do a little more for our descendants and for our ancestors. We want to tell them memorable stories, relatable stories, compelling stories. In short, we want to take them back in place and time. And the details we choose to include in our stories have the power to do that for us. They have the power to immerse someone in another culture, in another era. They have the power to engage curiosity, to engage hearts. The details also have power to distract people in a good way, but also sometimes in a bad way. So we have to use this power of details wisely. So today, what we're going to look at and cover are the types of details that are found in compelling stories. We're going to look a little more into socio-historical context. We're going to look very--we're going to scratch the surface, let's put it that way, on where to find some of these details. And then talk about how to pick and choose them. When we look at the way details are presented in compelling stories, one thing that we need to remember is that our words work like images. The details we choose, the words we choose, the facts we choose, work like optics. It's the lens that other people see and understand the past. Compelling stories have details that add context and texture to a story, things that add dimension, definition, things that make people want to look a little closer at the story. Compelling stories have details that engage the senses. And we're going to talk about why that's so very important. Compelling stories include details that increase the emotional connection to the characters, who in our case, are our ancestors, as well as the emotional impact of the story itself. And a lot of times we can achieve that by revealing our ancestors' vulnerabilities. Of course, these details can also promote and increase understanding, by providing backdrops, historical backdrops, that might explain decisions that our ancestors made, or explain things like how a seaman from London can end up in landlocked Nebraska. How a family rift happened. We have to draw from, of course, the reserves of our own memory, our personal knowledge of people and events. And we can also draw from the details that have been preserved by our loved ones, in oral histories, diaries, and letters, things like that. But we can also go out and find them. We can research and find details to include in our ancestors' stories. To get started, one of the easiest ways to find different layers to add on to a story is to look at the details, or the events we already know about, in chronological order. And then ask ourselves, what else was happening? What else was taking place in their family, in their community? What was taking place in the nation and in the world? For instance, this is a quick and dirty one I did on a little small segment of my grandmother's life where in black I put the events I knew. In red, I added other family events. And in green, I added what else was happening in the nation and world. So all this is is a brainstorming exercise. It tells me where I might want to start looking for details. And things that reveal my ancestors' or my grandparents' circumstances. Family might include birth order, family expectations, your gender, or their gender. Health and hardiness, could they have even undertaken a voyage? Wealth and all the opportunities that entails, or the desperation that came by having virtually nothing. And all these things, the historical, social, political, and religious traditions, cultural traditions, and educational opportunities could have played a role and made an impact on our ancestors. But the other thing we have to keep in mind is they also could have well been our ancestors' limitations. They could have been our ancestors' vulnerabilities. For instance, I have not found much information on my four times great-grandmother, Verlinda Carmichael Wilkinson, but when I put the few things that I did find in the context of her family and of history, I see that when her husband marched off to fight in the Civil War, he left her not only in charge of the farm, but with five children as well, three of whom were under five. So even though I haven't found anything about Verlinda that is more spectacular than the fact that when William came home from war, the farm and the children were all intact, this context, these details, these layers tell me she accomplished no little feat. So in other words, this is socio-historical context is the equivalent of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story. It's an insight into their backgrounds. And that family context, the further you go back, is elusive. Sometimes we can make inferences. But when it gets to the community and beyond, there's often more information than you know. But before we look at where we're going to find them, let's look at what kind of details we're looking for as we research and as we sift through information that we have. We want to look for details that orient readers in place, in time, and in history. We want to look for descriptive details about people and places. And of course, we want to find little things or big things that engage our reader's curiosity, engage their emotions. So you can choose details as small as little tiny things, like suspenders, that show a little bit of humor or character, or great big historical facts that increase understanding or increase impact. And the story that my grandmother wrote about her grandfather and the suspenders, the other thing she included, instead of saying my grandparents were very poor, she talked about coming home and how ramshackle the house was, and how the porch roof was listing to one side, and how the steps needed repairing. To give that story--and then she added what that buck's rack would have been worth. So we just give these details that sometimes it's what connected us to the stories. It's going to connect your readers to the story. Those little things can often make the difference. So what makes some details more engaging than others? Is it our writing? Or is it the details themselves? If I'm honest, it's a little of both. And one thing that really great stories have are sensory-rich details. What did a sod house in Nebraska smell like? What did Ersatz coffee taste like? What was it like to ride out a storm in the bottom of a ship? If you've noticed that marketers have caught on to this in a big way. They are constantly almost bombarding us with sensory words, images, and descriptions, because brain research shows that when we consume sensory information, they fire up, in a functional MRI, our brains fire up as if we're having that sensory experience. And that doesn't happen with other text that we read. So this sensory information does a lot of great things. First of all, we all visualize. We've all heard the crash of thunder. We all know that sticky, sweet smell of flowers at a funeral. So these sensory details allow imaginations to give--to take off. And they attract the attention and they actually stimulate memory retention, just like you remember a sensory-rich day, you'll remember a sensory-rich story. And in the same vein, emotional context does something like it. Emotional details not only connect people to a story--how many of you have read a story before and then gone out and done research on the subject? Exactly. Once you're connected to a story, you're open to a lot more details. So that emotional connection can prep readers, so to say, to consume more. And again, emotional stories are more memorable. They stimulate memory retention. So it's always good to look for those. In any story, the setting orients the readers. And ours should do the same thing. Our settings should give readers reference points of the historical, social, and economic reference points. But it should also include some part of the sensory environment. What did the place, not just look like, what did it smell like? What did it sound like? If it's a farm, what kind of dirt did it have? Was it soft, brown dirt? Or was it dry, red clay? Those details will bring your setting alive.

