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Creating a Quick, Easy and FREE Family History Book

A few weeks back, I blogged about creating a family history e-book, a digital book in a PDF format. This week we are going to explore a new feature at myheritage.com – A digital family history book.

First, if you are not familiar with My Heritage, then let me quickly introduce you to this unique website. They offer a portal where you can create your own family history website that enables families to meet, communicate, share and preserve their heritage. A basic subscription offers you the capability to create a family history tree up to 250 people, with a storage capacity of 250 MB enabling you to upload pictures. If you would like to go big, then subscribe to their Premium membership. For $4.38 a month (currently a 30% discount) billed annually, you can increase the size of your tree to 2500 people and 500 MB of storage, which are about 500 photos. This premium membership also offers you the new feature of the Timeline. If you would like to go grander, then try the Premium Plus membership, with unlimited tree size and storage capacity. For $9.95 a month, you will also have the Timeline feature and the Timebook feature. Two new options I have yet to explore. You can upload a gedcom file for a quick transfer of your tree to this site.

For the purposes of this post, I would like to focus on the Digital Family History Book.

If you are already a member of My Heritage, then you are a few simple clicks of the mouse away from creating a digital family history book in a couple of minutes delivered to your inbox. From there you are free to save it to your computer for printing or simply viewing in its digital format through acrobat. You can easily email to family members for sharing.

Your family history book at myheritage.com is beautiful digital book summarizing your tree, ancestor and descendants of any person in your family. Just tell it which person in your tree you wish to be the primary position and the book will be styled from that perspective. Your family book content may include all of the following, or you have the option of selecting only the content you wish to see in your book. The content includes photos and may include ancestors, descendants, direct relations, indirect relations, family trees, notes, sources, index of places, index of dates and an index of individuals.

Three Clicks to Creating a Book

1.Simply insert the name of the individual you wish to be the primary focus of the book
2. Check off the content you want included in the book from the list
3. Click 'generate book.'





           You can create as many different books as you like by changing the primary person and personalizing the contents of the book. Once created you can view the PDF from the website, want to change it, delete it and start again. Once you have created your family history book, My Heritage delivers it to your inbox for downloading.

The book is created in a PDF format; once acrobat opens, it to view you can print it or save it to your computer.

Although it is somewhat limiting in terms layout, and graphics, I still believe for the money, did I mention it’s FREE, this is a very nice, clean program to quickly and painlessly put together a family history book. Of course, in terms of printing, the capabilities are limited to your home printer, which may be quite satisfactory for some, but if you are looking for a more professional printed and bound book then you will be limited.
You however could take your pdf to a print shop or print on demand website and have it professionally bound and printed at a price, of course.

My Heritage is using a program called The Complete Genealogy Reporter, copyright 2010 by Nigel Bufton Software. If you want to increase your options then I encourage you to check out the full version of this software for generating this book with a long list of features not provided with the myheritage.com version. The full version of The Complete Genealogy Reporter can be purchased for $34.95, The Complete Genealogy Builder for $34.95 or as a bundle for $48.92.

However, for those of us looking to keep it simple and free then your Family History Book is just a few clicks away at myheritage.com.

Related Reading
How to Create A Family History E-book