« Reply #20 on: Wednesday 28 November 18 13:05 GMT (UK) »
I set about 'writing' the family history about four years ago. I had researched for over fifteen years and wanted to find a way of presenting the information in a reasonably accessible form and to set it in some historical/social context.
I explored various prepublished programs but ended up using Word, producing a document for each family in the pedigree. I included maps, images of buildings (homes/churches/workplaces etc), newspaper articles, images cropped from census returns, parish registers etc.
I found Word to be pretty flexible in it's ability to arrange images and text. My contents page consists of a list of the family pages, followed by a 5 generation pedigree for that line which acts as a 'map' to the contents. It has taken many hours and I refined my approach as I went along (meaning that I have revisited the first line I tackled and revised the documents to reflect the final line) but I now have four 'books' for each main line which can be readily adapted to include information discovered in the future.
I have attached an image of what a family word document looks like.
Newson, Steavenson, Walker, Taylor, Dobson, Gardner, Clark, Wilson, Smith, Crossland, Goldfinch, Burnett, Hebdon, Peers, Strother, Askew, Bower, Beckwith, Patton, White, Turner, Nelson, Gilpin, Tomlinson, Thompson, Spedding, Wilkes, Carr, Butterfield, Ormandy, Wilkinson, Cocking, Glover, Pennington, Bowker, Kitching, Langhorn, Haworth, Kirkham.