A quick note about family tradition versus social and historical context. Both of course, add depth to stories. Sometimes they are the same thing but often they are not. Sometimes our research will bring us to new understandings. And sometimes it can be very interesting to compare and contrast what has been passed down through your family for generations with no evidence, and then what the research actually reveals. Sometimes we have very surprising juxtapositions. And these--when we give people these surprises or we give them the facts that they've never seen before, we give people this "wow" moment when they understand their history, their ancestors' history. When they get that, "I did not know that," it not only changes their outlook on the story we've written, it changes their outlook on their own ancestry. And this is particularly true when pop culture has taken some, let's say, liberties, with the facts. For instance, has anyone ever seen a Western where anyone but the bad guys had bad teeth?

Right? And all the women's hair is always clean, always perfectly styled, and no one's skin has been leathered by the sun. And that's just not really the way it was. So it's a great gift that we can give to people. In my family, my great-uncle Buddy was killed shortly after the turn of the 20th century in a mining accident. And shortly after that, his wife Carrie remarried. And shortly after that, both kids ended up in an orphanage. So Buddy and Carrie's descendants might well look at Carrie as a heartless woman for giving up her children to have another family with a second man. But when I layer the law in Virginia and West Virginia in 1910 on the story, we find that women had no rights over their own children if she was married. The man, the husband had 100% of the rights, even if he was not the biological father. So then if I layer on top of that family tradition, namely, my grandmother wrote in her treasure chest of memories, that Carrie remarried to a cruel man, it changes the potential of the story. We don't know whether Carrie was heartless, spineless, or a co-victim. We just don't know. But what that tells me is that tying up our stories in nice little bows isn't what makes them compelling. It's when we engage the curiosity and we expose the mysteries--that's what makes people sit up and want to read a little bit more.

