Creating a Family Heritage Book

Have spent the last several months creating three family heritage book, one for my Schulteis family, one for my Siegl family and one for my Ott family. I have learned a lot over these 60 days much of which I did not know but wish I had before I started. Thought I would share some of my findings.

The Schulteis and Ott books were in the order of 250/310 pages which includes the detail, source listing, and name index. The Schulteis Our Family Heritage Book will be one of several as it identifies but 600 of some 2,200 family members. The Siegl book, 914 family members, is another matter and its structure and development, I believe, is worthy of discussion.

When you generate a journal report for a one name study, the person reading the report , and who is contained therein, is just a grain of sand among the masses. It is my belief they would like their branch isolated rather than being just a person within a generation. Additionally, several Siegl cousins came forth and shared their branch of the family. As luck would have it, their branches connected to the trunk at the same generation (the year 1800) and would you believe to the same family. And none of the cousins know each other.

The overall design of the Siegl book became obvious, branches would be chapters and preceded by the early common families. The design is-

Cover/overview
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Chapter 2 - Early Families (1640-1800)
Chapter 3-7 Individual branches

Support of this required six individual journal reports.

Up to this point, everything is straight forward. The individual journal reports are edited and modified until they are "just right."

What do we have here? Each journal report is relatively small in size as the exhibits are external but reside in the same folder as is the report generate file (.wpd) . In order to create the "temporary" journal report, the word processor needs to combine the report generate file and the external exhibits. Use the word "temporary" in that upon saving the updated report generate file, only the links to the exhibits are included, not the exhibits themselves.

The user can manually cause these reports to be page numbered correctly and then manually combine each of the printed reports into a single book. The short coming here is each journal report (chapter) must include its own name index for a combined book name index cannot be created.

The difference in quality in your original and the reproduced copies can be quite considerable. That is, your original copy has much better resolution. The book can be taken to the printer to have copies made from it. The copies will not be of better quality that the original, they will be of lessor quality.

In order to have the reproduction service to print originals, you have to provide them with a "complete" file on a CD, that is, one that contains both the report generated file AND embedded exhibits.

In order to do this, the user will be required to perform two functions:

First, the user must go into each report generated file and for each exhibit, change the content-type from "image on disk" to "image". This will cause each exhibit to be included in the report generated file and the external exhibits will no longer be required. The report generated file becomes self contained.

Second, the user will need to avail themselves of the word processor master document-subdocument facility. Each journal report file becomes a subdocument and all journal files (chapters) are rolled up into one master document (book). With the inline exhibits, the expanded master document becomes quite large. In my case, with 406 exhibits (jpg photos), it grew to 714,286 KB.

I am using a computer which is 4 years old, 2.5 mhz and 512 kb memory. While I can edit the large file towards its beginning, I have not yet been able to start in the beginning and browse through to the end. My word processor runs out of memory and aborts. Needless to say, I have not yet been able to generate the combined name index. Will I be able to print it on my computer, I don't know. Probably will have to print it in 50-100 page increments.

Have ordered an additional 512 kb of memory and we will see what happens then.

Am estimating the book will be about 330 pages. The 330 pages are not the problem as my Ott book is almost that large. The challenge is the 406 images.

Will be interesting to see what the printer's copy of the book will be like as compared to one produced on my printer which is a laser with real 1200 dpi output.

As I have found, there is more to creating a heritage book than just creating a book.

Will keep you informed as this story unfolds.