Number of lessons
on website
40
FREE lessons
Tracing Your Family History is a humorous guide for beginners and non-beginners.
I want to write ... something is the first lesson in the Words on the Page course.
Your host (Carol Baxter)
The question I’m asked most often by genealogists is this:
“How do I write something interesting when I’ve found nothing but dry facts for my ancestor, when I have little more than names and dates?”
It’s a great question, a valid question. Because we’re unlikely to find much more than names, dates and places for most of our ancestors.
However, think about this. For every fact we find about our ancestors, we’ve also found a world of lived experiences. So we can tap into their lived experiences in a way that brings them to life for the reader.
This does NOT mean fictionalising our family histories. This does NOT mean “recreating” scenes or conversations involving long dead ancestors.
How can I state this with such certainty?
Because I don’t make things up in my “popular histories”. My genre is called “narrative nonfiction” – history told as a story – and I’ve worked out how to use the literary tools we all have at our disposal to turn dry facts into exciting narrative. Indeed, The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller is being turned into a $10 million budget, internationally-produced TV series because it's such a fabulous story written in a gripping style.
Latest news
New course
(Published July 2022)
Did you know that you can change the dynamic of an entire sentence simply by changing a single word? This is the easiest way to empower our prose and engage our readers.
This course has ten lessons as follows:
1. Words, Words, Words
2. The Verve in our Verbs
3. Adding Oomph to our Genealogy Writing
4. Passive Power
5. All that other verb stuff ...
6. Adventuring with Adverbs
7. Our Noble Nouns
8. All that other noun stuff ...
9. The Objectives of Our Adjectives ....
10. And everything else ...
Lesson title slides include the following:
Course coming
in the next 2 months
Courses coming
in the next 12 months
Review comments
I’m working hard to listen to as many sessions of Words, Words, Words as I can. I am chuckling to myself that someone who studied Latin, French and German at English “O” level and English Lit at “A” level plus acquired three tertiary qualifications and endured years of report writing for one of the largest corporations in the world, can still get so many “light bulb moments” from your talks. The grammatical structure is reasonably familiar but it is the way that you illustrate how to use different structures to such good effect that has me absolutely wrapped. Loving it!
Di Johnson, Tasmania
Subscriptions
You can pay for one course at a time, allowing you to access its lessons for three months.
Alternatively, you can purchase an Annual Membership, allowing you to access all of its courses for a year, including new courses published within your membership year. The Annual Membership has a special launch discount price until 31 December 2022.
Zoom Q&A meetings
Each month I host a 60-minute Zoom meeting for Annual Members and Course subscribers (current and past) in which we discuss different writing topics. Email for the booking link:
carol@writingfabulousfamilyhistories.com
Next meeting (time/date)
- Sydney: Saturday 24 September 2022, 9am
- London: Saturday 24 September 2022, 12am
- New York: Friday 23 September 2022, 7pm
- Los Angeles: Friday 23 September, 4pm
About me
While writing a family history, I stumbled across the story of a political sex scandal in Sydney in 1829. I was up for a new challenge, so I decided to write the story as "popular history". But I’d never had any writing training and I hadn't studied history at university so I hadn’t been taught to write history in the usual dry academic way.
Astonishly, my unfinished manuscript was picked up in a matter of weeks by the first mainstream publisher I approached. Even more astonishly, they paid me a large advance for the rights to publish it
In 2006, An Irresistible Temptation: The true story of Jane New and a colonial scandal reached the bookshops. It sold thousands of copies and received critical acclaim, even from the academic history community.
The genealogical community asked me to help them write interesting family histories. And so began my journey as a professional writer and as a writing teacher.
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