Top 10 marketing tips for publishing your genealogy

Spread the word about your publication!

Now that you've published your book, you need to find ways to reach the people who want to read it. Try these marketing ideas:

• Let your relatives know about your book or article and where they can get a copy. Mention it in your letters, holiday cards, and family newsletter.
• Include book details in your email signature line.
• Send review copies to genealogical magazines and journals; local and state genealogical and historical societies (in areas where your subjects lived); and other societies where you are a member. You may get free publicity, plus a critique that will improve your second edition.
• Send your book to local libraries and societies; the National Genealogical Society, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the Library of Congress; and membership societies. Researchers may find your book on the shelf and want to order their own copies.
• If you have a personal or genealogy-based web site, announce your achievement and tell people how they can order copies.
• If you belong to appropriate surname and location email list groups, check with the list owner about mentioning your publication to the group. Or, you could post a general note asking members if they're interested in your line to contact you.
• Post your book title and ordering information on surname and location genealogy boards.
• If you've written a how-to-research, a local history, or a record transcriptions book, see if bookstores would be interested in holding a book signing event.
• Advertise your book for sale in appropriate genealogical and historical magazines and journals.
• Rent booth space at local, regional, and/or national genealogy conferences and sell your books there.

Pirates in your past?

The lure of the sea and the treasure troves of pirates spark the imaginations of people of all ages. So it’s no surprise that when I discovered my great-grandmother was a Kidd, I wondered if we were related, however remotely, to the infamous Captain Kidd (1654?-1701). Online, I saw other people named Kidd claiming descent from William Kidd, even though he had no sons to carry on the family name.

If you’re interested in 17th century seafaring, I recommend reading The Pirate Hunter : The True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks. This nonfiction book reads like a thrilling action-adventure novel. In it, you’ll learn that Captain Kidd was commissioned by Royal Governor Bellomont as a pirate hunter to capture the infamous Blackbeard who terrorized the New England coast. In 1699, Kidd traveled to Boston to meet with Lord Bellomont to discuss his high seas exploits and trumped up charges of piracy, only to be arrested and later hanged for piracy himself.

Flying the Jolly Roger

Piracy in the New World existed almost from the time of the first settlements. New England’s first pirate, a former fur trader named Dixie Bull, turned to piracy after French pirates plundered his provisions. After a decade of piracy, Bull eluded his would-be captors and disappeared in 1633.

You’ll hear his story and other seadog tales at the New England Pirate Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. As you take the 25-minute walking tour through a dimly lit colonial seaport, board a “ship,” and meander through a dark cave at the museum, you’ll see vignettes of life at sea, bloody battles, and pirates dividing the booty, from the high-spirited life of treasure seekers to their grim endings. Led by a swashbuckling tour guide, you’ll learn facts about local pirates and legendary scourges of the sea such as Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach), Thomas Tew, Ned Low, Thomas Veal, Joe Brodish, and Jack Quelch. You’ll also hear secrets about treasure buried in the Lynn woods and along the New England shoreline, still waiting to be found. (Note: This is more of an attraction—on par with other Salem attractions—and not exactly a museum.)

Treasures Found

One successful pirate, “Black Sam” Bellamy, sailed the Whyah galley to Massachusetts to show his ladylove his fully laden prize ship only to have it sink during a storm in 1717, along with himself and most of his crew. In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford discovered the shipwreck off Cape Cod. The treasures recovered from the wreck are found at the Expedition Whydah Sea Lab in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Besides coins, jewels, and treasures Bellamy looted from more than 50 ships and transported on the Whydah’s final voyage, you’ll see clothing, pistols, cannons, and utensils that the pirates used. Ongoing excavation of the site, located deep in the sand less than half a mile from the shore, continues, which means that during the summer months you may see treasures being hauled from the salvage boats.