I'm sure I'm not the only one in the room who has a few ancestors that--everything I know about them is engraved on their tombstone. And that makes choosing the details a little bit of a challenge, right? So what we do in that circumstance is we talk about the settings for their stories. For instance, you can explain how people looked, and dressed, and behaved based on your research. You can talk about their community life, what the town was like, how prosperous it was, what social classes were represented, if your ancestors were latecomers to this area, if they were, perhaps, indigenous peoples. Or perhaps they were pioneers in a new area. And we can talk about the schools and what kind of schools they had. And then we also have to remember, when we talk about community life and the culture, that includes the religious culture. And if you have any evidence that your ancestors were religiously observant, you can research and find out if there were ramifications of practicing that faith in that time and in that place. Because a lot of times, they're were. So you can still set this background. Occupations is another big example of that. What did the occupation entail? If the whole family earned a living from the sea, what was that like? What kind of boats did they have? What were markets like? How long was the season? On and on, I'm sure you catch my drift. But unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we can't just present lists and charts and dense text of encyclopedic facts and expect our readers to stay enthralled. And especially if they're not genealogically inclined. So we have to weave the facts a little bit into the story. And the readers have to feel like they're relevant to the story, not that we're just slamming in everything we have ever found. Now, the super secret sauce, if you can find it, comes in--is when you can find out not only what was going on in history, but you can find some evidence of how your ancestors reacted to that historical event or that thing. One of my favorite examples of someone doing a great job of working things into a sketch is a blogger named Margaret Crymes. And she wrote about her husband's ancestor, Richard Crymes. And I am perhaps biased because he's also my ancestor. The link you see on your screen, and it is in the handouts. But I'm going to read it verbatim, or an excerpt verbatim. "So Richard was a member of the company of haberdashers, whose guild hall was a block or two away from the St. Lawrence Jewry, where Richard was a parishioner. Haberdasheries in Tudor England were quite unlike the modern purveyors of men's clothing. In Richard's time, a haberdashery was more like a late medieval five-and-dime, selling everything from swords to fabric notions. In 16th-century London, haberdasheries were extravagant businesses, often brightly and fabulously decorated, over-the-top and ostentatious enough to encourage customers to part with their money, not unlike today's upscale department stores. I like to think that Richard was as over-the-top as the store he might have run." Oh, after I read this, I researched haberdasheries, which believe it or not, was not on my list of things to research. I was open to more details. I went to the National Archives and I got an actual image of Richard's will. I was open to hearing more about Richard. And then in 2015, I went with my son to London. And I stood in front of the church at the St. Lawrence Jewry. And the guild hall was off to my left. And I'm telling you, I could imagine Richard. I could imagine the Tudor England and everybody in their pageantry, and people wearing things they had purchased from a haberdashery, even if it was just a green ribbon in somebody's hair. So what Margaret Crymes proved to me is it's really not about the details. It's not about the facts. The facts and the details are about the people. But interestingly enough, it's not just about the people we write about. It's about the people who read what we write. And if you think about it, that's really powerful stuff, What we can do for people with our stories. Let's move into finding the details and looking at some sources. Research in genealogy is not part of one session. It's a lifetime. So we're going to scratch, like rub the surface, like scratch but not leave a mark. But just look at some common places that we might find details for context about our ancestors, if not information about them. Oh, starting with the obvious--census records. Depending on the country and depending on the date, you can find things like the value of the home, if they owned acreage, if it was a farm, how many that was, what livestock they had. You can see if they took in boarders for extra income, or if they had servants. And you can look at the whole page and adjoining pages and get a sense of the community. Did family live in neighboring households? Was there a great diversity of places of birth? On and on and on, I think you're getting my drift. The same thing with estate inventories and wills. Through the possessions people owned, we can get a sense--and who they chose to pass them on to--we can get a sense of them. For example, were they passing on--bequeathing 100-acre parcels of land? Or were they bequeathing, like in my family, one feather bed and a cow named Mabel. It tells you about the family. Other sources--historical newspapers are great sources. And if you look back at them, many of them are now available online. Sometimes you can even find a mention of your ancestors in the social news of who went to visit who, or meeting minutes, or things like that. Military records is a huge, huge body of research. But all I want to--so all I really want to say about that is, look beyond finding your ancestors' names. Look at the context these records provide because they also provide what that military occupation was, where they were. You can sometimes even find postcards and letters written by the other service people, servicemen and -women, that they may have served with. So military records are a great place for socio- and historical context. Maps is one of my favorites. My son makes fun of me, I like physical maps as well. And he says, have you ever heard of this thing called the internet? Luckily--I know, they're all snarky. Luckily, the two get along very well. And there's more and more maps available via the internet. One of my favorite is Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which are now online at the Library of Congress for a lot of U.S. cities. And you can see the structures, the outline of the building structures, on the maps. And they're color coded by building use. So you can see where your ancestor lived, versus worked, versus grocery shopped, or what have you. And you can look at changes over decades. For rural ancestors, and not just in the U.S., in many countries, there's plat or land survey maps. They don't show building structures, but they do show property lines. And again, you can look at these over time and see how things changed. And then you can go to Google Maps, or even Google Earth, and compare the historical maps that you've found. You can even go on to Google Maps, go into Street View, and drive around. See what it's like now. And again, you can look at these things over time. And if any of you were at Lisa Cook's Google session yesterday--I mean, the last session, she talked about how to use Google Earth for doing a lot of the same thing and accessing these maps. So these cool maps can give you a great sense of your ancestors. And then you can, for instance, if your ancestors moved around a lot, you can make a migration map of the places they lived and stayed and compare that to known migrations and what those migratory routes were like. When it comes to immigration lists and ship manifests, again, we want to look beyond the first page in the names. Look at the context--put that voyage in the