How to Write a Family Story and Link Everyone In It

A story is one of the most valuable things you can add to MyBloodlines, and it’s built to be more than a note on a single person’s page. Here’s how to record one properly, so it stays connected to everyone it actually belongs to.

Step 1: Pick a story you actually know well

Start with something specific rather than trying to summarize a whole life at once — how your grandparents met, the year your family emigrated, a defining moment from a relative’s career, a family tradition and how it started. Specific, well-remembered stories hold up better over time than broad summaries, and they’re easier to write because you’re not trying to compress decades into a paragraph.

Step 2: Create the story as its own entry

In MyBloodlines, a story isn’t a text box buried inside one person’s profile — it’s created as its own independent entry. This matters because most meaningful family stories genuinely involve more than one person, and a story that only lived on a single profile would leave everyone else connected to it with no way to find it from their own page.

When creating it, you’ll assign it a type — Life Story, Event, Migration, and Achievement are typical categories, among others — which helps keep the growing archive organized and makes stories of a similar kind easier to browse later.

Step 3: Write the narrative

Write the story the way you’d actually tell it — in your own words, with as much detail as you remember. This is where the real value of MyBloodlines comes from: not a bare fact like “married in 1962,” but the actual account of how it happened, who was there, and why it mattered. Future relatives reading this story won’t just learn that something happened; they’ll get the version of it that a real person who knew the details chose to preserve.

This is the step that makes a story more than a private note. Link every person who was genuinely part of it — not just the central figure, but everyone the story actually concerns. A story about a family’s migration might link the parents who made the decision, the children who made the journey with them, and even a grandparent who stayed behind. Once linked, the story appears on every one of those people’s profiles, not copied five separate times, but as the same single story appearing wherever it belongs.

You can only link people who fall within your own reach in the bloodline, which keeps every story attached to people you actually have a legitimate connection to record about.

Step 5: Attach any photos you have

If you have a photograph connected to the story — the actual picture from the event, a portrait of the people involved, anything relevant — attach it. Like stories, photos are their own entities in MyBloodlines, and a photo can be linked to multiple people and multiple stories at once. Attaching a photo here means it will show up both on the story itself and on the profiles of everyone pictured in it, so context travels with the image instead of getting separated from it.

Step 6: Review how it appears across everyone’s profile

Once saved, check the story from a couple of different angles: open one of the linked people’s profiles and confirm the story shows up in their list, then open the story itself and confirm everyone involved is listed and linked back to their own profile. This loop — person to story to photo and back to person — is the whole point of recording it this way rather than as an isolated note. For the fuller picture of why MyBloodlines is built around this interlinking, see people, stories, photos: one interlinked archive.

A few things worth keeping in mind

A story needs at least one linked person at all times — if every person were ever removed from a story, it would need to be deleted or reassigned rather than left floating unattached. This is a small constraint, but it reflects the same principle behind everything else in MyBloodlines: nothing is meant to exist disconnected from the people it actually belongs to.

It’s also worth remembering that recording a story isn’t a one-person job. If another relative remembers details you don’t — an exact date, a piece of dialogue, what happened just before or after — they can add to or expand what’s there, since the bloodline is shared and collaborative rather than owned by whoever happened to write the first version. If you haven’t yet claimed your own profile, that’s the step that comes before any of this — covered in how to claim your profile and start recording.

Start recording your bloodline Claim your profile and begin at MyBloodlines →