The Skull and Crossbones

Although captured in Boston, Kidd was hanged in London. It wasn’t until 1704 that the first pirate, Jack Quelch, was hanged in Boston. But he wasn’t the last. In the Boston Harbor, you’ll see a black-and-white beacon on Nix’s Mate, once a 12-acre island that has since washed away and turned into a shoal. It was here that the corpse of executed pirate William Fly and two other pirates were chained to the island as a warning to other pirates. Not everyone got the hint. Barmaid-turned-pirate Rachel Wall used her feminine wiles to lure unsuspecting ships to “rescue” her, while her husband George and his crew killed the would-be rescuers and stole their valuables. At her hanging in 1789, Rachel confessed to being a pirate, the only known female pirate in New England.

Skeletons in Your Closet?

Although my Kidd line does not descend from the Captain, it’s quite possible that my numerous sea-going ancestors encountered pirates along their shipping routes. And it’s quite possible to have a pirate in your past. After all, Blackbeard and his 14 wives did have 40 children!

Top 10 reasons to publish your genealogy on paper

Why should I print my genealogy research on paper (in manuscript form, in a magazine or journal, or as a book) when there are so many easier and cheaper ways to go?

• Technology is ever changing. Your computer files and multimedia formats may not be accessible in the future.
• Web addresses and Internet Service Providers change, making it more difficult to find your material. Search engines cannot keep up with the number of web sites in existence.
• Databases such as Ancestral File and World Family Tree may be good for clues, but are not necessarily reliable. Many of these databases do not cite sources, one of the critical keys to good research.
• Name collectors—people who download GEDCOM files and merge them with their genealogy databases without checking sources or verifying data—may graft your online tree onto their own unpruned database and then spread misinformation to others, many times over.
• Facts—such as names, dates, and places—cannot be copyrighted but books and articles are.
• Researchers are more likely to quote from articles and books with proper citations (especially compared to web publishing and database file exchanges), giving you credit where credit is due.
• Your article or book is accessible through libraries and interlibrary loans. (Make sure a copy of your book goes to the Library of Congress, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and other genealogical/historical and local libraries as appropriate.)
• Unlike memory books and scrapbooks, you can have more than one copy.
• Paper has been around for hundreds of years.
• You'll have something tangible to pass on to future generations.
• You can read it in bed.

Okay, eleven.

Revolutionaries in your family tree

Harborfest reenactors
photo from Greater Boston
Convention and Visitor Center

Alongside the main street in my town are white posts commemorating the march of the Minutemen on April 19, 1775 as they headed toward Concord, Massachusetts, at the start of the American Revolution. The minutemen were the early response teams for the colonial militia, highly trained and quickly deployed men prepared to attack when their homes, families, or rights were in danger.

In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, boys and men from ages 16 to 30 were required to participate in training exercises for the local militia. If you had colonial ancestors in New England, it’s highly likely that they participated in the local militia—or were fined for not doing so. But whether they served in the American Revolution could be a question of their age, their political views, and their location.

I have two Revolutionary soldiers as ancestors: John Gibson (1740-1797) and Medad Huggins (1746-1812). Neither received military pensions. But I found distant cousins who became members of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution based on their war service.

Check online for the DAR Patriot Index and the National Society Sons of the American Revolution's Patriot & Grave index.

Both of my ancestors had source citations from the “56th-77th Annual Reports DAR. Senate documents (United States Congress, Senate). Government Printing Office: Washington, DC” but the third listing showed that someone had applied to the SAR under Medad Huggins’ military service. It’s always worth getting the DAR and SAR applications to see if there’s any family data in them that you didn’t have. For instance, the John Gibson application appended material from the Gibson family Bible. And that, I didn't have!

The older the application, the less stringent were the membership qualifications. In the last few decades, DAR has insisted—and rightly so—on thorough research and solid source materials. The newer applications offer great detail, including information on the applicant and her line.

Other Online Resources

HeritageQuest has selected Revolutionary War pensions as well as the U.S. Serial Set with rejected pensions, petitions for relief, and soldier memorials.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society offers free access to the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati database, a post-war membership society.

See also—in person and on the web—the Minute Man National Park, the Boston National Historical Park, the Paul Revere house, and of course the Freedom Trail.

