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Writing a family history narrative can be overwhelming, especially when figuring out where to start. Some genealogists turn to tools like RootsMagic to generate narrative reports as a first draft. While this might seem like a quick fix to break through writer’s block, there are a few challenges you should be aware of before you rely on these reports for your family history story.
Why RootsMagic Narrative Reports Seem Like a Good Idea
RootsMagic and other genealogy software programs allow you to take the raw data from your research—names, dates, events—and compile it into a narrative report. This report can organize your ancestor’s life chronologically, offering you a starting point for a multi-generational story. It’s an easy way to get something on the page and start shaping your story.
For someone who’s staring at a blank screen, these reports can help provide a structure, making the task of writing less daunting. However, the real work begins when you move from this basic framework to creating a compelling, detailed family history. And that’s where the problems start to emerge.
The Real Challenge: Editing and Expanding the Narrative
Once you generate the narrative report, you’ll quickly realize that it’s not a fully polished story. The sentences may sound stiff, and the facts may lack depth or context. As you begin to rearrange events, add personal stories, or weave in details from historical documents, things can get messy—especially when it comes to keeping your citations organized.
Here’s the biggest challenge: when you start editing the report, moving facts around, or adding context, the citations often become disconnected from the relevant details. This can leave you scrambling to match sources back to the correct events—a time-consuming and frustrating process.
Let me know if you need more clarification.
How to Manage Citations While Editing
If you do decide to use a RootsMagic report as your starting point, you’ll need to take some extra steps to avoid a citation nightmare:
Convert citations into footnotes or endnotes right away. This keeps the sources attached to the correct information as you move things around, saving you a lot of time later on.
Skip the citations entirely at first. Focus on shaping the story and adding depth, then go back and manually re-add the citations from your RootsMagic database once your draft is complete.
Both of these approaches require extra work, and honestly, I find them to be more trouble than they’re worth. Instead, I prefer to build the narrative by working directly with historical documents, extracting the key details, and piecing the story together myself. This method allows for more flexibility in how you arrange events, add context, and craft a narrative that flows well. It also avoids the citation headaches that often come with using pre-generated reports.
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Is a Narrative Report Right for You?
If you want to write a multi-generational family story or simply need a structured starting point, a RootsMagic narrative report can help. It’s especially useful for organizing large amounts of data chronologically. But it’s important to understand the limitations—narrative reports are just a skeleton, and you’ll still need to flesh out the story, handle citations, and make sure the writing feels authentic and engaging.
How I Recommend You Write a Family History
If you’re ready to dive into a more customized approach to family history writing, I recommend starting with the genealogy documents. Here are three resources I highly recommend you consult.
Extract the facts and piece together the story in a natural way. While it seems to take more time upfront, you’ll have much more control over the flow of the narrative—and you’ll avoid the headaches that come with editing a pre-made report.
