Sharing Your Work

Page Updated on July 28, 2007

Eventually you will want to share your work with others, and there are a variety of ways you can do this.

Publishing GEDCOM Files (on the Internet)

GEDCOM files were developed by the Mormon church, an organization know for their intense involvement in genealogy. The computer file can be produced by most genealogy software programs, and most genealogy programs can import GEDCOM files. You can publish your GEDCOM on the Internet for others to download and look at by posting it on your own web page or by submitting it to a service that stores GEDCOM files in a database.

Displaying Family Trees

You can print your black-and-white family tree from your printer and stick it on your wall, or get fancy and make a piece of art out of it (e.g. make a decorative family tree with embroidery, quilting, painting, woodworking, and so forth), which will eventually become an heirloom. As gifts for other family members, you can create such artistic family trees for them.

Writing Biographies

Every individual has a story, and a biography is a good way to tell it. The best format for a biography is chronological order (start at the beginning, and end at the end). Along with the biography, you may wish to include a map of places where the individual lived and a timeline of that individual's life along with other historical events, and don't forget those photographs.

Writing Family Stories / History

A family story is like a biography about an entire family. It's more than a collection of individual biographies; it's a story about how all of these individuals interacted and influenced each other. A family story can be written in several ways. You can chose a family unit (e.g. mother, father, and children) and only write about them in depth, or expand and tell the story of them and their relatives. Some family stories are limited to "everyone with this last name," "all the ancestors of this individual," or "everyone descended from this individual" while others include everyone in the family tree. It just depends on how much work you wish to put into it.

Putting Together a Scrapbook

Scrapbooking is incredibly popular and easy, but it can get expensive. It's an excellent way of preserving photographs and documents and expressing yourself creatively at the same time. A scrapbook can become a family heirloom as well. The only drawback to creating a scrapbook is that you can't distribute it to everyone, so I recommend making a scrap book, scanning the pages into your computer using a high resolution color scanner, and printing the pages on a high quality color printer to create booklets you can pass out to other family members or post on the Internet. Or you can use your scrapbook to preserve original documents that you use as sources in your website or book.

Putting Together a Web Site

Creating a web site is an inexpensive way to share your work with your family members and the rest of the world. Some genealogy software will automatically put together a site for you, but I recommend learning about web site authoring and creating your own, either from scratch or by using the genealogy software and customizing the pages to your needs.

Putting Together a Book

A book is a bit more expensive, but it's nice to have a paper and print copy that can be shared even with family members who don't know how to work a computer. You can publish the book yourself and a local printing shop (even a place like Kinko's) and make just enough copies for your family members, or sell it publicly by self-publishing {such as with a service like iUniverse) or submit it to a professional publisher. Putting a book together is a bit more complicated than building a web site because you need to consider things like the index, table of contents, and so forth, which take extra time.