When people ask me about my writing all these family materials and how they should go about it, I tell them, especially kids and young students, to start right now keeping a journal and putting in interesting bits of what’s going on around them and what they think about these bits (their own thoughts and activities included, of course). Create scenes of action and speech. Also, ask their folks and sibs and neighbors and anybody old 🙂 THEIR memories and get them down. Of course, especially sibs won’t agree on details, but that’s part of the fun. And my dad always said, “Never spoil a good story for the facts.” So I confess, when I get conflicting stories, I choose the most likely or the most interesting, or as the author Robert Maxwell advises in his book Ancestors, “I use them both!”