2021 in Review

 

2021 is another year heading for the record books, unfortunately more due to disasters than for anything positive. Fingers crossed that 2022 will be a year that we can get back to something approaching "normal". In the meantime, here is a review of the topics covered in my blog posts in 2021.

As the year began, I was writing the story of my maternal grandfather, HS Chambers. My first blog posts for the year were inspired by the creative nonfiction work that I was writing about his immigration story and also by the research I had done on his family line which took me back to Northampton. I was able to visit that county in person in the 2000s and carry out research in local archives.

By March I was taking an NGIS course about non-conformist religion in England which led to posts about religion and about the many opportunities for genealogical education.

In May my interest was caught by World War II and how it had affected my family. This led to a plan to read all the books about WWII in my personal library. It turned out to be a bigger task than I thought. I'm still working my way through them.

By August I was thinking about travel, combining a trip to Victoria with looking up a directory entry for a place where my mother had lived at one time and also the place where she had worked. At that point I was also looking ahead to trips planned for 2022.

Towards the end of the year, the topics became more varied, inspired by the weather and books that I read related to genealogy or my family lines. I had also moved on to the planning stage of writing about another ancestor, this time my great grandmother on my maternal line.

As in years past, there were posts about DNA, although I don't seem to have made much headway on genetic genealogy. There is one aspect of genealogy that I have found of particular interest. That's epigenetics, which is basically the turning off or on of gene expression. I hope to explore more about this in the coming year and see if I can find out how it may have affected some of my ancestors.

Images:

Pier 21 in Halifax

Yelvertoft First Congregational Church

180 Shooters Hill Road, a tobacconist’s shop like it was when my grandfather had his shop in that location around the time of WWII

The Hudson’s Bay store in Victoria where I believe my mother used to work

Silhouette of my great grandmother

Books about epigenetics

Happy holidays

 

                     Seasons Greetings to all my readers

                                                                        and

                   may 2022 be a much better year for us all

Getting things in order at the end of the year

 

                                                      A view of Islay where some of my Scottish family came from

Redding the house was one of the Scottish customs mentioned in a recent webinar put on as part of the Scottish SIG at Ontario Ancestors. The custom involved getting the household cleaned and in order at the end of the year to have a fresh start ready for Hogmanay, the greeting of the New Year. That struck a chord.

An end of the year cleanup has sometimes featured in my end of year rituals. But, as much of our lives have moved online, this year I found myself trawling through all those emails I've saved until later, especially the ones on my Gmail account "promotions" tab, with a plan of getting the backlog into more manageable shape. It's surprising what I've missed which I might have been interested in. 

Recent emails to sign up for Rootstech 2022, which is going virtual again this coming year, also reminded me that I set up a playlist of what I wanted to watch for Rootstech 2021. Most of the sessions I tagged still wait unwatched on my list as other virtual events with shorter watching windows took over. It's now time to watch all the sessions I tagged, some of which are surprisingly short. I could have fit them in at any time. Why did I wait so long?

As I go through my Gmail account deleting emails with a sigh of relief and whip my way through my Rootstech playlist, I wonder how much of this end of the year cleanup is down to my Scottish roots. It's interesting the customs we carry on without thinking about where they came from.

Sources:

Scottish end of year customs: https://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/christmas/hogmanay.shtml

DNA, epigenetics and the family tree

 

As DNA testing became more main stream and databases grew more education was offered on how to use this new genealogical tool. Much of it has left me in the dust, trying to grasp the concepts being taught over and over again. I think I have a handle on the basic concepts but haven't put in the time to colour code my matches that the DNA whizzes I know do automatically. Part of it is a time thing. Like many areas of expertise, it took those whizzes years of practice and work on their own match lists to get their DNA cousins into line. At times it feels like everyone else is in on the secret to successfully using DNA in their family tree research leaving me behind before I start.

What I need is an in. Some researchers seem to have found a fascination with adding ancestors to various line on their family trees. This was all helped along by Ancestry's coloured dots. It reminds me of those students in school, mostly girls, who used coloured tabs to create organized notebooks. They looked so good I envied them but not enough to invest the time to get my own looking that way. So cool coloured dots look to me like a lot of work rather than an enticing coding system.

A more recently recognized aspect of DNA has caught my interest, however. That is epigenetics, the turning off and on of gene expression. When I first read about it, the written sources related it to trauma. Most examples were extreme trauma affecting whole populations as the holocaust and the systematic mistreatment of indigenous peoples were often cited as examples of trauma carried down through the generations. As I hadn't found any link to those groups in my family tree, I thought epigenetics couldn't possibly affect my family. But further reading showed that the effects weren't just a big picture whole population kind of thing, the effects were also seen at the family level.

