You Need Formal Research

Interviewing family members and friends is clearly a form of research, but interviews alone are usually not enough to give your stories the depth they require. For that, you need formal research. 

Perhaps you already know enough about the period in which you or an ancestor ( a parent, grandparent) lived to write about it convincingly and fully. It is more likely, however, that you have only a sketchy knowledge of the context of your story.

Your awareness, for instance, may be based on a...