The Family Historian: A Creative Writer. World Conference on Records: Preserving Our Heritage (Salt Lake City, Utah, August 12-15, 1980). Series 111.

Five papers on the topic of family history are presented. In the first paper, the author discusses techniques which have been successfully used for motivating reluctant writers to write their own personal histories. For example, in an effort to get her husband to write his life story, one woman asked her children to write what they remembered and felt about their father. When the father read what they had written, he started writing. Illustrating the important role that family albums can play in family history, the author of the second paper shows how to examine family albums and points out the type of information that can be found in them. In the third paper, the author shows, through excerpts from personal histories, how family incidents and personal experiences make history come alive. The need for children to have a sense of their own history is the topic of the fourth paper. In the concluding paper, the author emphasizes that, when writing a family history, it is very important to know about conditions that existed at the time your ancestors lived in order to understand why they lived as they did and what prompted their decisions. A checklist of questions to ask about ancestors when researching family history is provided. (RM)