As I think about the ancestor I'm currently profiling, my maternal great grandmother, I know some of the traumatic events in her life and the life of her family. Perhaps those traumas were carried down to the present day. This deserves more study, DNA related study. Perhaps this is my in into the use of DNA in my family tree.

Shaping an ancestor's story

 

                                        Lottie Trip Gilchrist, full skirt and sleeves make for a solid looking silhouette

Writing about family history is difficult at times. There's the initial fumbling about for something to write about, gathering information for the story and casting about for photos to use. Pictures are always needed and not always easy to come by given access and copyright issues. So why bother to write?

I find that pulling all the information together, whether it is for a one off story or an ancestor profile, clarifies my thoughts and brings interesting insights. These insights in turn generate more ideas. The danger here, of course, is that those ideas often take me haring off down some research rabbit hole. But they can also be helpful.

As part of my writing journey, I joined the masterclass of the Family History Writing Studio a year or so ago. It's fun to meet with other writers also working on their family stories. The tips and resources available through that site will, no doubt, help flesh out the tales I write about my family. I've just started working my way through the modules that are a part of the masterclass. To do that an ancestor is needed to work through the materials. I decided not to use my maternal grandfather whose story I had already begun. That's why I wrote about kitchens in my last post. They would have played a large part in my great grandmother's life. She will be the ancestor I will explore through the masterclass modules.

But before tackling the discipline of prescribed writing through the masterclass, I had an article to write for the BCGS newsletter. Strangely enough, kitchens and my great grandmother, Lottie Tripp Gilchrist, featured in that as well. But I also touched on stories which would have been talked about in her family. Those stories were about large life changing events, like deaths in the family. They would have affected Lottie profoundly.

Come to think of it, I started writing about my grandfather, Harold Strange Chambers, in much the same way. I explored the history of tuberculosis through what happened in his direct family. The story I am working on about him grew out of that. Now that I've started on Lottie's story, it's similar; outside forces at work shaping her life. It's a reminder that we are not only a product of our own history but of the times that we live through. 

From floods to housewives

 

                                                          Early Ontario kitchen at Fanshawe Pioneer Village

A few weeks ago I wrote about ancestral weather. At that time I talked about how weather patterns and disasters would have affected our ancestors. This week I was reminded again of people's behaviour around a weather disaster. Typically that happens as incoming bad weather, like a hurricane, is predicted and people stock up so they can hunker down and weather the storm. In this latest episode, gathering supplies was happening after the event because supply chains were disrupted or perceived to be disrupted and people just had to get out there and gather food to hoard. These days we can accomplish that by visiting the local big box grocery stores. How did our forbears cope? It must have been difficult, particularly with perishable foodstuff before there was refrigeration.

That got me thinking not only about predicting the weather and the change in that technology, but about changes in the domestic sphere as well. The kitchen and other places in the home have changed a lot over the years. Invention has followed on invention until our homes look vastly different than those of our ancestors. That's part of the reason I and many others enjoy exploring old homes that are on display showcasing the way people used to live. I've explore many historic places from British castles to historic Canadian village settlements.

Which reminds me, I'm about to start profiling another ancestor to write about their life. This time it's a woman. I really should give a thought to what she would have had in her home and the tasks which would have been required to keep her household running efficiently. I know I have some resources on my bookshelves to help with that. She lived in Canada so I'm hoping that Much to be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries by Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor will give me some ideas about her earlier years when she lived in Ontario. The Canadian Housewife: An Affectionate History by Rosemary Neering should help in my research too. 

Sharing genealogy

 

                                                        Binders containing some of my genealogical documentation

I've been in the genealogy game a while, long enough to remember the early days of microfilm and microfiche and being kicked off the micro readers at the Family History Centre after two hours because there were other people waiting. In the early days of the internet, ROOTs mailing lists came along which put us in touch with fellow researchers. Many a package of photocopied documents was sent and received in the mail.

It was a time when research seemed full of possibilities but hunting down records was miles slower than it is these days. Perhaps the slowness of discovery was good in its own way as I know that I took more time to think of next steps to find out more about family lines. At the same time, relationships were developed with fellow researchers. When I started to add travel to my family history repertoire, I met up with more than one person I'd met online so that we could visit places our distant family had once lived and worked. 

By the time that I started genealogy travel, the first big databases were coming online. I was leery of Ancestry when I first encountered it, only using the library edition which allows limited free access. Money, of course, was a restraint. I could have just subscribed to the database for one country to save money but the difficulty with that was that I resided in Canada but most of my research was in the UK. From what I could gather, if I wanted to subscribe to Ancestry for just one country, that would be for the country I lived in. I took out a subscription with Find My Past instead.

