Start Here: Find the Guide That's Right for Where You Are
Maybe you found one family history writing and research guide and you’re wondering what else exists. Maybe you’re standing at the beginning of a research problem and you don’t know which direction to go. Maybe you’ve been doing genealogy for years and something has shifted – you’re not just collecting records anymore, you want to do something with them.
This page is for all of those situations. It’s organized around the problem you’re actually trying to solve, not around what the guides are called.
Find your situation. Start there.
You’ve been doing genealogy for years – and now you want to write.
You’ve hit a wall. The records have run out – or they were never there.
You’re researching an immigrant ancestor and losing them between two worlds.
Something happened – and the official record doesn’t tell you what it was.
Your family tree has a rupture in it – and the records preserved one side better than the other.
You’ve done the research. Now you’re asking whether it could become fiction.
You’ve been doing genealogy for years – and now you want to write.
You have folders. Binders. A family tree with hundreds of names, dozens of stories you’ve pieced together from census records and ship manifests and newspaper archives and courthouse files. You know how to research. That part you’ve figured out.
What you haven’t figured out is how to turn what you’ve found into something a reader can actually experience. How to take a person who lived and died a hundred and thirty years ago and make them real on the page. How to decide what the story is, where it starts, what to leave out. How to write honestly about people who were complicated – because they all were.
That crossing – from fact-finder to storyteller – is what this collection was built for.
Start with: The Adventure Story: Writing Narrative Nonfiction That Moves – the craft guide for turning documented lives into narrative that moves. It covers the seven decisions every family history writer has to make, with real research and real stories showing how those decisions work in practice.
Then: The Complicated Family: Researching and Writing About Divorce, Remarriage, and Family Rupture in Your Ancestry – because almost every family tree has a rupture in it, and writing about it fairly is one of the hardest craft problems in this work.
And if fiction is where you’re headed: What You Owe Them: A Guide for Family Historians Writing Historical Fiction— the ethical and craft framework for making the crossing from nonfiction into fiction without losing your integrity or your people.
The foundation underneath all of it: The Decade-by-Decade Research Guide for Writers – because the writer who understands what records actually contain, what they can confirm and what they can’t, writes with a specificity and honesty that no amount of craft instruction can substitute for.
You’ve hit a wall. The records have run out – or they were never there.
You’ve searched everywhere you know to search. The census. The vital records. The obvious databases. And either you’re not finding her, or the records that exist aren’t telling you what you need to know. You’re stuck, and you’re not sure what you’re missing.
This is almost always a scope problem, not a dead-end problem. The records exist – they’re just not the records you’ve been looking for.
Start with: The Decade-by-Decade Research Guide for Writers – the wide-angle map of every record type across nine decades of American history. What existed, what it contained, and what changed. If you don’t know what records should exist for your ancestor’s time and place, this is where to find out.
If she’s disappeared after marriage: The Archive Wasn’t Built for Her: Researching Women Who Were Systematically Excluded – because women disappear in the official record for specific structural reasons, and finding them requires knowing where the system didn’t look.
If there’s almost nothing: The Ones History Forgot to Remember: Why Some Lives Leave Almost No Archive – and How to Find Them Anyway – for ancestors the official record largely ignored, and the strategies for finding the traces that survive.
If you need to go beyond the obvious sources: The Social Network: Using Organizational Membership to Research Your Ancestor’s World – the records most researchers skip, and why they’re often where the real material is.
You’re researching an immigrant ancestor and losing them between two worlds.
You have them on one side of the ocean or the other – maybe both – but you can’t connect the pieces. The ship manifest raises more questions than it answers. The name changed. The village of origin doesn’t appear in any database you’ve tried. Or you’ve found the arrival but you can’t find what came before it, or what came right after.
Start with: They Came By Ship: A Practical Guide to Immigrant Arrival Records – what the manifest actually tells you, what surrounds it that most researchers miss, and how to work with the complications that make immigrant arrival records genuinely hard.
Then: The Immigrant Story: Researching and Writing About Ancestors Who Crossed an Ocean – the full research and craft framework for the immigrant story, including how to work across languages and borders, and how to write honestly about what the archive can only partially recover.
If movement is the story: Following the Journey: Tracing Movement, Migration, and Relocation in the Record – for ancestors who kept moving after they arrived, and the records that track them across state lines and across decades.
