We hear it every day. "I want to record something of my life, but I'm just so darned busy." It's the number one refrain we hear (aside from "my life's just not that interesting," which is a subject for another post). Many of us get hung up on the fact that when we write something, it has to be BIG -- a comprehensive single volume that will take years to complete, so we might as well wait until retirement. (Except that we mostly hear the "I'm too busy" refrain from folks who are retired already!) So here are a few "cheater" ways to record some life stories.

So often our questions to our mothers revolve around ourselves. "So, enough about me; what do you think about me?" It's natural to be curious about our own childhood and upbringing from her perspective. But how much do you really know about who she was as a person before you knew her? What are her deepest thoughts and feelings?

Just in time for Mother's Day, here are some interesting questions that may help you get to the heart of the most important woman in your life.

Suppose it's not a person's life stories you want to highlight, but stories surrounding a place? Many of us have places that hold special meaning for us--a family farm, a summer home, a city neighborhood or rural mountain ranch. Here are three examples of memoirs in which the place--not the person--is the star.

This story of a Chicago family is one of the most fascinating books I've had the pleasure to design. Our client had spent years researching the origins of her family, and had a grand vision of what she wanted to accomplish with this book. It is the story of her grandparents: one descended from American slaves, originally from Africa, and the other descended from French royalty. We extracted the genealogical data from the client's Ancestry account and combined it with family photos, supplementing with historical photos to tell the story not just of this family, but of the cultures surrounding her family through the ages.