A Valentine's Day post: ancestors in love

Bath Chronicle, 24 February 1763

It's St Valentine's Day, so I'm going to look at a few love stories from my family tree. Happy, sad, or awkward, they remind me that my ancestors and relatives weren't just dates and names on a GEDCOM, they were living, loving, real people with all the ups and downs that go with being human.

Rwgan, our family home in Wales

My father's parents met when my grandfather, Richard Owen, came to board at Rwgan, a Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) farmhouse our family built in the early 19th century. Richard, the son of Griffith Owen of Anglesey and Elizabeth Richard/s, got a job in Lloyds Bank in the county town, Cardigan, and stayed at Rwgan with Rhys Lloyd and his wife Sarah Davies. Their daughter, Elizabeth Jane (Lizzie) lived there, too, and she was a beauty, small, with a heart-shaped face and long, luscious hair.

Richard was smitten... but Lizzie was choosy, and had turned down previous offers for her hand. One of her unlucky suitors had described her as 'frozen perfume' - I love that phrase! But something about young Mr Owen melted her... and they married and had two sons, my father and uncle.

My other grandfather was Laurence Thomas Delaney, known as Pop. He was the son of Mary Maude Wilson and Thomas Delaney (Tom). This story is about one of Pop's sisters, Florence (Flo) and also involves a paying guest.

Flo at the races, © Frances Owen

Flo was living with her parents at the family farm, Moyne, near Little Hartley in New South Wales. A trader, Robert Reinerts, from Hamburg, stayed at Moyne as a boarder when on leave from his work in New Guinea (presumably the north-eastern part, then under German control).

He and Flo fell in love. But international politics were cruel to them. The First World War broke out and Robert was interned as an enemy alien. After the war ended, Robert was repatriated to Germany.

He asked Flo to marry him, but she couldn't bear the thought of going to live on the other side of the world. So they parted, and she never married.

Her life wasn't empty, though; she loved going to dances with the other young Delaneys and, when the family moved to Sydney, she enjoyed days at the races and evenings at the opera.

One of my convict ancestors, James Thomas Richards (no relation, as far as I know, to the Elizabeth mentioned above), went on being a rogue into his fifties. At some time before May 1870, in Sydney, New South Wales, he met Rebecca Harrington, a free settler from Hackney in East London. You may have read about Rebecca's mother, Julia, in the Celestina Christmas story over on the A Rebel Hand blog.

James was about 25 years older than Rebecca. Who knows what drew them together? Did he represent security? He was a well-known figure on the quayside, and a prizewinning waterman. Maybe she was pretty, vivacious or charming. It could have been their East End backgrounds which gave them something in common.

But all we have are the facts - that on 28 February, 1871, when she was about 30 years old, Rebecca gave birth to James's daughter, Eleanor Ann Edith. The only problem was that James wasn't in a position to marry her - he already had a wife, Elizabeth Beadman.

I haven't got much evidence about how James, Rebecca and Elizabeth dealt with this uncomfortable situation. I do know that when Rebecca's father, Thomas Harrington, died in 1874, he was buried from James's house in Cumberland St, Sydney. Had he, or Rebecca, or both, been living there?

Thomas Harrington's burial notice, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July, 1874

Elizabeth was still alive, though whether she was living at that address I don't know. Maybe she stayed at her grown-up son James's house. She died later that year, and James Thomas and Rebecca married on 14 October 1874.

Most of my ancestors just met and married (or didn't) without leaving a boy-meets-girl story behind them. I've written about how my earliest Australian ancestors may have got together, and I'll mention them again because 2016 is a bi-centenary year for three of them: Nicholas Delaney, who married Elizabeth Bayly (Bayley, Bailey), and Sarah Marshall and John Simpson, who probably didn't go through a ceremony but were 'married' as far as they were concerned.


Do you know any love stories which bring your ancestors to life?


I'm going to finish with a few Valentine notices I found in the British Newspaper Archive. I hope you enjoy them!

Plymouth Gazette, 15 February 1845. A cynical view...

Worcester Journal, 4 February 1854

Burnley Gazette, 19 February 1876. Sale of unwanted cards?

Burnley Gazette, 26 March 1881. A bit desperate?

'Offensive vulgarity' in 1926. Who knew they'd gone out of fashion?