When you’re ready to write it: The Adventure Story: Writing Narrative Nonfiction That Moves – because the immigrant crossing is one of the most powerful forms of the journey narrative, and writing it well requires specific craft decisions about how movement becomes meaning.
Something happened – and the official record doesn’t tell you what it was.
There’s a death that doesn’t add up. A gap in the record that’s too large to be coincidence. A family story that keeps referring to something nobody will explain directly. An official investigation that you’re increasingly sure got it wrong.
You have the feeling that the truth is there – in the archive, in the newspapers, in the records nobody thought to connect – but you need a way to find it and evaluate it.
Start with: Reading Old Newspapers Like a Detective – because newspapers are where events that never made it into official records were documented in real time, and reading them well is a skill most researchers underestimate.
Then: The Zoom-In Method: How to Research a Single Historical Event from Every Angle – the four-phase framework for exhausting every source around a single event before you decide what you know and what you can’t recover.
If the official record is genuinely inadequate: The Cold Case: Research Strategies for Unresolved Historical Mysteries— how to evaluate an incomplete investigation, read physical evidence in historical context, and write honestly about what the archive cannot fully resolve.
If the death certificate is the starting point: What the Death Certificate Doesn’t Tell You – the records that surround the certificate, and what they reveal that the certificate itself cannot.
Your family tree has a rupture in it – and the records preserved one side better than the other.
Divorce. Contested custody. A child who disappeared between censuses. A remarriage that nobody talked about. A family that split and never put itself back together.
These stories exist in the archive – often in more detail than you expected – but finding all of it, and then writing about it fairly, requires a specific kind of discipline. The archive almost always preserved one person’s version better than the other’s. A good researcher names that asymmetry. A good writer holds it.
Start with: When the Marriage Ended: A Quick Guide to U.S. Divorce Records in Family History Research – what divorce records exist, where they are, and what they contain.
Then: The Complicated Family: Researching and Writing About Divorce, Remarriage, and Family Rupture in Your Ancestry – the full guide to researching the overlapping records of complex families and writing about them without flattening what the archive left genuinely unresolved.
If there were children caught in the middle: The Children Who Didn’t Survive and Childhood in the Archive – because children are the hardest thread to follow in a complicated family, and they deserve to be followed.
You’ve done the research. Now you’re asking whether it could become fiction.
You’ve spent years with this family. You know their world – the records, the newspapers, the court files, the letters. You know what the archive can confirm and where it goes silent. And you’re starting to wonder whether the story you’ve assembled could become historical fiction – whether the gaps that the archive can’t fill are actually the creative territory where the fiction lives.
They are. But crossing from nonfiction into fiction with integrity requires a specific framework – one that takes the obligation to real people seriously even as it claims the freedom that fiction allows.
Start with: What You Owe Them: A Guide for Family Historians Writing Historical Fiction – the ethical and craft framework for making that crossing: what you’re permitted to invent, what you’re obligated to document, and how to be honest with your reader about where one ends and the other begins.
The foundation underneath it: Every guide in this collection that helped you do the research is the foundation for the fiction. The specificity you built through the archive – the records you learned to read critically, the gaps you mapped honestly, the complexity you refused to flatten – is what will make the fiction feel true.
About This Collection
The Craft of True Stories grew out of a simple problem: the guides that existed for genealogical research were built for genealogists, and the guides that existed for narrative nonfiction were built for journalists. Nobody had written for the person in the middle – the researcher who had done serious archival work and was now trying to figure out how to tell what they’d found.
I built this collection one guide at a time, each one written around a specific problem I kept coming across in my own work. How to find women who disappear in the record after marriage. How to read a death certificate against the grain. How to write about a family rupture when the archive preserved one side better than the other. How to tell an immigrant story that honors both what the archive gives you and what it can’t recover. How to cross from fact-finder to storyteller without losing the integrity that makes the research worth reading.
Each guide includes real research and real stories – because methodology without example is just a list of steps, and the steps only make sense when you can see them working on actual material.
The full collection is available on Gumroad. New guides are released regularly. The stories behind the research live at The Lost & Found Story Box on Substack – free to read, and the best place to see the methodology in action before you decide which guide you need.
History isn’t lost. It’s just waiting to be found.