Types of Content

• Life Story, Personal History & Family History: A life story approach is comprehensive, spanning the memories, people and events of an entire lifetime. It is also called an autobiography or a biography, depending on whether you do it yourself or with help. A family history includes interviews and stories from an entire family group. (This is not the same as the Family Tree or Genealogy. See below)

• Memoirs, Memorials & Special Occasion Tributes: A memoir is a description of an event, a time period, a person, or selected scenes from your life. It may be one brief sketch, several unconnected tales, or a lifetime's memories. If you want to memorialize someone special who has passed on, you may find it healing to honor that person. For a special occasion such as a birthday, wedding, anniversary, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduation or retirement, a personal historian can help you create something special to celebrate the event.

• Business, Organization & Community Histories: A personal historian can record the stories and dreams of the dynamic people who created a company, an organization or a community. Our members can help preserve the histories of schools, clubs, family businesses, corporations, towns, historical societies, residential communities, and religious and ethnic communities

• Collections: Recipes, Folklore & Travel: If you feel daunted by the task of writing an entire life history, you might consider putting together a collection of reminiscences on a particular subject. You can write about your travels, with plenty of pictures to illustrate the stories. Record the local folk tales that you heard growing up. Honor a family member by compiling his or her colorful sayings. Collect your family's traditional recipes and stories of the good times you had, add photos of the family feasting, and create your own personalized family cookbook.

• Ethical Wills & Legacy Planning: An ethical will is a document that records your personal values, beliefs, life lessons, hopes and wishes for your family, friends, and community. Its purpose is to leave behind a moral or spiritual legacy. It can be a message to specific family members or words intended for future generations. Personal historians who specialize in ethical wills can guide you through the rewarding process of creating one.

  Legacy planning is the spiritual dimension of estate planning, namely, taking measures to ensure that your values and heritage will be preserved for future generations. Many personal historians offer legacy planning services, which might include disposition of historical family documents and photographs, creating an archive, preparing material for an obituary, or memorial service planning.

• Family Tree, Genealogy: If you want to include information about your descent (genealogy), ancestors or family tree in your life story, personal historians who are knowledgeable in that field can help you locate and incorporate the information. Sometimes other family members have already compiled data on your forebears and will share it with you; other times a personal historian must do the research in libraries, genealogy Web sites, newspaper archives or government records.