Slightly off Topic, but how do you write a family history without it just seeming to be like a long list of dates? My family tree program generates all sorts of reports that I'd like to incorporate, but it all seems so very clinical. I've considered slightly fictionalising it and changing black and white characters into coloured characters so to speak and possibly mentioning local and national contemporaneous events. I'd be interested to hear what other people have done.
Martin
Some years ago I started writing my family history in book form, but I'm afraid it has been on hold for a couple of years with the occasional brief addition. I found it best to use a proper DTP package, Serif PagePlus in my case, because you see the layout on screen as you write and can re-position items, adjust fonts, and include photos, charts, etc all in the same program.
The only way I could make it readable was to pick the more interesting characters and make them the focus of a chapter each, along with their near relatives. For example, one ancestor had a shipyard, so I made him and his family the the subject of one chapter and researched some of the local history and padded out the story with events of the time, adding in some national or global events that filled out the bigger picture.
There are a few snippets from my book on my embryonic web site
http://www.stuttle-ancestry.org/index.php . . . also work in progress
[added] I have also included in the book the bare facts in the form of tree charts, etc. I will also include an index of names and, possibly, places which can be generated automatically in PagePlus.
Mike.