As family history research drew me in further, I eventually subscribed to both Ancestry and Find My Past. I still do even though I use them much more sparingly than in earlier days. These days I spend more time hunting down stories than growing family lines. It's good to have the records on the big genealogy databases handy to hunt down references or to do those last pieces of research to fill out the story.

I am surprised at what I find there, particularly on Ancestry. Personally I only keep a bare bones family tree on the site. It is rare that a document is attached to a person on my tree. It there is one, I've usually taken it from something that another researcher has posted. My wariness of Ancestry has continued to this day. I don't post my family history finds and treasures on the site because somewhere along the way I must have read the fine print. I was reminded of that as I read The Genealogical Sublime. In the chapter on Ancestry.Inc, author Julia Creet reminds the reader that they are giving Ancestry the rights to the information they are posting on the site.

Reading the information in Creet's book reminded me of my own love/hate relationship with the genealogy giant. It also reminded me of what someone said in a genealogy group I was attending. The gist of the comment was that the researcher only took information from trees with source documents because that showed the depth of their research. I can see where one might think that but perhaps that family tree you are hesitant to use because of the lack of source documents belongs to someone who read the fine print on the Ancestry site.

Sources:

Creet, Julia. The Genealogical Sublime. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 p 91-94

Remembrance and family

 

On November 11 ceremonies are held to remember those who fought for their countries in wars. This need to commemorate was recognized after World War I, a war that is sometimes known as the Great War and which was billed at the time as the war to end all wars.

But more people were involved in war efforts than those who wore the uniforms of the various forces. The Land Army recruited women, many of them with little knowledge of agriculture, to help run farms to keep the population fed. There were the Canary Girls, the munitions workers who worked in dangerous conditions and the merchant navy battled through more than heavy seas to keep Britain supplied with food and goods to fight the war.

In his "Personal Wartime Memories", my father wrote about the hollowness of participating in ceremonies wearing his wartime medals when his brother, who had been torpedoed several times while in the Merchant Navy, received no recognition. And truly, the efforts of all who supported the war efforts, whether in uniform or not, deserve to be remembered. 

Ancestral weather

 

It's autumn on the West Coast. The sunny days of summer are over and we're heading into days, weeks, probably months of relentless rain. I've become used to the rhythms of the seasons in the years I've lived here. I also have a roof over my head and a furnace to keep me warm but in the past people were often more directly affected by the weather. 

Just think of the farmers and fishermen in your family line. They and their livelihoods would have been directly impacted by weather events where they were living, whether it was the cumulative result of weeks of rain or drought, or a disastrous weather event. Even city dwellers could be adversely affected by larger events. I know this well, having written about my grandfather's brush with the Regina Cyclone. But I wouldn't have know about that weather event if someone in a class that I was attending years ago hadn't brought it up.

After that I was able to find more information by looking at historic newspapers for the cyclone which devastated Regina in 1912. Books and online searches filled in more information. That's the thing about disasters, they catch people's attention and there are likely to be written accounts. They might also be the impetus for change in ancestor's lives, such as migration or an alteration in their day to day lives that brought them into contact with different people. I believe my grandfather met the woman he was to marry when he had to move after the cyclone left a path of destruction down the street he lived on.

Big weather events could change the lives of our ancestor but so too could the everyday effects of weather. Did they live in houses that barely contained the inhabitants as most work, even that of the womenfolk, happened outside? What happened when weather made staying outside a misery? Social history shows that the relentless day to day struggle of people living with only the bare necessities to keep them warm and dry during the hardest months of the year could also find this a spur in their quest for a better life. I've seen how one weather event affected my grandfather's life. Perhaps a look at the weather in other ancestors' lives might also add more to their stories

Finding gateways

 

                                                                                   Plymouth Colony 1622

In my last post I wrote about the book The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. As I was still reading the book at the time I wrote the post, I had not yet tackled the chapters about identifying the body through DNA. I found those chapters fascinating. It was like a giant puzzle or genealogy in reverse. Because Richard III died in 1485, only mitochondrial or Y DNA could be used in the quest to identify the body. The DNA which follows the female line, mitochondrial or mtDNA, being the more reliable of the two as any disputes over parentage usually follow the male line. What the researchers needed to find was a line from a known female relative in Richard III's direct maternal line and follow that line through successive daughters to the present day, a painstaking in daunting task which the book highlighted. 

It reminded me of doing genealogy in reverse, working forward through the years from an ancestor who came earlier. The medieval time period this work took the researchers back to also brought to mind a breakthrough that a fellow volunteer at the BCGS library made. He had found his gateway ancestor, that elusive link to the known genealogies of the great and good, or at least those in the top rungs of the social hierarchy back in history. The people who actually got written up in records that far back. It reminded me that there was a rumour of one of those gateway ancestors on one of my family lines as well. Maybe it was time to look into it.