Finding cemetery inscriptions and photographs online

Down the street from my house, there was an old cemetery that my sister and I visited—when we dared. We didn’t expect ghosts to rise up or bones to rattle, but it was a disconcerting place. After all, in the first row, there were granite markers for young children who had died, apparently from a contagious disease that nearly wiped out the entire family. We rarely saw anyone else visit the graves or leave flowers. It was a forgotten place, until John Fipphen published Cemetery Inscriptions, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.

Some cemeteries were visited by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) or Works Progress Administration (WPA), by family or cemetery associations like Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries Inc. Staten Island (FACSI), or by individuals like Fipphen—and their transcriptions may be available in microfilm, book, manuscript, or database format. To help you find such listings, check out books like David Allen Lambert's A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries and Janice Kohl Sarapin's Old Burial Grounds of New Jersey. 

However, it's the Internet, which attracts volunteers from all over the world, that has become an essential place to look for transcriptions, gravestone photos, and much more. My favorite site is Find a Grave, which I’ve watched grow exponentially over the years. Below, I’ve listed some national, New England, and local cemetery web sites. Also try search engines such as Google for cemetery listings. You may find currently operating cemeteries have databases online, such as the Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, Maine. Some old cemeteries have been transcribed and posted online too, such as the Hampton, New Hampshire, cemetery database. Or you may find an old book, like Ogden Codman's Gravestone inscriptions and records of tomb burials in the Granary Burying Ground, Boston, Mass., which has the benefit of being published before some vagaries of time and weather erased tombstone details.

No luck finding transcriptions? Search for the cemetery name and location online to find out who owns or maintains it. I've had success contacting cemeteries, funeral homes, churches and religious societies, local libraries, and historical societies for manuscript transcriptions and burial records. For abandoned or town-owned graveyards, contact the town's cemetery division or department of public works.

Don't know where your ancestors are buried? Check if the death certificate or obituary mentions your ancestor's final resting place.  

National/International

Find a Grave

Interment.net Cemetery Records Online

Political Graveyard

USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project (see also USGenWeb state and county sites) 

Cemetery Junction

The Association for Gravestone Studies

The Gravestone Project

The Association of Graveyard Rabbits

Grave Addiction

JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry

Tombstones & Monumental Inscriptions - links by Guy Etchells

Military

U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs Nationwide Gravesite Locator

American Battle Monuments Commission

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System - National Park Service

Patriot & Grave Index - National Society Sons of the American Revolution

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

New England

Farber Gravestone Collection

A Very Grave Matter

New England Cemetery Association

Connecticut

Connecticut Gravestone Network 

New Hampshire

New Hampshire OldGraveyard Association

New Hampshire Cemetery Association

Maine

Maine Old Cemetery Association (MOCA)

Maine Cemetery Association

Massachusetts

Historic Burying Grounds Initiative (HBGI)

17th, 18th, & 19th Century Cape Cod Gravestones

Massachusetts Cemetery Association

Rhode Island

Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Commission

Vermont

Vermont Cemetery Association

Visit the three oldest cemeteries in Boston

A great example of a death's head from 
"Mrs / Elizabeth Peck / Wife of Mr Moses / 
Peck Died August / The 7th 1757 /In the 39th
Year / Of Her Age" at Granary burying ground. 
PHOTO by Robin Mason.

Rumor has it that ghosts roam the Freedom Trail, which stops at the three oldest burial grounds in Boston. Follow the path and you’ll find plenty of skeletons, caskets, and death’s heads—at least carved on the gravestones—and maybe you’ll encounter a spirit or two.

Meet the Grim Reaper

Dating from 1630, King’s Chapel Burying Ground is the oldest cemetery in Boston. More than 1,000 people were buried here, although only 600 gravestones still exist. Here, you’ll see one of the most popular mortuary icons, the death’s head with wings, such as the one carved on top of Samuel Hood’s marker (died 1733). Although we associate it more with pirates, the skull and crossbones is another frequent symbol, such as the one on Sarah Todd’s gravestone (died 1777). And don't miss the elaborate memorial for Joseph Tapping, who died at age 23 in 1678; it features an hourglass, a death’s head, the Grim Reaper, and a skeleton snuffing out a candle.