Surrey Advertiser, 10 February 1940. The war can't stop love (or commerce). Take that, Hitler!

Keeping up with the Joneses, or making sense of census place names

Well, it had to happen. Anyone researching Welsh genealogy is likely to find a Jones somewhere in their tree. I’d been lucky until I started looking at my paternal 2x great grandmother, Elizabeth Lloyd (c1820 – c1890).

I’m planning a post about how I discovered more about her on my A Rebel Hand blog, so I won’t go over the details here, but eventually I found enough evidence pointing to her being born Elizabeth Jones in Llandysul, Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) in Wales. Jones! Now that’s going to make research into her family easier, I don’t think.

Some of the material I used came from maps. If you’re a regular reader of Worldwide Genealogy you’ll have noticed that I love maps, old and new. They can fill in so much detail about our ancestors’ lives and can help solve the problem of streets, houses and farms which have changed names as well as when they were built. I’m going to write about how maps gave me a bigger overview of the background of Elizabeth and her husband, John Lloyd, who married in 1841.

1841 Wales census via Ancestry

Here she is with her parents, Jinkin [sic] and Anne and her brother David in the 1841 census. (I still haven’t come near to pinning David down. David Jones in Wales? I mean, please!) But where are they living? It looks like Gwarllenoydor. Google couldn’t find anything like that. Luckily I had an image of Elizabeth’s marriage to John Lloyd which had Gwarllwynoedos as the farm’s name.

Image via Findmypast

Of course, census enumerators could have, ahem, eccentric spelling, and if this one didn’t speak Welsh he’d have made a stab at it without being able to recognise some words,such as llwyn, bush or grove. So armed with the new spelling I searched again and found... nothing. I went back to the census and looked for a nearby farm, Cribor, adding the parish name, Llandysul (also spelled Llandissil), to get an idea of where to look. Yes! It was near Pontshaen (also Pontsian).

Now this is where luck came in. I was looking at the family story that my Lloyds were related to Frank Lloyd Wright. I’d been intrigued by Eliot Ball’s Wikipedia Ancestor Challenge at North Sydney Family History (thanks to GeniAus’s GAGs for pointing it out). And Frank's family came from... near Pontshaen.

I tingled. I had a map of the area already saved!

Ordnance Survey map showing Gwarllwynoedos

And what a map. I’d found it by looking for Frank’s ancestors’ chapel, since his Lloyd Joneses were famous Unitarian preachers, and luckily it was a listed building. The Listed Buildings Online site led me to this Ordnance Survey (OS) map. And there, in the top right corner, was... Gwarllwynoedos. Thank you, genealogy map fairy! So, here’s a hint: if you’re looking for ancestors in Britain and they lived near an old or unusual building, try Listed Buildings Online.

Google map not showing Gwarllwynoedos

I find the OS maps better than Google's for places in the countryside – here’s the equivalent – and Bing is great for getting an idea of the landscape, which can be so important to how our ancestors lived and who they met and married.

Bing aerial view of Gwarllwynoedos area

But for finding named buildings, OS is the one for me. Why not try all three out for yourself? I’m not so keen on the OS’s own get a map feature, though.

After I’d had my genealogy happy dance, I decided to see if I could find where John Lloyd, Elizabeth Jones’s husband, lived. The marriage document said Blaencerdyn, also in the parish of Llandysul, which was backed up by the 1851 census (as Blaencerdin). I had no luck with the Blaencerdyn spelling, so I tried the other. This time Google recognised the name – but came up with Blaencerdin Fawr and Blaencerdin Fach, both in the same area of Llandysul. Fawr means big and fach means small, it’s a common pairing in Welsh place names, so I was fairly confident that I was looking in the right place.

But Google Maps didn’t recognise either spelling, so I tried GenUKI’s list of Llandysul farms. I was excited to see that Blaencerdin Fawr was in the district of Llanffrene, just like Gwarllwynoedos was. I tried the OS get a map site, and was thrilled to see that the two farms were near each other. Elizabeth and John were neighbours! So that’s how they met.

OS get a life map - you can see why I'm not mad about the picture quality

With this information, I went back to my listed buildings OS map and found Blaencerdin Fach. So I had the ‘big’ farm and the ‘little’ one on two different OS maps. I needed both on the same map, though.

