How to Create a Family History Book

A family history that lives on a hard drive gets read by nobody. Printed and handed to relatives, the same material gets read, kept, and passed on — and that difference is the entire argument for making a book. It doesn't need to be a professionally designed volume; a spiral-bound copy of a well-organized document does the job. What matters is finishing it, which means deciding on a scope, accepting that it will be incomplete, and printing it anyway. This page covers what to include, how to lay it out, printing options and costs, and how to get to the end. Include a clear tree, which the printable family tree makes straightforward.

What Should Go In It?

A structure that works for most family history books:

The two most valuable sections are the ones people leave out. A clear family tree near the front stops readers getting lost — most family members can't hold five generations in their heads. And a chapter of unanswered questions turns a closed document into an invitation, and is often what prompts a cousin to get in touch with the answer.

Captions matter more than you'd think. An uncaptioned photograph is decoration; a captioned one is evidence. Name everyone you can, give the date and place, and say plainly where you're guessing.

Transcribe any document you reproduce. Old handwriting is unreadable to most people, and the image plus a transcription is far more useful than either alone.

Keep sources in. Not footnotes on every line necessarily, but a section explaining where the information came from — which records, which archives, which relatives. It's what makes the book usable rather than merely readable.

How Should You Lay It Out?

You don't need design skills, and a handful of decisions cover most of it.

Page size: A4 or US Letter for a simple bound document; A5 for something more book-like and cheaper to print; square formats for photo-heavy books.

Typeface: one serif face for body text at 11 or 12 point, with generous line spacing. Older readers are a large part of your audience, so err larger. Avoid decorative and script fonts entirely.

Margins: wider than feels necessary, and remember the inside margin needs extra room for binding — 20mm outside, 25mm inside is a safe starting point.

Images: one to three per page maximum, with white space around them. Cramming reduces impact and makes the page hard to read.

Consistency beats flair. Same heading style throughout, same caption style, same image placement conventions. Inconsistency is what makes home-made books feel amateur, far more than the design itself.

Page numbers and running heads — put the chapter or surname at the top of each page so readers who dip in know where they are.

Print a test page before committing to the whole book. Colors, image quality and font size all look different on paper.

Leave the tree as a foldout or a double-page spread if you can. Family trees squeezed onto a single portrait page become unreadable at four generations, and readers will refer back to it constantly.

What Image Resolution Do You Need?

The most common technical mistake, and it's caught easily.

300 dpi at final print size is the standard. A photograph printed at 6 inches wide needs to be at least 1800 pixels across. Anything that looks acceptable on screen may be badly pixelated in print, because screens are far more forgiving.

Check before you lay out, not after. Most layout software will warn you about low-resolution images; a word processor will not.

Rescan rather than enlarge. Upscaling an image never adds detail, it just invents it. If you scanned at 600 dpi originally, as recommended in how to digitize family documents, you have plenty of headroom.

Use a copy for print, never your archival master. Crop, adjust brightness and remove obvious dust on the copy.

Don't over-restore. Heavy retouching of an old photograph produces something that looks synthetic and loses the character of the original. Light correction only.

Black and white printing is much cheaper than color and looks perfectly good for older photographs, which were monochrome anyway. Mixing — color section in the middle, mono elsewhere — is a common way to control cost.

Handling of the originals themselves is a separate question, covered in how to preserve old family photos.

What Are the Printing Options?

For most family historians, a local print shop or a print-on-demand service is the right answer. Photo book services are excellent when the book is mostly pictures and poor value when it's mostly text.

Print on demand has a real advantage: relatives can order their own copies at any time, and you're not carrying stock or postage. It also means a second edition is straightforward.

Check the binding suits the use. Spiral and comb binding lie flat, which readers prefer, and look less permanent. Perfect binding looks like a real book and won't stay open on a table. Hardback costs more and is what people keep on a shelf rather than in a drawer.

Ask for a proof copy before ordering a run. A single printed copy in your hands catches errors that no amount of screen proofreading will.

Budget realistically. Twelve copies of a 120-page book with photographs will typically come to somewhere between £150 and £400 depending on the route. Many families split the cost.

