A Helpful Miscellany

The following lessons were presented as seminars and webinars for genealogy organisations such as Legacy Family Tree Webinars and Unlock the Past.

    Each lesson will ultimately be expanded upon – or already has been expanded upon – for Writing Fabulous Family Histories courses. For example, much of the lesson Turning Dry Facts into Exciting Narrative forms the basis for the Words on the Page course, while one section was used in the Our Ancestral Surnames course.

    These individual lessons are being made available now so you can benefit from the relevant information before the course is available. 

Most of these lessons are only available to Annual Members.

Some can be purchased as an individual subscription. 

Contact Carol for any further information:

carol@writingfabulousfamilyhistories.com

​As every writer knows, the words we use matter. The right words can draw people in, engage their imaginations, and motivate them to keep reading.

The lesson can also be accessed via  an individual subscription. It is also expanded upon in the Words, Words, Words course.  

Video duration:          52 minutes  

Handout:                      Yes

Have you noticed that the given names of our eighteenth and nineteenth century British ancestors were drawn from a surprisingly small pool? But how small a pool? How common were our ancestors’ given names?

    John for example was carried by one in every five English males. The four most popular male names were carried by one in every two males. And the top thirteen male names were carried by 87% of the male population indicating that all of the other male names in use at the time were together borne by only 13% of the population. That being the case, the usual popularity lists found on the internet – those that record the top 10, 20, 50 names – are unhelpful unless they provide frequency statistics.

    This seminar focuses on given name popularities, changes in popularity, and the reasons for such changes. It also covers spelling variants, abbreviations and diminutives. For example, if you don’t know that Polly was a diminutive of Mary or that Nellie was a diminutive of Ellen and Eleanor and Helen, you may struggle to find your ancestors’ entries.

    Our ancestors’ names provide the gateway into tracing our family history. Learning more about their names may prove useful in determining their ancestry or finding other family connections.

Video duration:          Two parts totalling 63 minutes  

Handout:                      Yes

If you have already worked out that ‘Mc’ and ‘Mac’ surnames are the most complicated British surnames, you must listen to this webinar. And if you haven’t already worked this out, you must absolutely listen to this webinar.

    "Mc" surnames are double the trouble because they can suffer distortions at the beginning, middle and end of the "Mc" prefix as well as at the beginning, middle and end of the rest of the surname, the root word. Sound glides are a particular problem, in which the "k" sound at the end of the "Mc" prefix distorts the first letter of the root word (e.g. McCue/McKew/McHugh, McLachlan/McGloughlan).    Transcription errors can also produce a non-‘Mc’ surname (e.g. Mackever/Markever) which can prove a trap for the unwary.

    This seminar will help keep you sane when you encounter the complexities of these mad Scottish-origin surnames.

Video duration:          58 minutes  

Handout:                   Yes

To write a family history, we must convert our ancestral information into paragraphs of prose. But how do we group the resulting paragraphs to produce a coherent structure? We start by asking ourselves what we wish to achieve. Are we writing a history that focuses on a surname line? Or one that covers all of our ancestors, or all of our descendants, or all of the ancestors and descendants of a particular person? And how do we craft an individual biography? Do we produce a family history that is a group of stand-alone biographies or one that has a narrative-style flow? These and other subjects are discussed in this simple guide to structuring a family history.  

This lesson can currently only be accessed by Annual Members. Contact Carol if you would like it made available as an individual lesson subscription.  

This subject will be discussed in more detail in a WFFH course to be published in 2023.  

Video duration:          68 minutes 

Handout:                    Yes

Most family history book titles are boring: The Christie Family History, Our Watson Story. This is because most genealogists don’t know how to craft a good one. But what if there was an easy way of crafting catchy titles?

    In this lesson, Carol Baxter provides structures you can follow and words you can appropriate to generate titles that will not only interest your readers but amuse them. It even includes a sealed section, one that the straight-laced would be better to skip entirely.

Video duration:    Four parts = 68 minutes  

Handout:                   Yes