If you’ve spent a lot of time building a tree on a site like Ancestry.com, you’re probably wondering how you can build a notebook without doing all of that work again.
Bad news: there is no secret button you can hit to pull all of your Ancestry.com information into your family tree notebook.
Good news: you don’t have to do all that work again. In fact, you’ve taken care of some of the slowest work by pulling together records and setting up profiles so that information is gathered by your ancestor. All you need to do is take the work you’ve done and go one step further by putting it onto notebook pages.
Honestly, if I could save you a lot of time and wave a magic wand to build your pages right from Ancestry.com, I don’t think I’d do it. You get so many benefits out of building pages one record or image at a time, choosing what you want to share in your book and how you want to share it. I’ve taken years of research on Ancestry and still made some suddenly leap forward in understanding just because I’m being forced to write everything out on a timeline page.
Believe me, you don’t want to skip that part. Take it slow, one page at a time. Choose an ancestor and an event and just focus on that one story. How do you want to share it? What’s the most important part? If your audience is just going to skim the page, what’s the one thing you want to make sure stands out and grabs their attention?
That’s the way to build a book you love.