OS map of both Blaencerdins

I took a gamble and zoomed in on the listed buildings OS map and got lucky. Hint – use the + and – symbols, not your mouse scroll wheel, they’re more accurate for this map.

But which one was John Lloyd’s farm? This is where Ancestry’s back and forward arrows on the census images came into their own. I’d usually pinpoint the building by seeing what their immediate neighbours were and check the enumeration district details at the beginning of the record, then hope to find the places on the map. But this time I got lucky. One page on in the 1851 census there was a family living at... Blaencerdin Fach! So I knew that John was at the ‘big’ farm, Blaencerdin Fawr.

OS First Series map showing Blaencerdin (top left) and Gwarllwynoedos (bottom right)

I could also have checked at A Vision of Britain, Ordnance Survey First Series 1:63360, 1805 to 1869, which shows the two farms as Blaencerdin and Blaencerdin Fach, or Old Maps Online, but I’d need the co-ordinates for that since Blaencerdin doesn’t come up in their search. I’d have needed more information to use the National Library of Scotland’s wonderful map-matching service, too.

There was one last map I needed to go to. My own. I mark the places where my ancestors lived using Google Maps. I added them to my Lloyds map, alongside Sadlers Hall, where John and Elizabeth's son Rhys (my great-grandfather) later lived. And only this week I was able to add Rhyol, another Jones farm. Now that was a real toughie to track down!

But this post is l-o-n-g enough already. I hope you weren’t put off by the length. I wanted to ‘show my workings’, as they told us to at school, and hope that something here gives you a helpful tip for using maps to trace ancestors from Britain, if you have any.

Have you got any map tips to pass on?

Rear view mirror

Flickr: photo Big Grey Mare, Icky Pic

A light-hearted post this month. I’ve been reading an article about ‘mirror years’ on the History Today website. "To put your lifespan into historical perspective," it says, "start with the year you were born, then subtract your age. The result is your 'mirror year'." Or just double your age and take it away from 2014, if you like.

For instance, if you’re 40 years old now, your mirror year is 1934. That means the start of your life – 1974 – is as close to the middle of the 30s as it is to today. Your birth is as near to the US dust bowl drought, the shooting of Bonnie and Clyde, Hitler declaring himself Fuhrer, the Flying Scotsman reaching a record-breaking 100 miles an hour, the first-ever photo of Nessie and Donald Duck’s first film as it is to what you had for breakfast today. Eek. As the article says, your date of birth is "often closer to events that seem in the distant past than to the present day."

Baby's behaving herself today

What’s this got to do with genealogy? Well, for me, one of the pleasures of researching my ancestors is finding out how they lived – family social history, if you like. And looking though my own rear-view mirror makes me think how much life has changed since I first gave my parents a sleepless night.

Not everyone had a telephone (and I mean a round-dialled, wall-connected one, kids, not a smartphone). You could park in the centre of town. Washing was done by hand or sent to a laundry. The only pasta dish most people knew was macaroni cheese. TVs were black and white. And playing on the street was normal, not dangerous, for us children. How much more would be different in my mirror year?

And of course the older we get the further back our mirror year stretches. If you’re 50 this year, it’s 1914, the start of the First World War. 60? Welcome to 1894, when The Jungle Book was published, the Manchester Ship Canal opened, Coca-Cola was sold in bottles, Nicholas II became Tsar of Russia, women in South Australia gained the vote and Coxey's Army, the first significant US protest march, arrived in Washington, DC.

A (very) small part of the spreadsheet...

If I could go back through time the other way, to my mirror year, I’d love to meet my ancestors and ask them a few questions. Well, I’d like to ask a lot of questions, but I’m thinking about battering at those brick walls. I’d like to ask my paternal great-grandfather just exactly which of the 13 or so Griffith Owens born on Anglesey around 1847 was him. Then I could delete the spreadsheet I’m using to try and track him down. (Argh!)

I’d like to sit down with my maternal great-grandmother Mary Maude and tease out of her everything she knew about her father, Thomas Robert Sandon Wilson. We don’t know when or where he was born, or died, or even where he disappeared to when she was a girl.

