Mellen Family History Reprints

The Common in Framingham Center - Image via Wikipedia

Please see the post at Sea Genes – Family History & Genealogy Research.

Announce: White Center News Extracts, 1943-1949

White Center News Extracts, by N. P. Maling, just published, is a collection of newspaper birth, marriage, death, and other entries from The White Center News, covering a 6-1/4 year period. The newspaper, published on Fridays (with variations) had a coverage area including the 35th Avenue, Arbor Heights, Beverly Park, Boulevard Park, Burien, Cedarhurst, Dumar, Delridge, Five Corners, Hazel Valley, Highland Park, Mt. View, Riverton Heights, Seahurst, South Park, Sunnydale, Three Tree Point, and White Center neighborhoods. There is also news from West Seattle, to the north of these neighborhoods.

There are forty pages of listings. Information given includes the primary person’s name; the event; the event date; optional age at death; the parent(s), spouse name, or comments; the publication date, and page number.

White Center News Extracts is available at Lulu.com for purchase as a print or download item.

Recent Work

Image via Wikipedia

The New England Historic and Genealogical Society’s Register has a unique and sometimes difficult style. The Register has been published for about 160 years, now, and although the style is more recent than that, it is fairly standardized across the past-time and profession.

I’d like to share with you an example of what it looks like in a piece of my research. The subject is an early New England family which I am researching and planning to publish a 10-generation study of. This particular branch of the family, Richard Mellen’s, is not going to be in the published work.

Mellen_Richard_3gen.

I hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions about creating your own genealogy in this format, please contact me here.

Thanks.

On Indexing (current works)

I am currently preparing an index for a family history. The index will include places as well as people. A town, county, and state name index is important to family histories. The reason for including place names in the index is to allow the reader to follow a larger family group on its migrations to various places.

In another family history, covering colonial and federal period Massachusetts, the family consistently expanded outwards to New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and New York, making the project that much larger. By including these items in the index, the reader can follow a particular branch of the family in its outward peregrinations.

Sometimes, if the family history is large enough, or complex enough, separate indexes might work better to allow for quick finding in the text. You might want to consider having the primary family in its own index, everyone else related to the primary family in a general index, and place names in a third, or subject index.

 A subject index in a family history would include topics such as farming, occupations, the names of prominent universities the family members have graduated from, and other such matters. One of my current indexing projects includes references to about a dozen universities and several dozen more graduates of those universities. As is a major feature of the family history, it is imperative that they be indexed; perhaps names of graduates under the university heading, or perhaps just the universities referenced where they occur in the text. It is a judgment call whether to index the graduates and universities together.

The level of detail in a surname index can be important, especially with larger family histories. People oftentimes name their sons and daughters after other members of the family. For instance, a son would be named after one of his grandfathers. This pattern can continue for generations. In the index, one would ideally include the birth and death years, as well as at least the middle initial, if not the full middle name, of each member of the family with the same given name.

NPM

© 2009 N. P. Maling – Seattle Book Scouts

Genealogical Writing

Genealogical writing is somewhat different from most other forms of communications. It is more technical than say writing a blog article. The majority of writers of genealogical materials need to pay attention to details found only in this type of communication.

There are a number of styles and guidelines that share common features, among them are stylistic details the writer needs to include, such as:

• properly superscripting the given names of the family members;
• following a specific style of generational numbers; and
• making sure indents and formatting marks conform to a specific style.

Most genealogists follow two major journal styles. For New England-based families, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society Register (NEHGR) style is common. For families based in other parts of the country, or just because it makes more sense to the particular author, the National Genealogical Society (NGS) style is used. The NEHGR and NGS styles are similar in most respects but have significant differences in the way generations follow each other.

Having an editor review and revise an article before submission to a journal or newsletter speeds the process of acceptance and publishing. As well, if an author is planning to publish a family histories, having an editor review it for accuracy and completeness is a good move. Copyediting and proofreading are also important to producing a high quality, publishable family history. An editor or proofreader is likely to catch, for instance a person’s name, spelled one way in one sketch, but another way in a different sketch. To make sure that it is the same person, the editor corresponds with the author and corrects one or the other under the author’s guidance.

I will cover indexing a genealogical publication in a later post.

NPM

Seattle Book Scouts