Last week I discussed Family History Work as a Sabbath activity.  I really like the idea of dedicated time to sit down and work on this sort of thing and I also believe that there’s more to Family History work than just names and dates.  It’s a history, and history is nowhere without a story.

I also discussed interviewing members of your family and shared a recent interview I held in regards to my Great Great Grandmother.  Conducting an interview and gathering these stories is great, but what do we do next?

We should prepare to shares these details.  The first thing I recommend is that after you write a story, you then send it to the person you interviewed for their fact checking. I ran into an issue where my mother was not clear about an item and I needed to change it before my final draft was complete. Glad I verified!

Now that you’ve accomplished this, how do you share? The easiest is to then just send this out to everyone in your family or begin to put together a book.  If you want to go further, or access these capabilities in other ways, you can share the story with your online tree.  This week, I’m going to tell you how to share this on both Ancestry as well as Family Search.  It’s really easy, and I feel like you should all know how to do it.  This will help others seeking information to learn more about a deceased ancestor!

**Please respect privacy of those who are living if you do this.**

Ancestry:

I thought we’d start with Ancestry due to its popularity and rich variety of resources. Here we go!

Log into your Ancestry account and go to the individual’s profile.

Select his or her gallery.  Hopefully you have pictures, but if not you can do this here!

Choose “Add” and click on “Create Story”.  (You can choose to upload a photo or story from your computer through this drop down menu.)

Toggle: “I want to write a story” and away you go! I pasted my story into the text box since it was already written.  You can then choose to add other members of your family tree referenced to this story.  For example, I referenced my grandfather because I mentioned him several times.

You can give a description, date, and a place if you like.

I really like Ancestry because you can save stories about the individual, but it also includes interesting facts about historical events near your ancestor.

Make sure you click “Save Story” and you are done! I did a quick check of my grandfather I referenced, and the story was in his gallery as well!

Go to page 2 for information on how to do this in Family Search.