context of history. Did your ancestors travel steerage? Did they go first class? How long was the voyage and what time of year did it take? What kind of ship was it? And look at the fellow passengers. What were their demographics? Was it a bunch of young families from one country? Or was it young men that were all just coming, searching for work, and how your ancestor fit into this. And then the cool thing is going back to the historical newspapers, when you know the port of arrival and the date, you can see if there was a mention of that voyage in the local newspaper if something noteworthy happened. When it comes to your local communities, the sources are nearly endless. One of my favorite places to start is with the FamilySearch.org's research wiki. Which if you go to FamilySearch.org under Search, it's the last option. Another great, great resource is local and historical and genealogical societies, or your family history library as well. A lot of these gen societies and historical societies are on Facebook. And you can actually pose a question for them, to them, and find something out. For instance, we could not figure out why we couldn't find an obituary or a death certificate for my great-great-uncle Buddy. And the local historical society told us it's because in that town, the mining company owned the newspaper and the cemetery. So if only a couple people died in a mining accident, that was not newsworthy. And they may not have called the coroner. So it's not the solution we were looking for, but it's interesting context for us to know about Buddy. Museums are fabulous. In our area in Detroit we have a museum called the Greenfield Village and Henry Ford that we can go and see what an 1890s kitchen was like. We can see what the Wright brothers' workshop was like. But other museums have an online presence with great, great collections. And just recently, the International African-American Museum started their online presence at iaamuseum.org. The physical museum won't open till 2020 but they already have great collections about plantation life, Gullah culture, diaspora, migration routes. So museums can be wonderful, wonderful resources. And most of you probably know of city directories, whether it's here in the US or abroad. Many, many of them have biographical sketches in the beginning. You can look at the advertisements. You can look at the different things that you see. Did the cabinet maker also make the coffins? Does the undertaker also run a pub? Find out those things. And I was really surprised. I looked at Danville, Virginia. This is Hill's Directory from 1927, about five years before my father was born there. And I was shocked that it wasn't dry like I expected a biographical sketch to be. And this is just a short paragraph that I found in there. But talk about compelling details. "Danville is quite interesting by day. But it is when you cross the old bridge at night that you feel the difference. After passing through the business section, you strike a narrow, shadowy part, which is where many of the tobacco warehouses are located. Then suddenly, you come upon the river at the darkest part of all. You hear the rush of water, and through the superstructure of the long bridge, you see the lights of factories up and down the river." I just thought that was a great example. If your ancestors earned their living in a way that was climate-dependent, almanacs can give you great information about the climate, tides, things that may have happened. There are more and more school yearbooks and log books online that you might find out what activities your grandparents did in high school. You might find out how long they stayed in school, what the school they went to next was. You can find great context there. And church minutes, depending on the denomination, and we all know the Church of Latter-day Saints keeps great records, but there are other ones that do. And this is an example from the Seventh Day Adventist church's Educational Messenger from 1907 where I found that my husband's great-grandfather had moved from Nebraska to Colorado for his health, wanted to invest in a poultry business. His health was not good and that he and his wife had both attended Union College. So that was a whole lot of information in just a church newsletter. And then, of course, institutions like the Library of Science, and the British Museum, and university libraries all over Europe have collections of historical publications. And for instance, the Library of Congress has the federal manuscripts from the federal writers project, which was the height of the Great Depression. And this example on your screen, I found through JSTOR. And it's Carter G. Woodson's entire collection of The Journal of Negro History. You talk about social context, you have found tons. Then the thing that I cannot overlook sharing with you is a resource that is greatly underused are the blogs, vlogs, and podcasts that are curated by your other fellow family historians. And you probably have seen people wearing the beads throughout RootsTech, and that means they have online geneological content. And these are great sources for niche information about places, about migrant groups, immigrant populations, anything that you want to know, someone has probably blogged about it. And there's a complete searchable listing of all the blogs--and there are 3,255 at last count--at geneabloggerstribe.com. And you might even want to follow some of them, or you might find some cousins there too. Another thing that might surprise you is you might have some great context. And that box that you inherited from Aunt Martha where none of those photos are captioned or labeled, but sometimes by looking closely at these photos, you pick up details that tell you something about the community. This is the school in Lunenburg County, Virginia, where my mother and her siblings went to school. And when I looked closely at my Uncle Joe on the front row, I learned something about his family and his community. And if you can't see it, Uncle Joe had no shoes to wear to school. So that tells you something about that. So I could go on and on forever. And I'm not, but I would like to mention that Google is your friend. Don't be afraid to ask Google questions, to use the advanced search, and maybe even narrow results by the country that you want your results to come from. Your reference librarian is also your friend, and they like it when you come and ask them questions and you want to use their resources. And there are more and more books available on Google Books searches. Sometimes it's only 20% of a book, but a lot of times it's the entire book. So that's worth a shot. And on and on and on. It would be overwhelming if it weren't for a librarian named Rebecca Knight, who is also a genealogist, she works out of the University of Delaware. And at the link you have on your handouts, she has provided us a great resource, a listing of great sources, books, for historical context, and maybe what life was like at this time or in this place. So it's a great, great list. I'm going to take a deep breath because I've been talking fast. Let's move on to--let's say we have been brainstorming and we've been writing. And maybe we have a first draft. So how do we be sure--how are we sure we're including the right details and the right amount of details. So one of our priorities is portraying our ancestors in a way that captures the attention, and the imaginations, and the hearts of their descendants. We want to help them connect. We want to help them resonate. So here is where we have to be really, really careful because we have, a lot of us, this urge to portray ancestors only in a good, positive light. But we need to avoid that bias for several reasons. In my list, the number one reason, is--perfection is boring. How many people want Martha Stewart to come over for dinner?

