You can find many Family Tree templates by googling the term. Filling it in will trigger many thoughts and perhaps some Family Stories for you. You might need older relatives to help you with the names farther back, as well as dates. Many family bibles will give you the information needed to fill out your Family Tree. Long ago, people used the front pages to record family history including births, deaths, and marriages. If you have one, count yourself blessed.
I have mentioned several times that a good place to find information about your relatives is the Family Search website which is a free help. Once they have your general information, they send new alerts about someone in your family off and on. I'm always pleased when I see an email from them as I may find another piece of the puzzle that is our family.
Family history is fascinating and I highly recommend learning what you can and passing it on to future generations. For me, Family Stories are as important as factual information. It's through these tales that we learn the personalities of our great-grandparents or our grandparents' siblings.
We also absorb some of the time periods and get a sense of place. That's why those little details in a story matter. If you write about Grandpa Charlie milking cows on a frosty morning, the reader knows that he lives on a farm in someplace that sometimes sees cold temperatures. Write about Aunt Nellie riding the streetcar to shop downtown, and you're letting the reader know she lived in a city.
Whether you're writing a Family Story, a memoir piece, or a personal essay, give thought to what you're sharing with others in your family or readers of a published piece. Would it be hurtful to anyone? Would it bring shame? I truly believe we need to write about the bad times as well as the good, but do it with grace. If you want to write about Uncle Don's arrest, trial and acquittal, ask permission of him, or of his family still living. It's quite alright to include the bad along with the good when you write about family, but be considerate as you do so. I had a love/hate relationship with my father, but I never wrote about it while he was still living.
Genealogy websites sometimes run contests or ask for family stories. I found one in California that ran a contest, so I entered my story titled "Grandma, Raspberries, and Cream." It won an Honorable Mention and was later published elsewhere. I wasn't looking for the genealogy website or the contest, I accidentally ran across it, but you can do a search to see if there are others. Magazines like Good Old Days and Reminisce publish Family Stories. Do a Google search for both. They do have guidelines, and they pay the writers.
I like to think of Family Stories as the personal side of Genealogy. To put it another way, they're the icing on the cake. When I wrote about my parents' elopement and keeping the wedding secret for six weeks, I was giving a bit of family history with the date and the event, but I added far more to personalize this oft-told story in my family.
Family Stories and Genealogy go hand in hand. When you spend time working on one, make time to work on the other one, as well.
One last thought--you do not have to be a professional writer to write your Family Stories. They might not be as polished as those written by a person who writes to make living, but that does not matter. They'll be your stories, and that's what is important.
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