Then I’d like to move on to the social history. Ask another paternal grandfather, Rhys Lloyd, what life was like as a saddler in rural Wales. Find out how Minnie Richards and Thomas Winter, who lived in the Rocks, a notorious area of Sydney, got by and what it was like to be so poor they sent their daughter, my gran, to live with another family. Get Griffith to tell me yarns about his life as a mariner. Those questions might be answered by research, but... how much better it would be to hear their stories in their own words.

If you could go back to your mirror year, who would you like to meet? What would you ask them?

There Be Dragons – Finding Tithe Maps for England and Wales

Tithe maps are often the earliest detailed maps of parishes in England and Wales. They are important for genealogists, as well as historians of all kinds, cartographers, and other disciplines.

Tithes were a tax levied on land owners by the established churches, the Church of England and the Church of Wales in their respective countries. The property right to collect tithes, traditionally one tenth of agricultural produce, was a claimed by the church for the support of the clergy. In 1836, tithes were commuted (changed) to money payments rather than payments in kind. The Tithe Act 1836 set out the transition process, and established the Tithe Commission to oversee it. For each parish, the total revenue due was apportioned between the landowners, taking into account the area and productivity of the land. As the area of land was a factor in the calculation of the monetary amount due by each landowner, a survey was required. The tithe commission used the maps to check the accuracy of the survey, hence the fairness of the apportionment.

The Tithe Apportionments that accompany each map, record the owner, occupier, area, land use, tithable value and plot number for each land parcel. The plot number corresponds directly with the map, so people’s land ownership and occupation is precisely located. This is a genealogical treasure chest!

Archive Catalogues locate original Tithe Maps

Three copies of each map were produced for each of the parties involved: the Tithe Commission, the diocese (the bishop oversaw the clergy), and the parish (the rector was usually the main tithe owner).

The Tithe Commission copies at The National Archives (TNA), a collection of 11,785 tithe maps, were described in Kain and Oliver’s seminal work, The Tithe Maps of England and Wales.1 Many of the descriptions have been incorporated into the TNA catalogue.

TNA catalogue entry for tithe commissioner's copy of Llanychan tithe map

The diocese copies for Wales are at The National Library of Wales (NLW), and the catalogue descriptions benefit from Davies’ work, The tithe maps of Wales.2

NLW catalogue entry for the diocese copy of Llanychan tithe map & apportionment

 The diocese copies for England and parish copies are likely to be found in the relevant county archives, which vary in the availability of online catalogues and detail of description. Denbighshire Archives has an index that includes the third parish copy of tithe map for Llanychan, the example shown in the TNA and NLW catalogues above. An example from England, the parish of Claverley, Shropshire, is in the diocese of Hereford. The diocese copy is at the Herefordshire Archives, but is not included in an online catalogue, so I had to enquire to locate it.

Shropshire Archives’ catalogue includes copies of the tithe apportionment for Claverley, but no map. Enquiries have revealed that when the church deposited its records in 1955, no map was found. In Claverley, there were several tithe owners other than the parish incumbent. Consequently, the ‘parish’ copy of the map may have been kept by one of them and never deposited in the archive.

Which of the three tithe maps for any particular parish was the original?

In the case of Llanychan, it is hard to tell, as both the commissioner’s and diocese copies are manuscripts, or hand drawn. The diocese copy was apparently drawn from a new survey, so was current in 1838.

In the case of Claverley, the commissioner’s copy is a lithograph, a kind of printed copy, dated 1840, and the diocese copy bears a date of 1842. So, neither is the original.

Archives often make photocopies of tithe maps to prevent damage from handling the huge originals, which may be measured meters. Such copies may be reduced in size so do not faithfully reproduce scale and detail.

Scanning and photographing maps large in both scale and physical size, in a way that preserves both the detail and cartographic accuracy, is challenging. The resolution of this problem underpins the quality of digital copies, especially interactive online versions.

Online Editions and Peeling the Onion with GIS

Traditional maps pack lots of information into a flat piece of paper. There are multiple types of features like the roads, rivers and water bodies, buildings, and land parcels depicted on tithe maps. Think of these types as the layers of an onion.