And it's probably inaccurate, because very few of us really are perfect. So we all have our strengths and we have our weaknesses. And what's more, you're missing the boat if you don't show them because sometimes our strengths are our flaws, and vice versa. This grandma's sharp tongue may have given you uncomfortable moments while you were growing up, but as an adult, she was the one you went to when you needed the unsugared truth, when you needed an advocate. So I think our descendants need more than a one-sided glimpse into their ancestors. We're failing them if we only include things that are momentous, or things that are positive. So we are limited in our researched, factual-based, research-based version of our ancestors. We can't know everything. But we can certainly hold that up as a goal, that as we research and go through facts, we're open to all the versions of our ancestors that we uncover. And if we're open to the versions, then we can avoid bias in our stories. And we can share things that will allow our ancestors' descendants to imagine what it would have been like to know them, not just to know their historical sketch, but to know them. There's a caveat to that that's a very important caveat. As genealogists, we protect living people. That, in my opinion, doesn't just limit us to not writing about living people, but when we look at a story of someone recently departed, and if that can hurt a living person, we need to proceed carefully and ethically. And there's a lot of resources out there on being an ethical genealogist. The legal genealogist, Judy Russell, has some. The Association of Professional Genealogists has a lot. So we can look to make sure we're ethical as we go forth. And then even as a memoirist, sometimes we have to ask ourselves, are those details even relevant? For instance, I ran across a skeleton in my second cousin one time removed closet. That skeleton's not relevant to my story. So why hurt? Oh. I'm off the soapbox. So, when it comes to describing ancestors, one of the things that's good to include if we can know it is details that reveal their story arc. What made them tick? Did they have a rags to riches story? Were they a veteran that had seen it all? Is there something about them? But then also, if you find contradictory characteristics like the military leader that's a softy at home, that's great. Every great novel has contradictory characters. So include that. And then don't forget the small, tiny things, like a waxed mustache. Or in my family, a lot of my farming relatives had a suntan that ended, you know, right at the eyebrows. And when they took their hats off, they had white foreheads. So include those things because it helps people think about what it would have been to know them. This brings us to the Goldilocks question--how much detail is just right? Of course that depends on your writing style. And it's a subjective answer. And I even went to Writer's Digest to see what they tell their beginning writers. And they say, when there's so much description the story's momentum bogs down, that's too much. If there's so little that the characters or setting are bland and unmemorable, that's too little. In other words, it's subjective.

