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.