This possible gateway ancestor connects to my line of Tripps who lived in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the early colonial days. It wasn't the Tripp family but the Cudworth family who married into that Tripp line which was rumoured to have the possible link that would take me much further back into history. As you can see by the fragment of my family tree up above, more than one Cudworth woman married into my Tripp family line, Jabez being one of my direct ancestors. In fact, Abigail and Elizabeth Cudworth were sisters and daughters of James Cudworth. James in turn was the son of Major James Cudworth, an early immigrant who held important offices in the Plymouth Colony. The elder James featured in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II which takes the Cudworth and many other Colonial lines back to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. This would be perfect except that there appears to be controversy over the inclusion of James Cudworth the elder in this work. It seems the path to true genealogy is never a smooth one. 

Sources:

Ashdown-Hill, John. The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013.

Insurmountable problems with lineage of gateway James Cudworth? https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/5oEUwaUUZBI?pli=1

Richardson, Douglas. Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II https://books.google.vg/books?id=8JcbV309c5UC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_vpt_read#v=onepage&q&f=false

Image:

By Scan by NYPL - https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-8614-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47124218

Genealogy lessons from history

 

                                                                              Statue of Richard III in Leicester

My fascination with the story of Richard III was stoked by Josephine Tey's well known novel, The Daughter of Time, then went into overdrive with the identification of Richard's remains after they were discovered in 2012. This discovery and how the remains were identified interested me on so many levels. The history of this king was controversial and reached back into time. But the story was also up to date as present day methods were used to extract his remains and DNA was used to identify them. 

The fact that Richard's remains had been lost seemed odd to me. Had he been so reviled that they just slung him in the ground and covered him up? But the story was more convoluted than that. Think Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries. History provided the explanation for the loss of Richard III's burial place and it is often history, the things that happened around and after the time frame of the ancestors we are researching, which can explain why some of those records we are desperately looking for can be found and others cannot.

Another lesson to be taken from Richard III's story is how it has been told over time. The story morphed and changed depending on the historian, their interpretation of whichever records they chose to focus on and the aspect of the story they wanted to tell. It wasn't only historian who entered their interpretation into history, politics often underwrote which versions of the story were handed down. But we do that with most histories, as the story we feel we must tell becomes the focus and contains the points we want to get across. When these stories are handed down through changing times there can be additions and parts of the tale that no longer meet our current mores can be expunged. 

I'm currently reading The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA which prompted my thoughts about history. I haven't yet read the DNA part of the book but hopefully it will spur on the exploration of my own genetic heritage. In the meantime, it will pay to remember the following points when researching my ancestors.

• Research the wider history of events contemporary and subsequent to target time period and records
• Lore handed down should be treated with caution 

Sources:

Ashdown-Hill, John. The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013. 

DNA update

 

DNA experts who are able to use the data in their tests and the tests of genetic relatives to explore their ancestry fascinate me. The latest webinars about the methods they use are so informative. I take notes and download handouts but somehow nothing really sinks in. It seems that this new genealogical tool is somewhat akin to math, either you grasp it or you don't. But still I plod along hoping that one spark will set me on the path to understanding.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I am a bit slap dash in my approach and a lot of what the experts teach is about being methodical, like tagging and sorting matches once you've looked at them. It seems like it would pay to invest some time and actually get down to sorting through my matches.

Getting them sorted is becoming more urgent. I now have more matches to look through since Living DNA increased the offerings on their database to show probable related testers. I was trawling through my Living DNA matches to see if there were any familiar names attached to the testers when I came across a name I recognized. The name was of someone I know to be a genealogy expert. If I was able to figure out the match, the information on their lines should take me back further. So I sent them a message.

They replied and we tried to find the connection. I sent a link to my tree on Ancestry and we looked to see if we matched on FT DNA and My Heritage. Nada. No matches anywhere else. I was disappointed but when I talked about it in the DNA group for my genealogy society, one of the experts in the group asked me where the matching centimorgans were. I didn't know that information as Living DNA doesn't have a chromosome browser yet but it gave me something to think about. Perhaps the mystery of that match is the spark that will ignite my DNA research. 

The lure of genealogical mysteries

 

I love a good mystery. Many of the books I read and shows I watch feature murder mysteries. Good ones draw you in and tantalize you with clues keeping you guessing who done it. Most of these stories are fiction but real life mysteries keep us striving for solutions too. Mysteries like what happened to Amelia Earhart or to the Franklin Expedition inspire people to propose their pet theories about what happened.