In contrast to these representations of mortality, look for Bartholomew Gedney’s headstone near the entrance gate. His elaborately carved marker is of a knight’s helmet surrounded with heraldic symbols. Also, left of the entrance you’ll find a tabletop tomb for 11 members of the Winthrop family, including John Winthrop (1588-1649), the first governor of Massachusetts. The plaque includes a heraldic shield on top, though the stone probably dates from 1920 when the last Winthrop was entombed.

Revolutionary Endings

Since 1660, more than 5,000 people have been buried at Granary Burying Ground, though less than half are marked by gravestones. That’s partly because early Boston residents carted off headstones for their own building projects, including the one marking John Hancock’s grave. Today, there’s an obelisk for this famous signer of the Declaration of Independence, near the side of the Park Street Church. You’ll also find other revolutionaries, such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, buried here.

On the path to the right of Benjamin Franklin's family obelisk in the center of the cemetery, you’ll find another much visited stone. Mary Goose, wife of Isaac, died in 1690 at age 42 after having 10 children. Although Mary’s headstone is frequently photographed, the name “Mother Goose” is usually given to Isaac’s second wife, Elizabeth Foster (1665-1758), who had six children. Both women deserve the moniker, even though the term “Mother Goose stories” was used in France before both their births.

Ministering to Witches

Located in the North End, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground has a commanding view of Boston Harbor and the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) in the Charlestown Navy shipyard. Since 1659, more than 10,000 people have been buried here, including close to 1,000 African-Americans. Near the Charter Street gate, you'll find the brick vault for three generations of Puritan ministers: Increase, Cotton, and Samuel Mather. Both Increase Mather (1639-1723) and his son Cotton Mather (1663-1728) were involved in the 17th-century witchcraft hysteria.

At the bottom of the hill, you’ll see a granite pillar marking the grave of Prince Hall (1748-1807), a black Revolutionary soldier and anti-slavery activist. Another activist who died in 1769, Daniel Malcolm’s grave apparently struck the ire of the Red Coats. His epitaph reads: “a true son of Liberty/a friend of the Publick/an enemy to oppression/and one of the foremost/in opposing the Revenue Acts/on America.” It’s a good thing Malcolm is buried in a “stone grave 10 feet deep” because his marker was used for target practice, with a bull’s eye on the carved skull.

Visiting Hours

Maintained by the city of Boston, these three burying grounds are open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Gravestone rubbings are not allowed. For more information, including a list of burials, visit the Historic Burial Grounds Initiative web site.

Use your library card to access databases for free

Public libraries are wonderful resources. Not only can you borrow books, movies, and music, you can request materials from other libraries and access special databases that are often only available to libraries and schools.

My local library subscribes to many worthwhile reference databases. I can visit my library and search millions of records on Ancestry.com, without paying an annual membership fee. Other databases are accessible to me at home by using my library card number. For example, I can search for obituaries and news stories from the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and several local newspapers—both recent and historic issues. For me, however, the most useful database accessible through my library card is HeritageQuest Online. And I can view it in my pajamas!

Currently, HeritageQuest has seven different searches:

Census: Images from the complete U.S. Federal censuses from 1790 to 1940.

Books: 250,000+ local and family histories, searchable by names and locations. You can browse through the list of books alphabetically and even read a book page by page.

PERSI (or PERiodical Source Index): Search through this index of 2.1 million genealogy and local history articles by name, place, or keyword. Search periodicals by title or look for how-to articles by record type.

Revolutionary War: Search selected files from Revolutionary War-era pension and bounty land warrant applications. Note: These are the “selected” files, chosen for their genealogical value, not the complete files.

Freedman’s Bank: This bank served mostly African Americans after the Civil War (1865-1874). Details may include parents, siblings, spouse, children; birth and death date and place; plantation, master; current residence; military information; occupation, etc.

U.S. Serial Set: Search for private relief actions, petitions, and memorials handled by the U.S. Congress.

Check your local library to see what databases are available to you for in-library use or with remote access. Many libraries subscribe to HeritageQuest Online and various newspapers as well as biography, historic and current events, and reference databases.