In the 1970s I became interested in tracing our family histories. I completed my researching ; myself back to 1798 and in my wife's case back to 1840 and could find no records earlier than that. I then spent 1979 compiling a joint family tree. This took a long time because I was working on it spasmodically between working commissions. As all my basic information was gathered in around 20 notebooks, I then decided to write it out in a form of family history and did this in 1980. I'd like to recommend this as a marvelous subject for handwriting and this is the purpose of this post
I read somewhere that long lines of handwriting can be difficult to read as you go from one line to the next down the page so
I used a simple format of two columns to a page which seemed to work quite well. I started from the top of the tree and worked my way down to my children following the path of direct ancestors. I added dates where known and occupation information. I included all siblings with dates of birth.
There are no such things as genealogical police and you can make a family history as detailed or as simple as you want My children are now grown adults with children of their own, and they value this history book as an historical document which is a very personal legacy having been handwritten. Obviously, this isn't calligraphy, but written at a reasonable speed in my normal handwriting at the time. At an x height of 3mm it's around 40 pages long and this is a typical page.. It took me a long time to produce but it was very much a labour of love. I can think of no better use of handwriting and I know that, being personal it will be around with descendants long after I've gone.
