Share 52 Stories from your Personal History

Have you ever wanted to write your life story? The goal can be intimidating, especially for family historians who aren’t writers. One way to accomplish a difficult task is to break it up into smaller pieces. FamilySearch has a plan that can help you do that. They call it #52Stories.

#52Stories is a project created by FamilySearch. It provides the inspiration you need to write down one of your stories every week for a year. When you complete the project, you will be 52 steps closer to completing your personal history.

FamilySearch created 12 themed quizzes, one for each month of the year. The quizzes are in the form of a PDF that can be accessed from the #52Stories website. These are not the type of quizzes that are interactive or that will let you post instant results onto your social media.

Each quiz gives you 12 questions to inspire your personal history writing for that month. Every quiz has its own theme. You can choose to answer all 12 questions or expound upon one question per week as part of the #52Stories project. The questions make great prompts that will help you remember stories from your past.

You can start anywhere you like. Begin with the quiz with the theme that connects to the current month of the year. Skip around and use the quizzes in random order to shake things up. It is acceptable to start with the first quiz and work your way through them. Some people may want to wait for the turn of the calendar and the start of a new year before they begin. There is no wrong way to do the #52Stories project.

Those that are working their way through the #52Stories project can use that hashtag on social media. It lets other people, who are also working on the project, know who else is also taking on that task.

Post your writing onto your Facebook page or Tumblr and use the hashtag to connect all the related posts. Or, put a link to your writing on your personal blog into your social media accounts and use the hashtag to let people know what to expect.

Need more inspiration? Visit FamilySearch on Instagram and check out their posts that relate to the #52Stories project. They have been highlighting one question from the project each week (in 2016). You can see what question they selected and read the responses that other people posted with their answers.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* 52 Weeks of Ancestors

* LifePosts – Easy writing of Your Family Stories

* Writing an Interesting Family History