Week 28 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is Random. When I received this year’s prompts and began brainstorming, I decided I’d write about whatever my current genealogy fixation is during random week. It’s a welcome change since sometimes it’s hard to shift gears away from my latest obsession to focus on the weekly prompt!
For the last few weeks, I’ve been focused on my grandfather Phil’s WWII diary, a topic I’ve covered in a couple other posts. As a refresher, he donated his diary to a historical society, and they unfortunately misplaced it. I have a partial copy in my possession, which I believe he used to supplement other WWII binders he created for the historical society’s military collection because I’ve found pages there I don’t have in my partial copy, but I have yet to find any repeat pages. Spreading out multiple copies of his notes, pictures, or documents was part of his “unique” organization style.
My goal, since learning about the diary, was to turn it into a book for my family. As I read the partial copy and began typing the pages, questions popped into my head, and I fell down plenty of rabbit holes searching for answers. Who was Tokyo Rose? What were Atabrine tablets? What was an LVT and what did it look like? How did the point system work? My grandfather lived it; he didn’t need explanations in his diary. Those of us reading it need context. A plan started to take shape. His diary and the pictures he took while stationed in Okinawa were great as-is, but if I added historical snippets for context and open-source pictures from the National Archives, it would bring it to the next level.
Unfortunately, without having the complete diary, formatting it would be a nightmare in MS Word. I could turn it into a book, but I’d have to reformat it every time a new page turned up – and I have faith new pages or the whole diary will eventually surface. In fact, I visited the historical society in April and found two additional pages of entries plus a page of pictures I didn’t have previously.
I typed up the diary pages in 2021 and they sat pretty much untouched until I added the new entries in April. Shortly after my visit, I came across a program that solved the formatting dilemma and made sharing his diary doable. Personal Historian by RootsMagic is designed to create family history books -- actual book-books with covers, title pages, table of contents, indexes, footnotes -- the whole shebang. If you purchase an ISBN number, there’s even a place for that. The completed books can be saved as PDFs and sent to family and friends, or printed and shared. It’s not the most intuitive program, though there are YouTube videos and a Personal Historian Facebook group if you need help. While there’s room for improvement, overall, it’s getting the job done better than anything else I’ve seen.
Personal Historian is supposed to make writing your family history easy. You start by compiling individual stories. Each story is assigned a sort-by date and a category which acts as a chapter. For example, if I have journal pages for January of 1945 and March of 1945 all typed out, but suddenly February is found at the historical society, it’s no big deal. I add February as a category, and now when I create a book, February shows up as a chapter in my table of contents, right between January and March. The new pages fall into place, and the table of contents and page numbers automatically adjust. Personal Historian also allows you to add the location each story takes place as well as the people in the story and uses these facts to create indexes of names and places. My grandfather mentions many fellow soldiers in his diary. If I track down their families and share the book with them, they can flip to the index, locate their ancestor, and read only the relevant pages if they wish.
You have the ability to name and save format settings. Because there’s a lot going on with this diary, I have different formats set for his actual diary, letters he wrote home, notes to indicate where pages of the diary are missing, and the historical blurbs I’m inserting. My grandfather even wrote some diary entries almost in the style of a reporter, so I added a format for that too.
As I mentioned, the program has room for improvement. Their books are designed to focus on individual people instead of family branches. There are ways to get around this and create chapters for each of the ancestors you want to cover, but you lose access to some of the more engaging features Personal Historian offers. You can import your family tree, and it automatically generates story titles/prompts on your ancestor’s timeline. It also has a feature called Life Capsules that add additional prompts, such as historical events and pop culture. None of that works if you’re trying to write about an entire branch of a family, which is unfortunate. Some sort of family feature would be a huge improvement.
While that wasn’t a real issue for the purpose of my grandfather’s diary, adding pictures has been more difficult than it should be. Personal Historian doesn’t have the ability to add captions to pictures, so I have to do that with a photo editing program before I import them. I’ve also found that sometimes pictures run off the page into the footer, and I’ve even had cases where the picture somehow messes up the formatting of a page and words will disappear. It takes a lot of tweaking to get it right. A drag and drop picture feature would be a huge improvement.
RootsMagic offers a free version of their Personal Historian program if you want to try it before you buy it, or if you don’t need all the features the paid version offers. You can get it here: https://www.rootsmagic.com/personal-historian/ By the way, I don’t work for the company or anything. I bought the program, tried it, and what I’ve shared is my honest feedback as a user.
Grampy’s journal is coming along at a good pace. I hope to finish it in time for Christmas. All the journal entries and letters are copied over, and I’m in the process of adding historical context and pictures. More ideas crop up the longer I work on it. I added a timeline. There’s a place automatically generated in the book for a prologue, but I haven’t added the text to it yet. I also plan to add an “About Phil” section to the back. I’m a big believer in learning through “living history” instead of dry, boring textbooks chock full of dates and facts, but devoid of the human experience that makes readers care enough to be interested. It’s my hope that Grampy Phil’s great-grandchildren (especially the little ones who haven’t started school or studied WWII) will read this a few years from now and it will mean something to them. Maybe they’ll excitedly share passages with their teacher and classmates that make them feel like they’re in the trenches. I want them to know this lovely man who passed before their time and see the war through his eyes. If it happens to spark a lifelong love of history within them, all the better.
Below are some samples of Grampy's diary pages created with Personal Historian. Click on the arrows to see more.
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