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.