Reading Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, reminded me of one of the mysteries in my own family history, that of how Tom Thomson died. Strange how the uncertainty around his death keeps his memory alive. That mystery has spawned many books about Thomson, his promise as an artist cut down in his prime and speculation as to whether his death was an accident or murder.

But it's not only the well-known mysteries that drive my family research. Others fascinate me as well. For one, where in Ireland did my family come from? But that's a big question involving a whole branch of the family. I find the more intriguing mysteries are the ones that involve individuals. Like just how did the last member I've traced in one branch of my Arments end up with so much money to leave in his will? Since that was the family where a father and son a few generations previous had been sentenced for receiving stolen goods, I find the final sum to be willed an intriguing mystery.

Another puzzle involves a birth in Ashmore, a village in Dorset where my Rideout family lived. Thomas Rideout, my 2X great grandfather, was a relatively young man when he died in 1842 leaving my 2X great grandmother, Mary, alone to raise their children. She never remarried but her last child was born a few years after Thomas' death. I'm sure it was an open secret who the father was. It was a very small village. Try as I might I haven't yet found the answer to that son's paternity. Not that it affects my own line as I'm a descendant of one of the children born when Thomas was alive. Still, the mystery beckons.

Getting back to Ireland

 

                                                                              Boyne Valley, Ireland

Most of my family lines lead back to the UK. They are predominantly English and Scottish but include a smattering of Irish. It's that smattering that I'd like to put some shape to. My goal is to take it back to some particular place in Ireland. The Irish genealogy experts say that finding your family's records is a matter of finding out the particular place they come from. Finding out the county is good but getting them down to their townland is better.

This last point was emphasized in one of the talks at the BIFSGO online conference, Irish Lines and Female Finds, which I signed up for. It's an interesting mix of talks about researching Irish and female ancestors. Both strands of talks deal with particularly challenging areas of research. Areas that can benefit from accessing records beyond the top genealogical sources. Perhaps one of the presentations will point me in the direction of something that can help me.

My problem is that my Irish immigrated to England. I can trace my Irish line back in time in London but have been unable to find out where they originated from in Ireland. If it wasn't for the surname, I wouldn't know they were Irish at all. But unfortunately, it isn't one of those surnames that can take you back to a particular area of Ireland. The name Cavanagh can be found all over Ireland. Or perhaps that should be Kavanagh. Once, when my father registered at a hotel in Dublin, the receptionist told him that his last name should be spelled with a "K".

I had hopes that DNA would be able to pinpoint where in Ireland my Cavanaghs came from. DNA certainly seems to work that way for other people. Unfortunately, that doesn't work in my case. My portion of identifiable Irish DNA isn't large enough to trigger breaking down the regions down further. Either that or, like my English ancestors, my Irish ones didn't stay in any one place for long. So it's back to plodding through the records and listening to talks to see if there is something that can help me find that illusive place of family origin in Ireland. 

Research: lost or missing?

 

                                                                  War of 1812 monument on Parliament Hill

This week I was exchanging information with a fellow researcher. We're not looking in the same family lines but looking in the same area around the same time frame; early Ontario in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At that time the area was known as Upper Canada. My suggestion to her was to look for family members in the muster rolls for the war of 1812. I can distinctly remember begin able to look up my Tripp family in a book that contained the names of the sons of the original settler who had taken up land in the township of Percy, county of Northumberland in 1797. When I later found out that Charles Tripp, the family's original settler in Canada, had fought for the patriots in the American Revolution, it seemed rather ironic that his sons fought for the Canadian side in the war of 1812.

Strangely, because I generally keep copies of everything, I don't have a copy of the muster roll. It's a reminder of my lack of organization when I first started family history research. Sometimes I thought I would just remember things or that they were too mundane to note down. But I still have scads of information, so I obviously thought some things were worth saving.

All of the documents and paperwork pertaining to my research need to be put in better order. A daunting task but one that I hear other genealogists are doing by scanning and digitizing everything. I haven't come up with a solution about my storage problem as I still use the binder system. Until I find another system that works for me, I'll still consult my family binders when furthering my research or writing my stories. In the meantime, I need to track down those 1812 muster lists. Maybe I don't need to find the book in the library as there appear to be lots of sources online. This time I'll remember to save the information I find!

Image:

War of 1812 monument on Parliament Hill By Jeangagnon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51188874

Reminded about a clue

 

                                                                   Some books with information about Tom Thomson

I read a lot. While devouring books I own that are related to my family's history, I often leave bookmarks between the pages to note where there is a relevant passage to be found. It will be somewhere in the text on the two pages flagged by the bookmark. At the time, I promise myself that I will follow up on the information later. But do I?

My intentions are good. My follow through, not so much. I was reminded of that when reading Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. I bought the book in the hope that it would cover the life and influence of Tom Thomson. He wasn't actually one of the Group of Seven so it was not a given that the narrative would include him. But there he was at the beginning of the book.

