Letting the past speak: how to write a compelling family history

Though many people take steps towards writing their family history, turning that research into a published book is a rarer endeavour – unless you have a connection to a famous person or noteworthy event in your background, it can be tricky to find a readership for your story outside of your immediate sphere.

Graeme Davison is an exception to this rule. A historian by trade, Davison has authored two books of family history: Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia's Golden Age (2015) and My Grandfather's Clock: Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family (2023). Beautifully written and deeply researched, these books offer insight into the lives of Davison's ancestors down both his maternal and paternal lines, as well as into his own life and engagement with the study of history.

Davison began researching My Grandfather’s Clock in 2018, not long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon stuck at home, he used primarily online tools to conduct genealogical research. But for Davison, the research is only half the story: the real question is how you go about shaping that research into a compelling narrative.

The key, he says, is situating your family’s story within broader social and historical developments: ‘Thinking about how you turn a genealogy into a story is a very important part of the process. Try to register the setting in which people are living.’

Here, Davison shares his top tips on how to research and write your family history.

Four key sources for writing your family history

Ancestry: ‘This is an essential one,’ says Davison. It contains a wealth of primary source material such as immigration records, censuses, civil registration indexes, convict records and more, as well as searchable family trees submitted by Ancestry members, which may help you discover new links within your own family tree. You can access Ancestry for free through State Library Victoria when you are on site.

Trove: This enormous database of digitised historical newspapers offers a wealth of information to family historians, especially for fleshing out the world of the past. ‘It opens up sources that were always there, but couldn’t be interrogated until now,’ says Davison. ‘Once I’d established my ancestors’ connection to an institution or a place, I used Trove to research them, which allowed me to build up a more rounded picture of the whole environment.’

Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages: These historical indexes allow you to research births, baptisms, marriages, burials and deaths dating back to 1836. ‘Australian Births, Marriages and Deaths records are amongst the richest in the world,’ says Davison, noting that unlike those of many other countries, an Australian death certificate contains crucial information like migration history.

Public Records Office Victoria: This site gives you access to records created by Victorian Government departments and authorities including courts, local councils, schools, public hospitals and other public offices. ‘Court records and police documents can be very valuable if your ancestor had a criminal record,’ says Davison. ‘Court depositions will give you a lot of information about how people lived.’

For those with ancestry in the United Kingdom, Davison recommends The British Newspaper Archive or British Library Newspapers (accessible from home with free State Library Victoria membership), which offer a similar service to Trove, and Scotland’s People, a gateway to historical Scottish records like census returns, legal records, employment records, and migration records.

Getting creative with records

As a historian, Davison is interested in how records can be read in unexpected ways to yield new insights: ‘You will often get good results if you interrogate sources from a different angle,’ he notes.

As part of his own research, Davison read The Drove Roads of Scotland by ARB Haldane, a study of pre-Industrial cattle tracks in Scotland. In it, Haldane argues that the way people travelled through the landscape was dictated by the movements of livestock with the seasons. This research allowed Davison to draw new conclusions about why his ancestors might have moved from one region to another.

‘When you start to look at the country from that vantage point, you realise that people are not travelling from place to place as the crow flies – they’re following these cattle tracks,’ says Davison. ‘Then the migration question is posed in a different way.’

When he came to reconstructing the world of his childhood in mid-century Essendon, Davison turned to an unusual source: a collection of aerial photographs by aviator Charles Pratt held in State Library Victoria’s collection. While he had initially accessed them to gather data on the history of Australian back yards, he found that looking at the photographs of his house and surrounding suburbs brought back vivid childhood memories.

‘As I drilled down into those photographs, it reminded me of things that I knew but had forgotten,’ says Davison.

A historian’s top tips for writing a compelling family history

Prioritise primary sources

‘The stuff people post on forums and the like is often inaccurate – you need to apply a bit of critical thought and scepticism. If you can, always try to look at the original sources yourself.’

Read widely

‘I think of a genealogy as a skeleton, it’s the bare bones. But then you’ve got to put flesh on the bones – and the flesh comes through rounding out the picture of the world in which they lived. Do some reading around the subject. Read about the region you’re interested in, read about the history of the family of that period – not just your family, but what’s happening to the family in general. When you do this, things that at first sight seem incongruous or you can’t understand, start to become intelligible.’

Consider the shape of your story

‘If you’re enjoying researching your ancestors but would like your children or your friends to read what you’ve discovered, then a lot of the effort should go into thinking about how you would turn it into a really good story. Part of the success of telling a good story is to leave an element of surprise for the reader. You, as the researcher, know what’s going to happen, but to tell the story successfully, you need to keep the reader a little bit in the dark.’

Visit the Library to access records in person

‘Remember that there is a range of primary sources beyond what you can get from Ancestry. If you’re here in Melbourne, and you’re working on your family history, and it turns out those primary sources are in Goulburn, or in East London, then come to the State Library and read about that region. The things that might not make sense to you from a genealogical chart will begin to make more sense once you know about the region and time period your ancestors lived in.’

Are you writing your own family history? State Library Victoria offers training guides, workshops, and help from Librarians throughout any stage of your geneaological journey. Explore our resources below or plan your visit to access materials on site. 

Further resources:

• Family history tools and resources at State Library Victoria
• What's on for National Family History Month
• Publishing your family history

Image: Susan Gordon-Brown, Graeme Davison, 2005; H2005.82/7