A Big Puzzle: How to Present My Genealogical Data to Family Members

 I've made great progress on getting my ancestors created, sourced, and with well-defined Biographies on WikiTree. 

In fact, back in June 21, 2024's post I posted a fan chart showing I had completed 4 generations of my ancestors. I made good progress in the preceding 9 months I've nearly completed another generation backwards in my tree all while working on various WikiTree project teams and challenges.

I've been struggling with what format to document my life's work on my own family genealogy.  I have been working on a "book" or paper format to collect all the data and life stories.  I've progressed quite a bit over the past year in this endeavor.  I got a 3-ring binder and a box of sheet protector sleeves and started working on making my ancestor biographies be all I could make them with my present skills and knowledge of their lives.  I then print off each Bio and place it in my binder.  I started with Generation 0, me, and have sections for Gen 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.  That's going to my great-great-great grandparents! 

Not all are complete as I've skipped around and utilized the ones I worked on the most over the past two years since recommitting myself to the use of WikiTree. Already I can see the volume of paper I will consume.  Maybe this won't be the best format for presentation of my research to share with family members.  Afterall, even if I digitize the paper collection once it's ready it will be volumes of data.  Yet I've spent a lot of hours on getting to this point and I'm quite proud that I have a tangible thing to show for my work.  I've actually caught my 2 adult children that live with me holding it in their hands and curious.  THIS is what I want!

Years ago I thought I'd just whip out a genealogy of my family in book form and move on so I had written an Introduction to my "book" and polished over the last 7 or so years to where I'm finally happy with it.  I share that Introduction with you here.

I saw an interesting genealogy blog today that gave me an idea; document my ancestors here.  So I believe this idea may shift my focus once again to a more accessible version of my "book".  Stay tuned fair reader.  I cannot promised that I will return here quickly with an update, but then again I could very well end up here adding many, many hours of ancestral heritage to this very blog to be me legacy I leave to my family and other curious websurfers.