Ancestry Stories – magical,
enthralling, entertaining…

The Covid era has persuaded people to do more talking and reading – and taking up writing. This has resulted in record levels of online “chat” and greater demands for new books, despite the covid-19 pandemic cancellation of book festivals and literary events across the UK and Europe.

As the pandemic took hold, many book launches planned for spring 2020 were postponed until the autumn when an unprecedented 600 newbies hit the shelves on a single day. Anxious authors struggled to stay afloat in a tsunami of bookish marketing that flowed from early September to encircle Christmas, the usual peak sales period.

Established authors, some giants of their genre, with their higher profiles expected to ensnare extra sales, but new writers often failed to gain attention and resultant fans. Their new work is a lifetime achievement and it needs to be shared with the maximum number of readers. A favourable review in the right kind of publication might be enough to start word of mouth endorsements and extra tweets. Sweet music for new authors, but a small fanfare is easily missed…

If you are itching to write and gain an appreciative readership for your work, can we suggest 2021* as the year to fire-up your creative talents and maybe, like Don Quixote, you can slay a few giants of your own – the pen being mightier than the sword?

For would-be authors, the biggest genre is currently “Family History”. Genealogy is the one subject that everyone on the planet is actively and passively involved in. Search websites like Ancestry and Find My Past make it easier than ever to round-up ancestral relatives and establish their place in your family history. The dramas and hard times endured by some of your ancestors, and the triumphs enjoyed by others, reflect directly on your life right now and the lives of your descendants. To write about your discoveries can be emotional, exciting, engaging and entertaining. Family history is always educational as it peels back periods and places shrouded in time.

To be able to produce a strong family history could be the finest legacy and inheritance; pages to be read avidly and added to by future generations. If published online “My Story” is easily updated with new adventures, achievements and heartaches. Good news and bad news echoes down the ages, helping descendants to find their place in the Family Tree of Life.

“How did my ancestors fare in their lifetime?
Where did I come from and what have I experienced?
What can I tell future generations of my family’s’ life
…and of the lives and times of our ancestors?”

Write it all down…in a story that will resonate with your family now and through the ages

If you need help to write your story?

After 60 years of writing words that gained millions of readers around the world, last year, as covid-19 raged, and we were socially entrapped in deepest Essex, I decided to write something about little old me and the adventures and people that have marked my life. I summoned up all my journalistic experience to probe my family’s past and soon I was reeling under the startling revelations involving ancestors on my rapidly assembled family tree…

Great grandfather revealed as a military draft dodger fleeing Cossack press-gangs in White Russia…great grandmother producing the first of nine children when she was just 12 years old….1915, evidently a very frantic year for my Jewish grandad who joined the British army, fathered an out of wedlock son, but married a woman who was not the mother. In the same year, he managed to get himself shot and was invalided out of the army.

After a start like that, my memoir quickly became a big book-sized 120,000 words, entitled My Life, in Words. Even as I was getting down the stories, some of the participants were taking their leave of us. Sir Harold Evans – acknowledged as “The finest journalist of all time”- left his own version of a story I had already written for My Life, in Words. The historic hard day’s night we shared together with John F. Kennedy, John, Paul, George and Ringo became the most popular in The Times tributes the day after Harry Evans’ death in 2020. I was happy to have been its author.

We will be publishing both versions of that day in Ancestry Stories. Budding writers may find many pointers to their future success in the Hard Day’s Night story and in the many other entertaining fact-based tales we have lined up for publication during our launch year 2021.

If Ancestry Stories encourages more people of all ages to take up a pen (or keyboard) and write about their family history, please be assured our publishing professionals will be supportive with our creative skills and resources. We can even help you to construct your story to a level that will surely resonate down the ages, truly outlining the setbacks and triumphs of your family up to and including the Covid era…

* The year 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of my first recorded kith and kin arriving on these shores and the start of a search to trace the family they left behind. Not easy, because an obliging sea captain issued my great grandfather with a new birth certificate under passage to England – with new English name and Welsh birthplace.

Terry Walker, publisher, Ancestry Stories

ancestry stories book launches family history new authors publish free