Also included was the information that his mother was related to Sir John A. Macdonald. It was a distant relationship and one I'd heard rumours of before. Having recently read Reunion: A Search for Ancestors in which the author, Littrell, finds out that his MacDonald line goes back to the MacDonalds of Glencoe, I was intrigued to be reminded of this potential Macdonald family link. Did our Macdonalds also go back to the Glencoe line? Maybe the book about the Group of Seven would provide more information about Thomson's Macdonald link, which would also be my own link.

Checking the notes in the back of the book about the Group of Seven, I was surprised to see that the information about the Macdonald link came from The Thomsons of Durham, another book on my shelves and one that had a few bookmarks sticking out from its pages. Not only did the book about the Thomsons provide more clues about the Macdonald connection but those bookmarked pages showed me a few more clues to family records I hadn't followed up on. Maybe its time to do that now.

Change and deadlines

 

                                                         There used to be a townhouse complex on this corner

This morning, I could feel the change in the air when I took my morning walk. There was a definite chill in the breeze and, when I headed east, the sun was low and shone in my eyes at a time that, in the height of summer, it would be a lot higher in the sky. Change is all around as people get ready for the school year to begin after Labour Day. It's a time that many look forward to, conditioned by years of new beginnings and the pristine potential of brand new school supplies.

My thoughts of change were probably echoes from the PoCo Genealogy Zoom meeting I attended last night. After a demonstration of how to use various DNA sites, the general chat took a turn to the challenges of record keeping and media changes and how to transfer data from one type of media to another. I'll have to get on that when I have some time to spare.

It doesn't look like that will be any time soon. I'm currently writing text for PoCo Heritage, converting the F Words story from the text on the graphic novel pages from the exhibit panels and comic book, to text for a digital exhibit which will eventually appear on https://www.digitalmuseums.ca/funded-projects/ as one of their community stories. There are many stories on the Digital Museums Canada website already, a rich resource for those doing Canadian research. Working on the text is interesting, reminding me of the story of Port Coquitlam's early years and how we portrayed them. The past will also be related to the present in the digital story text and it is interesting to see how we initially coped with the pandemic and how our responses and interactions have changed since then.

The deadline for writing the text for the digital story is tomorrow, after that I'll have two weeks to deal with the edits. While feeling the pressure from those deadlines, I've also been altered by one of my travel partners that it is probably time to book travel arrangements for our 2022 trip. It's an overseas trip we had planned for 2020, which we postponed to 2022. It seems that next summer is not too far away to start arranging bookings for, another change to wrap my head around. 

Pursuing directory entries

 

                                                                       The Hudson's Bay Downtown Victoria

In-person research has been missing from my life for a while, so when a recent trip offered a chance to see if two places mentioned in a 1948 directory still existed, I dragged my friend off on a walk to find out. We were in Victoria, a place where my mother lived and worked in the late 1940s. I knew that she and her parents had left the UK in 1946. Passenger lists confirmed this part of the family story. They only stayed in Canada for a few years but had intended a permanent move. It was a sojourn that would have lasting consequences for the family. More on that later.

I was happy to track down the Victoria address where my mother was listed as living in the 1948 directory. It was worth the walk. It even looked like the house which currently holds the address would have been the same building as the one in 1948, at least to my eye. You can see it below. 

As we were staying downtown, there was very little walking involved to track down the address of my mother's former place of work. She was a saleswoman at Hudson's Bay. That building still stands on Douglas Street. I'm sure there have been a lot of changes since she worked there but it was a kick to see the building and translate the directory entry into reality.

Finding the places where my mother had been all those years ago, reminded me that her parents were in Canada at the same time. I just didn't know where. Perhaps it's time to check some directories to see if I can find their whereabouts for the same time period. The search this time could be done online, not trawling through the directories in the Vancouver Library's Special Collections where I had found the entry for my mother so many years ago. But were they in Winnipeg, where my grandmother's sisters lived or in Vancouver, closer to their daughter? 

An internet search brought up a few places to search like the Can Genealogy site at https://www.cangenealogy.com › manitoba-directories or, if looking for Vancouver addresses, I could look through https://bccd.vpl.ca › index.php › browse › title › 1948 Many sites give access to Canadian directories for free and many are searchable by surname which would be a plus except the name I'm searching is Chambers which brings up all sorts of government and other types of chambers. I'll see how I get on.

Organizing my search

 

                                                               Some of the World War 2 books from my shelves

Doing the research and writing about my mother's Land Army experience was relatively easy as most of the information I had was already compiled. I also have a few books about the Land Army but when I actually read them, they were short and gave a general picture about what life would have been like for Land Girls. My mother's war story lent itself to being a self-contained narrative. The rest of my WWII research looks more daunting.

