Admin: Creating the Callin Family History

I reached a milestone last night: I finished editing the computer-generated rough draft of Generation 5!

Generation 1 was, of course, James Callin (c. 1750-c. 1816), and Generation 2 included his two sons, James and John - regular readers ought to be familiar with their stories by now. In March and April, I began editing the rough draft produced by my RootsMagic publishing feature into what will be the "first draft" of the revised Callin Family History.

I wanted to give you a better idea of what I'm actually doing, so here is a quick example.

Editing One "Person" or "Family"

Here's the "rough draft" of the first page of Generation 6, starting with person 204. Henry Bushnell. 

Gen 6 - page 1 (unedited)

To the right is a screenshot of the first page and a half on Google Docs. You can see in this block of raw text that Henry and his wife, Livva, each get their own "story" which starts out as a page of computer-generated narrative (full of bad grammar and confusing facts) with sources provided in brackets.

Note the 1910 Census (highlighted in yellow) appears three times - once as a "supporting source" for Henry's birth; again as a source for one of his life facts and a third time to support a fact in Livva's story. (It shows up again on that second page!) I'll combine their two biographies into one narrative paragraph, so I only need to cite the 1910 Census once in the edited version. 

The green highlighter shows you where Henry's obituary is cited; I have the text of that obituary, so I'll quote it at the end of his biography, and condense these four lines into a properly formatted source citation, which will go into a footnote.

The purple highlight shows you that the computer cited Henry's mother's obituary. I will take that line out altogether, because her obituary was quoted in her biography in Generation 5, and it doesn't need to be repeated here. Most of this "raw" version is repetitive information that will just be deleted or condensed. Ideally, each fact will get woven into sentences that tell more of a story.

Editing each numbered "Family" this way, I condense an average of 2.5 pages of computer-generated text into between 1 and 1.5 pages of first draft text. If I don't have other sources to quote (like an obituary or biographical sketch from another book), it's less; if I have other sources or a family has a large number of children, they end up with more. 

Once I am done, the final result looks more like this screenshot:

Gen 6 - page 1 (edited)

Now, instead of 1 to 2 pages of unreadable text, you have some basic facts arranged into paragraphs, with source citations, and an obituary - all on one page. 

This page took me about half an hour to edit. The raw version of Generation 6 has three sections, each with more than 200 more pages like this - and I expect I will find mistakes or gaps along the way that require additional research to complete.

The Way Forward

Now that I have some data, I can do a better estimate of how much longer this project should take.

I do a lousy job of taking notes, but from looking at my earlier blog, Facebook, and Twitter posts, I started on Generation 5 while I finished up my school work in March and mid-April. Here are some stats:

• 15 April - 9 July: just shy of three months
• rough draft: 371 pages (low estimate of 185.5 hours of work)
• first draft: 198 pages (53% of the rough draft size)

At this point, I need to go back to RootsMagic and re-generate Generations 6-11, because I made some pretty significant changes to the Ancestry tree while I edited Generation 5. It will save me a lot of time to re-generate the rough drafts for those Generations instead of re-numbering and manually adding people.

I broke the rough draft of Gen 6 into three sections so Google Docs could handle the larger documents; each section was about 200 pages. Based on that:

• an estimated first draft of Gen 6 (when I'm done) should be about 300 pages.
• My estimated hours of work: 600 rough draft pages = 300 hours
• Working "full time" (40 hours/week) should (optimistically) take about 8 weeks.

I said "optimistically" - I don't know how much of my time I'll get to keep spending on editing. And that estimate doesn't take into account the extra research I'll need to do as I find mistakes or missing people. Ancestry is constantly adding new records databases, and I'm constantly finding living cousins who help me find more information and fill more gaps. (Hi, Dean! Hi, Sara! Hi, Cheryl!) 

I'm not complaining - I'm thrilled to meet everyone, and I want to include your stories the way YOU want them told - but I have to budget for that extra time, too.

How You Can Help

If you've come this far, and you want to help lighten my load, there are a few things you can do that would save me a lot of time:

1. Send me YOUR bio. (mightieracorns@gmail.com) If you are a direct descendant of James Callin (meaning you will be one of the people in the book), writing your story down in a paragraph or two will save me a ton of time. Even if you're not confident in your writing, don't worry - I can help you with wordsmithing and I don't mind tracking down documents that help support your personal story. But it will be so much faster and more accurate if you provide it. 
2. Get your family to tell their stories, too. If you're a direct descendant of James Callin (and this blog should help you determine if you are), I'd love to see a paragraph or two for your parents, siblings, and/or your children. Not only will you save me time, but you'll help me get the word out about the book, and help me make sure I'm not surprising anybody who might not want a stranger writing their life story!
3. Ask me about your Callin-related ancestors. It may sound like that would distract me and take up MORE of my time, but I have found that your questions often make me look at the documents I have in new ways, and answering you makes us both smarter!
4. Can you spare some time to edit? I can send a link to you and give you permission to view and comment on the "first draft" I've done so far - you don't have to worry that you might accidentally delete anything, and your comments or specific questions would be a huge help when I go to do the final draft in a few months.
5. Spread the word! The biggest help of all is just to talk to your family about this project. If they're comfortable with Facebook, invite them to join the private Callin Family History group, or ask them to like and watch the Mightier Acorns Facebook page. If they are Twitter people, @mightieracorns might be for them. My email address is great for one-on-one questions.

What's Next?

Now that I have some idea of when this will be publishable, I plan to start making some Mightier Acorns videos to go along with the eventual Kickstarter campaign. 

If you are interested in contributing to that part of the project, you can send me videos of yourself with a greeting ("Hi, cousins, my name is ____ and I'm descended from James Callin through my grandparents, ____ and ____!") or a question ("I read blog post X, and I was wondering if you knew more about ____.") With your permission, I would like to put several videos together and it would be a lot more fun to have your input that it would be just to watch my big, dumb head talk to a camera for 5 minutes!