Chapter name ideas?

Question

I'm making a family history book and each chapter will be a generation
chapter 1 - generation 6
chapter 2 - generation 5 etc

I need ideas on a universal name for each chapter, because gen 6 (my ggg grand parent) will not be the same for everyone who reads this book.

I was aslo thinking 'generation 1800's - 1850's
but that could be more confusing and a lot of over lapping.
Any help would be great :)
Thanks

Answer 1

Maybe you could make the chapter name some thing that was significant in the lives of your ancestors like

-Our First Farm

- The Move To Missouri

-The End of the Civil War



If you've got it in chronological order I'm sure people looking at it can pretty much work it out for themselves.



Edit

Have you actually written this book yet? If you haven't maybe you should do that first, then maybe the names of the chapters will come naturally to you. Do you have just names and dates or do you have some meat to put on the bones, like Great grandma won the county fair blueberry pie bake off in 1902?

I don't know that I would try and put 32 unrelated people into one chapter.

Answer 2

"I think it has a happy ending." If you can't come up with chapter titles, don't name your chapters. Especially if you don't have a firm plot and are making it up as you go along. There is more to a book than "cool" chapter titles.

Answer 3

If you used rough dating instead of generations by chapter, the dates would be easier to use "Generations 5 or 6, 1840-60") and so on, perhaps. I don't know, because I can't see the item in question.

Answer 4

You're going to love this answer or hate it.



Any genealogy program worthy of the name will generate a family history book at the press of a button. You have two choices, "Ancestors of" a designated person, and "Descendants of" a designated person. The one I use, Roots Magic, gives me two formats for ancestors and five formats for Descendants. For any of the reports you get several options for notes, source citations, and index. You get three formats; plain text file, RTF or PDF.



I just generated one for "Ancestors of Ted Pack". It took 7 seconds to generate 200 pages. (It took 30 years to gather the data and many hours to enter it into Roots Magic, but, once it is there, I can print it, to paper or a file, almost instantly.)



The beauty of having it in a genealogy program is a little like the beauty of using "Word" to write a novel. If you want to add a paragraph to chapter 4, you don't have to re-type the whole chapter; just call it up, add the paragraph, then re-print the whole chapter. By the same token, if you find out you had the wrong William Miller as your cousin's great grandfather, or you finally find an elusive great uncle who ran away and joined the circus in 1912, you can correct your data and re-print.



(Roots Magic has another option; burn a whole database to CD.)



I would suggest you enter your data into a good genealogy program, then let it do the work. Entering it will be no more work than typing your family history book in "Word", and the genealogy program will catch mistakes "Word" will not. To take one example, I had a guy born in 1888, died in 1962. I slipped and had him born in 188, which was the early Roman Empire. My program told me he was 1774 years old when he died. "Word" doesn't subtract for you and would not have caught the error.



I like Roots Magic. Several other regulars like Legacy. Family Tree Maker is the market leader. They are all about $29. You can Google "Genealogy software comparison" to get professional reviews.



Once the data is in, generate one report for you and your siblings, another for each set of cousins. The chapter headings will be "Generation 1", "Generation 2", etc. If your ancestors on your father's side were famous and/or interesting, your cousins on your mother's side may be interested in a copy of your ancestors; they may not. You could also run four reports, "Ancestors of ---" one for each of your grandparents, and send copies of each to the appropriate cousins; you and your siblings would get all four copies.



If that seems like too much work to you, I'd suggest you write several books, starting with each grandparent and working back, titling the chapters "Generation" and the number, and, again, sharing with the cousins involved. No one reads a family history book because it has engaging titles.

Answer 5

chapter 3: the day i fisted a hamster