As you can see by the picture of the books up above, I have a few tomes to read through and those are just a sample of the WWII books on my shelves. I've been collecting books like these for ages with a view to reading them someday. Well, that someday has come but it's going to take me quite a while to read all the relevant books on my shelves. It doesn't help that I can't resist buying new books on the subject either. A case in point, I just received the book on the top of the stack, Land Girl: A Manual for Volunteers in the Women's Land Army 1941, in the mail.

While I continue to read and research, I want to keep writing WWII stories for my blog so I'm going to have to be more systematic about this. That means writing lists and outlines of the family members I am following up on so that I don't miss any interesting stories along the way. Some people are natural outliners. I'm not one of those. I do like writing timelines, however. Maybe timelines of the families I'm following might throw up some useful hints of where to find those stories. 

Newspaper clues to a Land Army past

 

                                                                    A Land Army girl on a Fordson tractor

Finding out more about the Women's Land Army experience in Hertfordshire gave me a better idea of what my mother had gone through when she was part of the WLA in that county. Between that and the WLA Alphabetical Index Card that I found, I have sketched the parameters of her service which I interpret as starting May 1, 1942 and ending with her resignation August 12, 1945. But I wanted a clearer picture.

The sites I had visited gave me a general idea of what the Land Girls did and the book, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, supplied photos of many of the activities. What I wanted was to know what my mother's actual duties had been. I turned to the newspapers to see if there was any mention of my mother which would throw light on her war experience.

Unfortunately, when I tried to apply filters down to the county level to get the news for Hertfordshire where she was stationed, the British Newspapers on Find My Past didn't have any newspapers for that area. But my mother and her parents had emigrated from Manitoba. My search through Newspapers.com was much more productive. It yielded a clipping which merited a photo of my mother on a tractor at the West Hertfordshire District Agricultural Competitions Association's ploughing match just after the war. The story was carried in the Winnipeg Tribune and gave the name and address of her grandmother who lived in Winnipeg.

With family in different places, it's surprising where news will turn up and I wonder who supplied the newspaper with the photo. Perhaps the grandmother named? Interestingly, the article appeared in the paper in January of 1946 although the competition had been held in October of 1945, just months after my mother had resigned from the WLA. The article contains many clues to follow up on but, after the research I've already done, I now know more about my mother's experience in the Land Army.

Through my research, I know that driving a tractor required specialized training and not every Land Girl did it. My mother would have gone through that training and must have been using her skills for a while to be proficient enough to enter a competition. My increased knowledge gives me a greater appreciation for her war experience. 

Sources:

Find My Past https://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers

Newspapers.com https://www.newspapers.com/

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott. The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Ministry of Information official photographer - http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//36/media-36219/large.jpg This is photograph D 128 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30861464

Adding colour to the official Land Army record

 

                                                                            Land Army girls working in a barn

Trying to add colour to my mother's Land Army experience, I turned to the books on my shelves about women's experience in World War Two and books on the Land Army in particular. It will take me a while to get through them all and, in the end, while it will be a useful exercise and give me more background on the women who served on the farms in Britain, it won't be the story of the particular person I'm interested in. In fact the book I'm reading now, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, seems particularly sparse in its coverage of Hertfordshire where my mother was stationed.

Then I turned to online sources. A search brought up the website Herts Memories which gave me access to stories and articles which would bring me closer to my mother's experience. On the site there was a write up by Margaret Hurst about her time in the Land Army in Hertfordshire. The stories highlighted the reality and grittiness of the experience, from the cockroaches in the kitchen to the scurrying rats as the workers got to the bottom of the threshing pile. Was my mother's experience similar? One of Margaret's memories did strike a chord. She wrote about going to pick Brussel sprouts on a freezing cold day. That brought forth a memory of one of the things that my mother had said, that Brussel sprouts were picked after the first frost. Maybe she too had worked harvesting sprouts for a market gardener like Margaret Hurst had. 

Sources:

Herts Memories - https://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/content/herts-history/topics/world-war-two/womens-land-army/the-womens-land-army-in-hertfordshire

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Nora Lavrin - http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16311, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53995217

Land Army Records

 

                                          A mockup of the Land Army Alphabetical Index Card which I found

Unfortunately, when I started to look for information about my mother's time in the Land Army she was no longer around for me to ask for further information. I was left with some fragmentary memories of what she had told me and whatever I could learn from other sources. When I started this research, one of the first things that I did was to check the Discovery catalogue on The National Archives site for the UK. There were no online records, but there were copies of alphabetical index cards for the Land Army which covered the years between 1939 and 1948. The reference number for these records is MAF 421. I found this record on an in person visit to The National Archives at Kew.