So as important as research is, storytelling matters too. And they're different crafts. So we have to make sure that the details are bringing our story alive and not making our readers' eyes glaze over, that we're not transporting them into this Charlie Brown cartoon where they're in a little wooden desk and the teacher's up at the front going wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. So we can ask ourselves, are the details--or we can ask a critique partner, which is a wonderful thing to have--are the details engaging or evoking curiosity? Are they adding humor and context? Are they adding things that accurately increase the intellectual, social, or emotional impact of the story? And remember, you don't have to jam everything you know about one person in your family tree into one story. You can write multiple stories. I'm a great believer in this because every time you write a new story, you've issued a new invitation for their descendants to come in and investigate and explore that world. Now the other thing--I hope you guys can see the image on the sunglasses that my son thought was a cheesy image--that really when it--one of the things that helps me make decisions is, focus on what it's going to do with the reader's ability to understand their ancestors and their ancestors' world.

Of course, even with these great sensory details, we can overdo it. And part of that is because we have to allow our readers' imagination a runway, a place to take off. Because if their imagination is shut down, the story has bogged down. They have nowhere to go. And a man whose name I've subsequently forgotten, I worked with him on a publicity campaign, once told me, Laura, you can lead a horse to water but you have got to give that horse credit for being smart enough to drink. Sometimes we have an urge to over-explain and we have to take a step back and let our readers understand--come to their own understandings.

Another thing that disengages brains is tired eyes--so the visual appeal as we write does matter. We need to leave white space on the page by our line spacing and the judicious use of paragraph breaks. And another thing those paragraph breaks can do for us, if you have a really important fact that you don't want people to miss, not burying it in the middle of a paragraph is good. So if you take more--if there's more whitespace on the page for the reader, you've made it more digestible and you've made your important facts more prominent. Then, of course, if we use clear, readable fonts, if you're hand writing, write legibly. My grandmother wrote throughout her life and only one of her kids could ever read it. Use illustrations, if you can find them. If you have too many facts, you can choose or you can summarize facts. You can use sidebars and appendices. And just in case anyone doesn't know what a sidebar is, it's there on your right, I think. And it's just to the side of the main narrative. It's facts at a glance. So as you edit and as you finalize, keep your genealogist's hat on, not that I know what a genealogist's hat looks like. So I chose a detective's. But separate what you know from what you believe and what you wonder, so that people reading can see that each are in their own lane. Avoid perpetuating misrepresentations. And we all know a lot of genealogists that refute that Ellis Island clerks were willy nilly changing last names. So we have to refute those, or not--at least not perpetuate them. And this, because I work with a lot of people who are not genealogically inclined, is provide snippets of your pedigree charts as illustrations because you want people's mental energy going towards their imagination and their consumption, not figuring out, huh? What generation are we on? So those are great things. And then there's a couple of other ethical considerations, which you guys all probably know. I'm probably singing to the choir or preaching to the choir, is--we're not going to enhance the truth. If we're still puzzling over what the truth is, we're going to say that. We are not going to borrow things from the internet, especially not with without attribution. And if you want to use something, ask. You'd be surprised how many people are going to say yes. And that goes for photos, too. Just because they're on Google Photos doesn't mean they're ours for the taking. So we're going to be careful and make sure that we give credit where credit is due and we ask permission. I'm sure none of you are surprised that I believe this--images help make your details digestible. If you have your own, like this is my Uncle Joe. One of those cows' name is Betsy. I forgot the other one. But you can also go to historical images. You've seen a lot in my presentation. They're a little work to dig out, a little work to figure out which ones are in the public domain and which ones you have permission to use, but it's worth it for your ancestors. For instance, my mother used to talk about picking tobacco as a child and drying tobacco, and how big the leaves were. When I see the historical images of children picking tobacco, I understand what "big" means.