The land ownership and occupation information could have been written on the map, but that would have made it difficult to use for tax purposes. Instead the plot number provides the key for the apportionment data, which is presented as a separate document. When the tithe maps were produced, this was the only practical option, but modern map making tools can handle this with ease.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have revolutionized map production from the 1960s right up to today. This is also the technology behind familiar online mapping like Google Maps and Bing. GIS editions of tithe maps online include:

Cheshire
Norfolk
East Sussex
Worcestershire
Leeds area, West Yorkshire
University of Portsmouth, a selection of parishes

Try them out. Do you prefer outlines of land parcels overlaid on a current map, or viewing old and new side-by-side? Which maps are easiest to use? Did you experience performance issues like slow responses? Can you pinpoint great-grand-daddy’s tiny hovel?

Each map has some advantages and drawbacks. These websites are limited implementations of the technology. If you know of website that does really impressive mapping, please share in the comments. I am impressed with the United States website Atlas of Historical County Boundaries which even offers the GIS data for download. I would like to see something similar for the tithe maps.

In February 2014, the UK-based genealogy subscription website The Genealogist announced that they will offer the TNA copies of tithe apportionments and maps online. Some apportionments are available now, and the maps are due to launch in 2015. It is not clear how the maps and apportionments will be linked. The time scale seems too short for the production of GIS editions.

According to the minutes (Item 6.1) of the TNA’s User Advisory Group meeting on 18 March 2014, in answer to questions in about the tithe map digitization, Commercial Director Mary Gledhill stated that

“the digitisation being carried out by S and N is targeted towards a genealogist market. They are paying for the work to be carried out, and make the decision on how the work is produced”. 

S and N are the company that runs The Genealogist. I am perturbed by the TNA’s apparent lack of engagement with the digitisation of the tithe maps. Done well, it could be an important research resource for all disciplines. Family and house historians need a high quality, and cartographically accurate rendition. Then you stand a real chance of locating the small dwelling of a peasant ancestor.

My comments on the production of GIS versions of tithe maps is based on personal experience of digitising tithe maps gained during research for my Master’s degree dissertation.3

References

1 Kain, Roger & Oliver, Richard (1995) The tithe maps of England and Wales : a cartographic analysis and county-by-county catalogue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2 Davies, Robert. (1999) The tithe maps of Wales :a guide to the tithe maps and apportionments of Wales in the National Library of Wales Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales.
3 Adams, Susan Yvonne (2012) To what extent can Cartographic, Land and Genealogical data be combined to establish Land Ownership in England and can a Geographical Information System (GIS) tie it all together? unpublished MSc thesis, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Ancestral April Fool

Laughing fool, c 1500 (via Wikimedia)

This April, I've been fooled by a name.

I've started researching my father's grandmother's family, who lived in the same area of West Wales for - well, if you believe old family stories, many centuries. I've been looking for great-grandmother Sarah Davies, born in Llandyssilio[gogo], Cardiganshire, between 1853 - 56. And I thought I'd found her in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 Wales censuses. In 1881 this Sarah was living in an old farmhouse that's been in the family for generations. Right name, right age, right birthplace, right-looking address.

Wrong Sarah. I found her in the same house in 1891, but with the married surname James. 'My' Sarah had married Rhys Lloyd of Llandyssil/Llandysul before then.

We can all follow false trails. It's so easy to be fooled by the 'right' details. The fact that my ancestors were unadventurous in their naming doesn't help. Half my foremothers were called Sarah or Elizabeth, and a lot of the men were Thomases. And of course finding a married woman's maiden name can just complicate things even more. Poor Sarah has gone back into my 'to do' file, and I'm picking myself up, dusting my research off, and starting all over again.

There's an up-side, though, with names and false trails. I'm guessing that if you've looked at online family trees which have your own ancestors in them, you'll have found some cuckoos in the nest. A John Jones married 10 years after he was buried, perhaps, or a Jane Smith who emigrated in 1865 when records show she never moved from her Scottish birthplace. They're in your family's tree, but they don't belong there - and you have the documentary proof.

I've got my own cuckoos in the family nests. For instance, my 3xgreat-grandfather, Nicholas Delaney - the one who got me interested in genealogy - was transported from Ireland to Australia in 1802, and married Elizabeth Bayly (Bayley, Bailey) in 1808.

Reed warbler feeding cuckoo (Wikimedia)

A look at some family trees have him married before, in Ireland, to a woman with a very 'modern' looking name. Now fair enough, a name could be spelled in plenty of different ways, like Elizabeth's surname in the last paragraph. But when it looks extremely 20th century, like Kathryn, Debra or Barbra, you have to go 'hmm'. And if her second name is also not what you'd expect in rural Ireland in the 18th century - Jay, Kay or Dee, for instance - well, it's time for a pinch of salt.

