They say history is written by the victors, which is true in warfare, but when it comes to family history, it’s written by the living. The living who are separated from history by a good many years.

Twenty years ago, my grandpa wrote down his ancestor’s history of arriving in Australia. I’ve just finished rewriting, editing and laying it out in a book as a keepsake for my family. I’m really proud of it, but I’ve got to say, it made me a little anxious.

Not because I was worried about whether my family were as happy with the book as what I was, but because I added to the book with information I had gathered over the past two years. This included birthdays and other records of family members long past.

What if this information is wrong? Now that it’s on paper in a form that will likely be passed down through to the next generation and possibly the next, people are going to take my word for it that everything in the book is correct. But what if it isn’t? It’s so easy to get a day or month or even year wrong. Or a place name or regiment number. It may not be detrimental to anyone, but it makes you think about how easily we believe what we read in the history books. What else do we believe as fact, that’s a mistake in history, or a typo.

There’s a lot of pressure in putting fact on paper!