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Thread: Just do it!

  1. #1
    mfwebb
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    Default Just do it!

    When I started my family history 25 tears ago it was with the intention of making a book out of it – not for sale you understand, just for my own reference and maybe family members. The title of my research came about 2 years in – Mysterious Origins – and I have stuck with that title ever since.

    My research never seemed to be complete enough to do the book so, a couple of years ago, I put my efforts on my own website www.
    mysteriousorigins.co.uk

    For the last year or so I have made no meaningful advance in any of my research although there are, as always, all the peripheral lines to research backwards further. So, the book is almost complete with my research to date. I have printed and amended the proof and now have a “working copy” of the book in a spring-back folder – all 261 pages plus a fold-out family tree. I am waiting delivery of a new laser printer before I print the final copy for binding at a local university bindery.

    I thought fellow researchers might just be interested in how I put it all together because that had been a stumbling block for me for some time – the daunting prospect of compiling it all with an index etc was just too much to let me get started. Then I stumbled on a programme called Ancestral Author reviewed in a family history magazine. This was free to download and it was not long before I realised that this was exactly what I needed, so I bought it. The free download is fully functional but the printed output contains watermarks – you have to buy it to lose the company watermark.

    I already had my stories about family members and places which I had been compiling from the start and the photographs and illustrations to go with them. I have my Brother’s Keeper programme for producing the GedCom and I have TreeDraw for producing my own trees from the GedCom and saving them as pdf files.

    Ancestral Author allows me to insert titles, chapter headings, stories as text files, photos and illustrations as jpg files and ancestral and descendant trees from the GedCom; it then compiles everything into a pdf file for printing complete with a list of contents, an index and a list of source and end notes. The beauty is that if I make amendments (and I have made many along the way) I just recompile the book in Ancestral Author and it repaginates everything.

    The downside is that there is limited flexibility in the formatting of text (it only allows Times, Helvetica or Courier as text choices) and in the positioning of photos and illustrations. The sizing of photos and illustrations is done automatically by the programme depending on where you choose to place them. I think the concept behind the programme is that it compiles everything into a single pdf file which you could then send to a commercial printer for printing and binding.

    I chose not to include “everything” within Ancestral Author. I have tables and other things which did not compile to my satisfaction when scanned and inserted as jpg files. So I chose to insert blank pages into the programme at appropriate places which are numbered in sequence and then print from my original programme (Excel or Word or TreeDraw) onto the blank numbered pages.

    I have to say I am delighted with the result. There will only be one hard-bound copy for my own use but I have 2 family members so far who want a copy so I have said I will print and compile copies for them in spring-back binders – they will pay for the binder and the printing of the family tree on large format paper which I have to pay for commercially.

    I have to say I have no connection whatsoever with Ancestral Author, I am just a satisfied customer and I am sure that there are other similar programmes available. My intention is to give others some inspiration to get on with publishing the book they have always promised to do.

    Just do it!

    All the best and Good Luck with your research.

    Malcolm Webb
    Lincoln UK

  2. #2
    Name well known on Brit-Gen
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    South Australia
    Posts
    4,594

    Default

    Congrats on sticking with it Malcom. You've made it all sound so much easier that probably we all thought.
    Happy Families
    Wendy
    Count your Blessings, they'll all add up in the end.

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