Researching And Writing Family History Or Genealogy With TL Whalan
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Joanna Penn
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are you curious about the lives of your ancestors? What secrets might be hiding in your family tree, and where would you even begin to look for them? How do you turn dusty records and vague family stories into a compelling book for others to read? T.L. Whalan shares how she researched and wrote a book about her family history.
In the intro, InAudio.com and Spotify for Authors; The Written Word Podcast from Written Word Media; How to sell 1000 books a month [Author Media]; Vetted services from Alliance of Independent Authors, and Reedsy; Writer Beware for scams.
Plus, Ideogram for consistent Characters; Google Notebook LM video overviews; Gothic Cathedrals; The Buried and the Drowned – J.F. Penn.
Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.
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T.L. Whalan is the Australian author of short stories, young adult, and middle-grade fiction, as well as co-author of the family history project, The Wirrabara Whalans.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
* What genealogy is and the motivations for researching your family history
* Why you should always start your research by interviewing living relatives
* Key resources for research, including official records, newspaper archives, and genealogy websites
* The importance of getting family consent and how to handle sensitive information
* The practical challenges of compiling vast amounts of research and formatting a book
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, |
| 0:08.0 | bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing craft and creative business. |
| 0:14.7 | You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint, and lots more at the creative pen.com. And that's Pen with a |
| 0:23.7 | double N. And here's the show. Hello, creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number |
| 0:30.2 | 822 of the podcast. And it is Thursday, the 31st of July 2025, as I record this a little early as we're away this weekend. |
| 0:40.6 | So in today's show, I'm talking to T.L. Waylon about researching and writing family history or genealogy. |
| 0:49.0 | I wanted to talk to Tegan about this, as I know so many people are interested in this area for family reasons. |
| 0:55.9 | And these kinds of projects are almost nothing to do with anything commercial, but they are super |
| 1:01.6 | personal, meaningful, creative projects very much in the vein of double down on being human. |
| 1:07.8 | And I want us to keep returning to this. We write because we have something creative. |
| 1:12.8 | We want to achieve an idea or a story to share. And the business side is secondary for most of us. |
| 1:19.6 | This, as in we would write regardless of whether we got paid for it. And this is a great example. |
| 1:24.8 | Plus, it's fascinating to hear about Tegan's Australian family history, and I share a bit of mine too. |
| 1:31.4 | So that's coming up in the interview section. |
| 1:37.2 | In writing and publishing things, well, if you self-publish wide in audiobook format, you can now use Spotify for authors directly for publishing audio books to Spotify. |
| 1:49.3 | Findaway Voices is ending and you can now use Inaudio.com for wide audio publishing from the 1st of August 2025. |
| 1:59.0 | You can still access your findaway dashboard at the moment. |
| 2:02.6 | Anyone using findaway voices will have had multiple emails about this, but just a reminder that |
| 2:08.1 | things will keep changing. And from now on, you will need to load to both sites for wide audio |
| 2:14.1 | or more if you also use Kobo Writing Life and Book Funnel for selling direct. |
| 2:18.9 | And I was thinking about this, like just over a decade ago, we only had one option, which was |
| 2:23.6 | ACX.com, and now the opportunities have expanded so much. We can reach more readers, more listeners, |
... |
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