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The Attic Lesson: Finding Pres Freeland’s Songs

The trove from the attic looks like the boxes hiding in everyone’s attic (if you’re lucky enough to have both), and like the stuff in everyone’s storage, its greatest value is to my family only. At first I thought I had found Grandaddy’s music when I found the CD entitled: “Pres Freeland’s Natural Songs from 1955”. First I played it (here’s…

The Best Commemorative Sympathy Gift

We have written a number of personal biographies to commemorate the lives of deceased loved ones. Sheridan Hill works frequently and extensively with families who are experiencing the health decline or death of a matriarch or patriarch. We are work effectively with people who are in failing health, and in deep grief. The most important step is to conduct…

First-Born Asian Son Bears Great Responsibility

Some of my clients are the first-born sons of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Japanese parents, and these men hire me to honor their parents with an heirloom biography. Non-Asian people can hardly imagine the weight placed upon the shoulders of the first son of Asian descent. In a tradition passed through many generations before him,…

How To Merge Historical Events in Writing a Memoir

One of the most difficult exercises in writing a memoir or biography is to condense world history into the most pertinent strains that can be gracefully merged with the events of an individual life. In the sample here, I begin with the personal event, “Celia’s father and brother escorted her out of Poland in 1906 when…

Writing and Editing: Don’t Look Back

What should you do with old versions of your manuscript? I’ve written more than 20 books and my method is to drag them into a folder called “Past Versions of X (name of book)” –and never look back. The only reason I would ever go into one of those files is if the current version…

Creating a family memoir

Creating a family memoir takes time, but don’t let that intimidate you. One step in the family memoir is to preserve the oldest photographs. Those old black-and-white photographs, or the daguerrotype tins that preceded photographs in the late 1800s, become part of the musculature of the family memoir. While the photographs are important, the stories…

The strong faces at Ellis Island

Arriving at Ellis Island, Esther’s grandparents were two amongst the throngs that swelled to 5000 newcomers a day. Ellis Island was their Plymouth Rock. The immigrants carried linens, embroidery, hand-forged scissors, sacred ornaments and religious objects, and sometimes they carried musical instruments. Their strong faces staring forward, they waited in long lines to be examined…

The Wreck of the Andrea Doria

(Today’s history lesson is taken from my research into an event that figures into my current client’s life. Below is a sample of how the stories of an individual’s life are woven into larger history. This blogpost is my account of the disaster, which figures into my client’s life in part because she was making her own first…

My life in a book

Personal biography is your life in a book. We meet you wherever you are, prompt your stories to emerge, go away to conduct research on the era in history, and create a beautiful narrative that tells your story perfectly and completely. If you have ever imagined your memories unfolding on the pages of a hardback book…

First-born Asian son bears great responsibility