Consider a PDF as well, which costs nothing to distribute, is easy to update, and reaches relatives abroad. Print copies survive; PDFs circulate. Do both.

What Should You Think About Before Distributing It?

A family history book goes to real people, some of whom appear in it, and a little thought here prevents a great deal of awkwardness.

Show relevant sections to the people involved. Anyone still living who features substantially deserves to see what you've written about them before it's printed. This is both courteous and practical — they frequently correct errors and add detail.

Be careful with living people's details. Full dates of birth, current addresses and other identifying information circulate further than you expect once a book is in a dozen households. Many family historians restrict living individuals to names only, or omit details for anyone born within the last hundred years.

Handle sensitive material thoughtfully. Adoptions, illegitimacy, estrangements, criminal history and unexpected DNA results all affect living relatives directly. Context rather than judgment, and consider whether something belongs in the widely circulated version or in a private research file.

Expect corrections, and welcome them. Somebody will tell you a date is wrong or a photograph is misidentified. That's the book working — note the corrections for the next edition rather than defending the first.

Think about copyright for anything you didn't create. Photographs taken by professional studios, published maps, newspaper images and archive documents may still be in copyright, and a privately circulated family history is treated differently from a commercially published one. For small family runs it's rarely an issue; check before selling copies or publishing online.

Decide what happens to it after you. Name someone who'll keep the files and the source material. A book survives; the research behind it usually doesn't unless somebody is told where it is.

How Do You Actually Finish It?

The reason most family history books don't exist.

Set a deadline tied to an event. A milestone birthday, a reunion, an anniversary. Open-ended projects don't finish.

Accept version one will be incomplete. Every family history is. Print it with the gaps clearly marked, and let the gaps do useful work — relatives who read version one routinely supply corrections and photographs for version two.

Cut the scope rather than the deadline. If it's slipping, cover four generations instead of six. A finished shorter book beats an unfinished longer one every time.

Get one other person to proofread. You will not see your own errors, particularly in names and dates, and misspelled family names are the thing relatives notice first.

Check names and dates twice. These are what people look for, and errors in them undermine confidence in everything else.

Print more copies than you think. Word spreads, and reordering singly costs more per copy than including a few extras in the original run.

Give one to an archive. Local record offices, county archives and family history societies frequently accept donated family histories, which puts your work where future researchers will find it. That's how a private project becomes a public source.

Then keep going. Version two, or a different branch. The first one is the hardest — the writing side is covered in how to write a family history, and the material for the next one usually comes from the conversations described in how to interview a relative.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should a family history book include?

An introduction, a clear family tree near the front, the main narrative in chapters, captioned photographs, transcribed documents, a section of unanswered questions, and your sources. The tree and the open questions are the two sections people most often leave out and most benefit from.

How much does it cost to print a family history book?

Roughly £10–£30 per copy at a local print shop, £8–£25 through print on demand, and £30–£80 for a photo book service. Twelve copies of a 120-page illustrated book typically comes to £150–£400 depending on the route.

What resolution do photos need for printing?

300 dpi at the final printed size — so a photograph printed six inches wide needs at least 1800 pixels across. Images that look fine on screen frequently print badly, so check resolution before laying out rather than after.

Should I wait until the research is finished?

No. Family history research is never finished. Print version one with the gaps clearly marked — relatives who read it routinely supply corrections and photographs, which is exactly the material version two needs.

What software should I use for a family history book?

A word processor is genuinely adequate, and export to PDF for printing. Layout software gives more control and takes longer to learn. Photo book services provide templates that handle layout for you and suit image-heavy books.

Can I put my family history book in an archive?

Usually yes. Local record offices, county archives and family history societies often accept donated family histories, which makes your work findable by future researchers. It's worth asking before you finalise the print run.

One last observation, offered as encouragement. The family histories that survive in archives and get cited by researchers decades later are rarely the most beautifully produced ones. They're the ones that were finished, distributed widely enough that a copy survived, and honest enough about their sources that someone could build on them. All three are within reach of a spiral-bound document printed at a local shop.

The book that exists beats the book that would have been better. Choose a scope, mark the gaps honestly, check the names twice, and get it printed — even simply bound. Copies in a dozen households will outlast anything on your computer. Give readers a tree they can follow with the printable family tree.