RootsTech class helps make family trees more fruitful

SALT LAKE CITY — Family trees are like skeletons in that they need fleshing out, Ian Tester taught in a class Friday at the RootsTech Family History & Technology Conference. Tester, a product manager at United Kingdom-based Brightsolid Online Publishing, shared with conference attendees some ideas on how to flesh our their family trees and record journey they make in the process.

In his presentation, titled "Telling Stories: Transforming the Bare Facts of Genealogy Into the Astonishing Tale of You and Your Family," Tester taught that people are their own detectives when it comes to researching and writing their family history stories.

He explained the difference between genealogical narratives, which follow primary source documents to create a factual series of events about an ancestor, and family history stories.

"Storytelling, we take the facts and we put something on top. We embellish. We make creative decisions on top of the facts," he said.

Part of the challenge in finding those stories, Tester said, lies in the family tree format. Family trees are strong in that they're understood worldwide, they map the biological relationships between family members and they're easy to share.

However, they have "petty crippling weaknesses when it comes to telling the story of your family history,” Tester said, because they don't deal with "the reality" of most people’s lives. Some of those realities may be what the ancestor's occupation was, the kind of life they led, and circumstances like divorce, adoption and motive.

"(Family trees are) stark and bare — they are the bones, they are the skeleton; they’re not the meat of the story. They don’t record that very well."

Tester showed a video, "Stories Through Data," that shared ideas how a family tree could bear some story-worthy fruit.

When it comes to fleshing out the story, Tester said, "The journey of finding your family history is almost as important as the destination."

Sometimes people may come across astonishing facts that completely change their research, or even themselves. He said these are motivation to continue researching.

Those moments could include cracking a certain part of the research process, or finding a piece of information where there seemed to be a dead end. Tester encouraged those who attended his class to keep track of these moments, which could also be emotional in nature.