Genealogy on the Road - Planning Stages

I have a love/hate relationship with the planning stages of a research trip. At first there seem to be unlimited possibilities. Well, if I'm going to the south of England why don't I add, Bournemouth, Winchester, Dorchester and London to the mix, oh and a little side trip to Jersey on the way. After all, it is close. Then reality and logistics set in.

Unfortunately, time and money are limited and, since I can't wrap my head around crossing the street in a place where traffic shows up on the opposite side of the road, I think it is best that I not drive there. That limits me to public transportation. The public ways to get around Britain may be much better than the transportation systems which cover the vast distances in North America but they don't take in remote places where far flung relatives once lived. However, if there are convenient genealogy cousins with cars, things can turn out differently. But sometimes it's hard to factor that into plans.

So, from the possibilities comes the whittling down to find what is physically doable in one trip. That not only means pinpointing a few destinations to explore, it also means finding if there are ways to get there and available places to stay. Once the framework of the plan has been determined; the hotels booked and the airline tickets bought, the real spade work begins - the pre-research research. That's what I'll start next.

DNA: Tools and Tips

It has been a while since I revisited the progress on my DNA research. I haven't gotten much further. As always seems to happen, so many other things have taken up my time. But more about that later.

One of my preferred ways of finding out more about the uses of DNA in genealogical research is watching webinars, but there are some about the subject that are way above my knowledge level. A recent one I watched about Y-DNA was way over my head. I'll have to shop around for a more basic one, perhaps even watch the excellent, The YDNA Test Should be Your Favorite, by Diahan Southard on Legacy Family Tree Webinars again. You have to be a subscriber the site to see that one.

Another webinar on Legacy Family Tree Webinars, which should be free to view until February 20, explained the possibilities of using DNA Painter. Blaine Bettinger showed the uses of this tool in the webinar Reconstructing Your Genetic Family Tree. To use this tool, the DNA testing site where your match is needs to give you access to a chromosome browser so, unfortunately, Ancestry matches are out. But I can see useful possibilities even with matches who don't respond to emails as long as they have a family tree to compare with mine.

Actually, looking at the surname in the case of one of my closest matches on FTDNA, it looks like I have a good chance of figuring enough of their tree myself as they don't have a tree posted. Hmm, will let you know how I get on.

Adding Atmosphere to Ancestral Living Places

Houses of Parliament though fog, Claude Monet, 1904

Knowing where they lived and finding the actual buildings is enlightening but it doesn't really give a good idea of what it was like to live in the area at the time of our ancestors. Our world, for the most part, is more sanitized than the environment in which our ancestors found themselves. During my research on TB, I ran in to accounts of the flies which were a constant presence. Imagine picking out a joint of meat as the flies circled.

Part of the insect problem was related to the main form of transportation - horses. The manure problem added to the overall waste disposal problems. Our delicate 21st century nostrils would have been constantly offended. Then there was the mud and soot.

I am currently reading London Fog: The Biography by Christine Corton. Fog was a part of life in the capital made worse by all the industrial chimneys and coal home fires until London fogs had their own particular characteristics. They were a reality of life for ancestors who lived in the city, mainly in the East End of the city as the wind drifted that way. I wonder if that was why many of the death certificates for my East End ancestors had causes of bronchitis and psithis (a form of tuberculosis).

The book about the fog also makes reference to fiction that includes descriptions of the fog in particular works like those of Dickens. Reading novels set in the districts in which our forbears lived can give us a better idea of what they lived through. Local histories can give a better idea of life in the area and there are many other books that can give us an understanding of what affected our families and dictated how they lived. Among the titles on my shelves are Tracing Your Rural Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians by Jonathan Brown, something to read for better understanding of all those ag labs. In a different vein is A New Way of Living: Georgian Town Planning in the Highlands and Islands by Gordon Haynes, which outlines the change that came to those areas. These are just a few of the many books about various aspects of history that can add to our understanding of how our families lived.

Further enlightenment can come from art. The fog book is chock full of images of dense London fog, much more informative than prose alone. Pictures can add visual understanding of what places were like and they aren't only in books or online. A trip to an art gallery can be good to include in a research trip as can visits to museums where there are relevant images and objects. I remember more about our visit to the Scotland National Portrait Gallery than I do of the hours I spent trawling through records in Scotlands People. Mixing things up can lead to better understanding. 

Images:

By Claude Monet - Musée d'OrsayFormer version: The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain,  

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155843  

 

Buildings for Our Families

Kilsby United Reformed Church - the chapel was opened in 1784 in honour of Rev. Thomas Strange

One of the joys of looking into family history is to visit the places where your ancestors once lived. Perhaps little has changed and you will be able to feel like you have walked a mile in their shoes, finding the places where they worked and worshiped. If you are lucky, you may even find the building where your family lived in the past.

 Whether or not these buildings are still there depends very much on where they were located. I went looking for my grandparent's pub in East London but it had been torn down and there was a new business in its place. (The wall of the cable business that replaced the pub is in the foreground of the picture of Dock Street on the right.) They had the pub in the recent past but in a city real estate is worth lots and progress is constant. It was a different story when I looked for traces of my 5 x great grandfather who was a nonconformist minister. What is now the United Reformed Church in Kilsby, Northamptonshire was erected in his memory and bears an inscription that indicates this. It was amazing to find an ancestor who made an impression on the landscape that still exists today.

But that is probably true of many well-heeled ancestors in the upper crust of society who left their mansions, castles and country homes as permanent markers of where they once lived. Those with humbler ancestors have to hope that dwellings that were prominent in their family history have, by some fluke, survived. Sometimes they do as an example of something, as in an historic village or as a commemoration of another kind. 

House at Fanshawe Historic Village in Ontario

But you won't know what is there until you go looking in the places where they lived. Happy hunting!