Mayflower

How to Make Your Written Family History More Exciting

How to Make Your Written Family History More Exciting

If you decide to write and publish your family history, you must decide if you just want those who share your common ancestors to read it, or if you want to sell it to a wider audience. A family history for a wider audience has to be more than just names, dates, and places. Here’s how to inject some fascinating readability into your family history that will make it more appealing to a wide audience.

While most written and published family histories are meant for just members of that family to read, or those that share a common ancestor if it is a particularly long family history, there have been some that have gone on the market as big sellers to a wider, general audience. What makes the difference between a family history that gets a few sales from people related to the ancestors mentioned in the book and one that a large, public audience wants to read? The main difference is excitement. Just about any family history can become a good seller on the general book market if it has some excitement in it.

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Where Were the Pilgrims Really Going?

Where-Were-the-Pilgrims-Really-Going-AncestralFindings

We all know the story of the Pilgrims landing in Massachusetts and coming ashore on Plymouth Rock to start a new colony based on religious freedom, and having Thanksgiving giving thanks to God for his bounty and blessings with the local Natives. Every American school child is told this story early on in their educations. The story has some truths to it, but it leaves out a lot. It is basically the sanitized and simplified version of what really went on when the Pilgrims came to America… a story suitable for children and one that instills pride in one’s country, but leaving out the more harsh details of the tale. For example, the Pilgrims were coming here to practice religious freedom… their own; they were considered too radical in their interpretation of Christianity in England, but once in America, they would tolerate no other type of religious practice in their newly formed town. Further, the Pilgrims lost more than half the passengers of the Mayflower during the first hard winter in America and never would have made it through the cold months had it not been for the assistance of local Natives.

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Mayflower Passengers: Not All Were There for Religious Reasons

Mayflower Passengers: Not All Were There for Religious Reasons

Though the Pilgrims (a separate group from the Puritans who came just after them) were all about establishing a religious community in the New World, they were forced to take on non-religious passengers to pay for the voyage. This was something they agreed to only very reluctantly, as they did not want their community corrupted. The elders of the church, who had led England some years previously to set up a community in the much more religiously accommodating Leyden, Holland, discussed at length whether they should allow passengers from outside their community on the ship. They were already concerned that the liberal, and what they considered hedonistic, atmosphere in Leyden was having a detrimental effect on their children. This is why they were so eager to go to the New World. They couldn’t go back to England, and Leyden was too permissive and secular in its nature, though it was more than willing to allow the Pilgrims to live there.

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