How to Write Compelling Family Biographies from Genealogy Research

How do you make your genealogy research come alive and transform it all into compelling family biographies that will inspire generations to come? In this article, one of our expert researchers will give you some tips and tricks to make the writing process more straight forward.

Biography is a genre of history that overlaps with genealogy. It’s not reserved for only those who were famous or significantly impacted history. The art of biography is trying to find meaning in a single person's life. When we, as genealogists, try to find meaning in the lives of our ancestors, we become biographers. To discover meaning in the lives of our ancestors, we often need to turn to the historical context in which they lived. 

Writing a biography requires a slightly different skill set than conducting genealogical research. To write a biography, we need to know what sources are available. Understanding the three categories of sources will help us use them accurately: primary sources, secondary sources, and tertiary sources.

How To Use Genealogy Resources for Writing Family Biographies

Primary sources are ideal for genealogy. A primary source is a first-hand account of an event created either at the time of the event or by someone directly involved. In genealogy, the ones we use most often are birth and death certificates, census records, church records, and anything else created by our ancestors or by someone who knew them. The importance of primary sources is that they provide data, or facts, about our ancestors. 

Secondary sources are created when someone references primary sources for their information. When a genealogist writes a report or a historian writes a book or an article, they create secondary sources. They should reference primary sources and analyze or interpret the data they found.  

A tertiary source compiles information from secondary sources without providing any additional analysis or interpretation. It should be used as reference material when you want a broad overview of what people have to say on a subject. Any encyclopedia is a tertiary source, including the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  

The following sources can be used to find other sources: 

1. Wikipedia 
2. FamilySearch Research Wiki 
3. WorldCat 
4. The catalog of your local library 

Each kind of source has a place in our research as genealogists and family historians. When it comes to facts, we should always turn to primary sources, or else we risk relying on someone else’s interpretation of events. When we want to learn more about what life was like for our ancestors, we can see what historians have said about it to help us write family biographies.  

Tertiary sources like Wikipedia are great for getting a broad overview of what the experts have to say about a specific place, time period, or event. They are also a great way to identify secondary sources about the subject by checking their references to books or articles. 

This primary source document provides several facts about a man named Joseph Dalton. We can summarize the information found in the document like this: 

Joseph Dalton, 62, lived in Denby, Yorkshire, during the 1851 census of England. His occupation was “Fancy Weaver.”  

I looked up Denby on Wikipedia to learn more about Joseph’s life as a fancy weaver. I learned that it was a part of the parish of Penistone, which was renowned for its cloth. The articles I read showed that cloth, weaving, and textiles were a large part of the area’s economy.  

How To Use Genealogical Secondary Resources

The first secondary source I used was A Topographical Dictionary of England, which can be found on the website British History Online. The dictionary was written in 1848, making it a contemporary secondary source, meaning it was written around the same time as the events I was researching. However, it was still a secondary source since it was written using data from primary documents.  

The entry for Denby in the Topographical Dictionary stated that the area was “chiefly occupied by weavers” and that there were “several manufactories of woolen goods.”  

Armed with this knowledge, I rewrote my description of Joseph Dalton in 1851: 

Joseph Dalton was part of a community of weavers in Denby, a town in the Penistone parish of Yorkshire, where the main industry was the creation of woolen goods. Joseph earned the position of “fancy weaver,” which implies a certain level of skill or intricacy, indicating that Joseph was a more specialized type of weaver. At 62, one can imagine that he was respected in his community for his craft, maybe even serving as a mentor for younger weavers hoping to achieve the same skill level.  

Notice how the focus of the description shifted from collecting facts about Joseph Dalton to imagining what life might have been like for him, using the facts and information collected.  

Occupation is not the only avenue for research when writing a person’s biography; other details can be just as valuable. Some examples we might encounter during genealogy research include interesting family relationships, migration, and historical events they may have lived through.  

For example, when I read the Wikipedia article for the town of Denby, I learned that they had a history of baking significant pies. A couple of articles were linked in the references by news reporters and local historians. Denby has baked ten giant pies throughout history, and Joseph Dalton would have been alive for at least two of them. The first was a victory pie, made in 1815 to celebrate the victory at the Battle of Waterloo, which contained “two sheep, twenty fowls, and half a peck of flour for the crust.” The second was baked in 1846 and was said to have been much bigger, celebrating the repeal of laws that caused hardship for the poorer classes.  

It is interesting to imagine Joseph Dalton and his family taking part in the festivities of Denby’s historic town pies and becoming a weaver, a fancy one. This adds humanity to his life and creates a family history out of what was originally just facts and data.  

When I said that Joseph Dalton may have been a mentor for younger weavers in 1851, it was only a hypothesis based on his skill, age, and community. Occasionally, we luck out as family historians when someone writes down what life was like for them in a journal or letters to their loved ones. In that case, we not only have many more details to use in our research, but we can write about their experiences without guessing.  

Writing Family Biographies: from genealogy to family history

My great-grandmother left notes and drafts for an autobiography she was writing. I relied heavily on her notes when writing her biography, but I also turned to secondary sources. I checked out books from the library and read articles on the internet about Methodists, adoption, divorce, Irish immigrants, changes in home technology, and dairy farming. I learned what she did in her life, who she was, and how she searched for meaning in motherhood, religion, and work.  

When outlining her autobiography, my great-grandmother listed “themes” that she would have liked to communicate to her family. I believe that most of our ancestors had messages they would have liked to communicate to their descendants, and we can sometimes understand those messages through how they lived their lives. 

Sometimes, our research is focused on genealogical facts, dates, places, events, and relationships, extending our ancestral lines and proving our hypotheses. Other times, our interest turns to more than our genealogy, and we seek our family history. We want to know more about our ancestors’ experiences and get to know them as people. During those times, we borrowed the skills of biographers. to help us write compelling family biographies. 

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