As the name indicated, the information on the index card was sketchy at first glance but gave intriguing tidbits of information to follow up on. There was, of course, her name and her current address. The address given was in Welwyn Garden City, a different address from the Greenwich one that I found in the 1939 Register for her father. That's something else to follow up on but I'm not sure if the whole family had moved to Hertfordshire or if my mother was staying with someone there.

Also on the card was her age with her birthdate in brackets. The bottom right corner of the card also had a date with no explanation. When I did the math, it appeared that 5/1/42 (May 1, 1942) was likely to be her date of enlistment. There was a W.L.A number, no doubt this number was a key to any further records but no further records were available. Under the space left for the age of the woman, was a space for Present Occupation which, in this case, was given as clerk. There was a diagonal line through the whole card. Above this line was writing that I interpreted as saying: "Resigned Herts Reg't 8/12/45". 

It looks like this was the only official record for my mother's years in the Land Army. It's enough to give a brief sketch of her time there, giving the length of service and information such as the address to follow up on. I'll see what else I can find. 

Unsung heroes

 

                                                                       Information for knitters during WWII

In 2008, after more than 50 years of campaigning, the British government at last officially recognized the members of the Women's Land Army and the Women's Timber Corps for their contributions to the war effort. A badge was issued in recognition of their services. But there was a catch, the women had to still be alive to receive the award. Many had died between the time of their service and the government's official recognition.

I can remember my aunt being upset as that meant my mother wouldn't be recognized even though her time in the Land Army was one of the defining experiences of her life. Was it there that she received the injury that required her to have skin grafts on the back of her hands? Why didn't I ask when I had the chance?

Actually knowing that she was a Land Girl was a step in the right direction because that's the thing with non-military war service; it's hard to know what you should be looking for unless there is a whisper of what they got up to during the war period. I don't know if either of my grandmothers volunteered for any wartime duties. That's also the case for my uncle's wives. Perhaps they didn't take on an actual volunteer job but took on extra tasks such as knitting for the troops. But there is no way to know unless a family story was handed down.

There were a variety of tasks in which those left at home could take part. For example, the Home Guard performed many harrowing tasks to help keep those at home safe. A trawl of information about WWII records shows that it is possible to access limited records for the Home Guard, the service which provided local defense. Generally the personnel were men who were too old or young for the regular forces. But I have not found a database of the names of the people involved in that service. According to the blog post whose link is given below, it might be possible to find minimal information on your ancestor's time in the Home Guard if the record survives but there is a cost involved that doesn't guarantee that they will find anything for the person you are looking for. So finding out what your ancestor did during the war is not an easy task.

Sources:

https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/search-british-war-records-ww2/

International Express, Tuesday July 29, 2008, "At last, Land Girls honoured" 

Image:

By Storye book - Photo of object in my possession. Linda Spashett Own work, CC BY 3.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11832744

Blackouts and furniture

 

                                                                   A World War II era buffet still in use today

The history that interests me the most is social history. That's probably the case for many family historians. Rather than focusing on what was happening with the great and good (or bad), social history encompasses the rules, events and fabric of the lives of the man and woman on the street. They weren't the movers and shakers of society but the masses who dealt with life as it came and tried to find their way through it, in the good times and bad. My current focus on World War Two sheds light on a challengingly bad time.

Footage and pictures that show the damage in London during the Blitz are familiar. Those images show the dramatic reality but the smaller, more annoying privations were something I didn't think that much about before starting to research the war era.

People had to change their ways of doing things and obey new rules, like the blackout. Householders were fined for showing light. To get around this, people had to pay for and fit their own blackout curtains or find other means of hiding the illumination in their homes. Of course, I knew about rationing but only thought of the difficulties of obtaining food. But other things were rationed as well, like clothing.   

Fashions reflected wartime regulations as dresses and suits slimmed down and used less material, giving rise to the wartime silhouette familiar from old movies. But other materials were also in short supply such as metal for pots and pans or fabric for upholstery or rugs.

Because wood was scarce and metal was needed for the war effort rather than springs for upholstered furniture, simplified furniture designs were developed. This led to Utility Furniture. This furniture was rationed and only available to newly married couples or those who had lost their household goods because of bombing.

Even after the war Utility Furniture must have been all that was available as, when my parents got married in 1949, it was this type of furniture with which they started married life. My mother was frequently disparaging of the sideboard which followed her to Canada, calling it "cheap war stuff". It was very simple and plain but that's one of the reasons I value it. I still have it with me as a functioning memento of that time in history.  

 

Sources:

Evans, Paul and Peter Doyle. The 1940s Home Shire Publications Ltd., Oxford, 2009