So the last secret that I wanted to share with you is that all this works better if it's not a purely academic endeavor, if all this choosing of the details. As we mentioned that the details that connected you to the story are often the ones that will connect your ancestors. But there's more than that. There's more to it than that. As you research and sift through the details, and write, you can connect. You can connect with your history. You can connect with your family, your family's history, and you can connect with your readers, and even your future ones. So you can make this an exercise that is very fulfilling for yourself as well. So with that, I would like to open it up to a question and answer. I must have talked fast because we do have plenty of time. And let's see what questions do some of you have? Yes, ma'am? My father's father, my grandfather, passed away [INAUDIBLE]. So I asked my father, [INAUDIBLE]..

So I don't know [INAUDIBLE].

So I don't know whether to include all of that together or include other details that I can find, like what was happening at the time [INAUDIBLE].. OK, her question is she has some details that have been passed down to her, and she doesn't know whether to use what's been passed down or to enhance it with other details. Obviously, that's a personal question, I mean, a subjective question. Personally, I would say enhance and research because you can bring out little nuggets and maybe even one little thing that you can explain the impact of losing a father at the age your father was when he lost your grandfather, et cetera. So do I say [INAUDIBLE]. Who wrote this, my dad or myself? So her question is, who wrote it? I think you can use quotes. And a lot of times--one of the things my grandmother passed down, this treasure chest of memories. She didn't want it published, but it was all her writing. So in the family what's happened is my mother took my grandmother's journals, or her writing, her stories, and some of them, she annotated. And it was really cool because my grandmother saw everything through rose colored glasses. My mother was a social worker who was the advocate. So you got these two viewpoints in the same story. So it became a family story, even though it's still very clear who wrote what parts. Does that make sense to you? Yes, ma'am? [INAUDIBLE] pictures on the internet [INAUDIBLE]..

The best way, I think, is make sure--when you go to the internet and you find those historical images, if you limit yourself to a site where you know that they're there for you to use, that's a lot easier than going to Google Photos and trying to figure it out. There are sites like the Library of Congress has this historical prints division. And they will let you click a little button and it will download to your computer. So then that's a really easy way to do it. And then if, for some reason, you don't have permission, it will say right on the page and it won't let you download. So that's what I--or go to, some sources that have said, these are all in the public domain. [INAUDIBLE] No, I use the right click--she's asking how to get that image onto your computer. I'm a Windows user. I do the right click and I Save As. Sometimes I will open it--I have Photoshop Elements, that I love. And I will open up in that and then save it, like if it's crooked or something and I want to fix it a little bit. But anything that gets it on your computer so that you have access to it. Other questions?

Oh, I'm sorry. [INAUDIBLE] and she [INAUDIBLE] puts them in two columns because it's easier to read, like newspapers. What's your opinion about that? I think, again, it's subjective. And it probably depends on the age of the readers because there's a whole generation who have come up reading things in one column. Millennials read things in one column. And so that wouldn't be my choice, however, if you're writing for someone that you know that they're a newspaper consumer--the cool thing about writing and saving in digital format is reformatting is so easy. So other questions? Yes, ma'am? [INAUDIBLE] The question is, do I have any recommendation on the companies that-- [INAUDIBLE] You know what, if you go to geneabloggers--I think it's on the geneabloggerstribe.com's resource page. I know recently someone had told me some of their favorite ones. I've never used them. But, and I know we have some in the exhibit hall. I don't have a--I'm sorry, I don't have a particular recommend--has anyone else used one that they really recommend as to get hard copies of those family histories? OK. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am? [INAUDIBLE] Oh, the Writers Digest, OK I hope I won't make you guys-- [INAUDIBLE] Is this one? Yeah, that one. OK yeah. Writers Digest has this writersonlineworkshops.com, and they do have some good resources on improving your writing. And a lot of us keep saying we're not going to write until we're good. Who's ever said that about a violin? I'm not going to get that violin out of the closet until I can play it well. So you do need to write. You get better the more you do it. So I would definitely encourage anybody who's interested in improving their craft to do a workshop like that. Anyone else? Any questions?

I think everybody's interested in the big--the Greatest Generation Music, is that where we're headed next? [APPLAUSE]