There are a variety of newletters that a family historian might be interested in reading. These include those that concern a particular surname, ones often published by large family societies doing research on that name. They can be helpful for those looking for general information on a family name, for people who wish to contact distant relatives, or for gaining information on research others are doing.
Another type of newsletter that may prove at least as interesting to read, more fun and easier to write, and an excellent way to record both family history and current family events is what I will call the "immediate" family newsletter. Immediate family members are the intended audience for this type of publication. Depending upon how you define immediate, this could include parents, grandparents, cousins, siblings, and aunts and uncles. I would call this a more focused newsletter, where you can both contemporaneously record family news and share snippets of history you've discovered. The focus is on information of concern to your immediate family.
There are many advantages to this type of newsletter. These include:
- The intended audience is smaller, so you won't have to keep up with a huge database of addresses and names.
- Since you won't have to send it to so many people, the cost of producing the newsletter will be less.
- It's a great place to record events that have occurred in a specific time frame that may not be recorded anywhere else. We often get upset at our ancestors because they left us so few details about their lives. How about changing that practice! This is a wonderful way to leave information for your descendants.
- Not only is the intended audience small in scope, but the subject matter is narrower than that of a more generalized newsletter. It should be easier to produce a newsletter of this type because you already know your focus.
So how do you get started? Tom Person, in an article entitled Starting a Newsletter states that the three things you need for a good newsletter are content, readers and design. The first two are a given in this type of newsletter. Your content is news and history about your immediate family; your readers are your family members. The design is up to you. But don't worry about creating anything truly elaborate. People will read your newsletter because of the information it contains, not because it has a fancy design.
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