It turns out that this cuckoo wife was born in the US (and would have had to cross the Atlantic as a young woman to live in deepest County Wicklow in order to meet and marry Nicholas). Digging a little deeper into her history, I find she was born in the mid-20th century. How she ended up in Nicholas's tree in the 1790s, I do not know.

So in this case the name is a hint that you need to look very closely at the proof for this claimed 'relative' - which Worldwide Genealogists would do anyway, of course!

When I start searching for great-grandmother Sarah Davies again, I plan to use names as clues. I've said that my lot were all very traditional in the forenames they chose, so maybe they followed traditional naming patterns, at least for the first few children (many of them had traditional large families, too).

In many parts of the UK, couples would use this pattern, strictly or loosely, until the later 19th century:

1st son - named after the father's father
2nd son - mother's father
3rd son - father
4th son - father's eldest brother

1st daughter - named after the mother's mother
2nd daughter - father's mother
3rd daughter - mother
4th daughter - mother's eldest sister

Of course, it's never that simple in real life. Some people used variations on this pattern. Some only followed it for the first few children. Some didn't use it at all. Parents who were firstborns could choose another sibling's name for baby number four. Children could be named after other relatives, a powerful local family, royals, role models or political figures. And if someone had fallen out with a parent or sibling they might well not want to name their baby after its spiteful granny or criminal uncle.

Still, I'm glad of any clues which might help me track down those elusive ancestors hiding away in the records.

I'm looking at you, Sarah.


Apologies to all my fellow Worldwide Genealogy bloggers - in its wisdom Blogger/Blogspot has decided not to let me make comments once again. I thought I'd sorted out the glitches! (Sigh...) So I just wanted to let you know that I'm enjoying your writing and all the inspiring ideas and information. And please do comment on this post. I'd love to hear from you - I just won't be able to chat!

Croeso i'r Blog Worldwide Achyddiaeth o Gymru

or Welcome to the Worldwide Genealogy Blog from Wales

Although I have lived in Wales for almost 21 years I do not speak the language. I used Google translate for the title phrase.
I know this is a tool that genealogists have used when researching in countries which do not use their native tongue. They have found it an asset as it is much cheaper than getting a translator for the records. It is not infallible but for most genealogists it has opened up the records they can use especially now more of them are becoming available online.

A bit more about me. My name is Hilary Gadsby and the title of my blog is The Edge of Snowdonia which pretty much describes where I live in North Wales. My research areas are all in England which is where I was born, Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire for my family and Lincolnshire, Rutland, Leicestershire and Norfolk for my husband's family. We have one or two people from other areas in our direct lines but the majority of the family have stayed in a small geographic area for centuries.
I started researching when the only internet we had available was using a dial up modem and you paid for each minute you were online, at this time or a little later I signed up for some rootsweb mailing lists in order to connect with other family historians, I also started with a free genealogy program which did little more than record basic details.
Over the years I have used various websites to connect to others with a shared interest  http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/, http://home.ancestry.co.uk/, http://www.lostcousins.com, http://tribalpages.com and http://www.wikitree.com being the main ones. 
I also use social networking websites such as  www.facebook.com and plus.google.com to connect with friends family and fellow genealogists. These are great if you want to connect with other researchers but what if you want to share with your own family and in a way that they can get involved as much or as little as they want. Most of these have varying amounts of privacy but none are totally private.

Famberry is different from most family history sites in that in order to be able to access the tree and any accompanying images you must be invited and a member of the family. Access is granted by the tree owner and can be restricted, the owner may also choose to grant access to the entire tree. So here is a place where you can share and collaborate without everyone having access. This makes it an ideal place for photographs and announcements, including living members of the family. To access the website go to http://famberry.com/ 

We discussed this website with the developer on last week's Mondays with Myrt which can be viewed on YouTube at 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXTRg5UDeM8&list=UUZlX5znu6d7CCz6xobwMXOA&feature=c4-overview
you may have to subscribe in order to view the video.

There are many ways in which we genealogists or family historians (whichever term which wish to use) can share and collaborate you may have others which I have overlooked. Please feel free to share them with us as collaboration is what we aim to foster with this blog.