Family Milestones

Not Your Typical Milestone!

Whilst the photograph above is not a typical milestone, it does indicate the distance to the places but not by road. It is situated as you may have gathered beside the Montgomery Canal in Shropshire.

Typically, family historians, record major events in their families, such as births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials, they also compile information  about occupations and military service details.

Family historians however want to do more than record dates and places.

To truly understand our roots we need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. Many of those who live in the United Kingdom or have roots in these countries will have ancestors who were employed by others as servants, agricultural workers or in cottage industries or more recently factory workers. Some of the occupations of yesteryear no longer exist or have altered due to the introduction of machines, this makes it much more difficult to visualise what life must have been like for them.

Major historical events have always influenced the way people live, wars may have both a direct and indirect effect on the population and the generations to follow.

If you are recording your family history consider carefully what you want to record. That story that your aunt told you may not be entirely true but by recording it you are reflecting how someone perceived a moment in time. Our perceptions and feelings are going to be as important as the facts to our descendants. We may have the advantages of photographs and videos to pass on our memories but will our descendants be any clearer about how we perceived our lives.

Start with your oldest living relative and ask them to tell you in whichever way they wish to describe the milestones in their life. 

What do they remember?

Do they have any photographs or other items that trigger memories for them?

Do the same for everyone in your family?

If you are fortunate enough to have a family get together, then get out the photographs, along with pencils or pens and small notelets, and ask everyone to write down anything they associate with a photograph or just who is in the photograph and when it was taken.

Provide envelopes so that the notes can be kept with the photographs and then get digital images of the photographs & notes, or type up the notes and attach to the photograph. 

Each memory is a milestone in the life of someone and can point us in the right direction to understand who they are or were.

Collect and Share your memories and bring a smile to someone's face.   

Memories - How do we keep them?

Are you a Memory Keeper?

This photograph is a group of nurses? who worked at a military hospital near Southampton, Hampshire 
Who knows who they were?

As we get older and we start to lose the older members of the family we realise that much of what we want to know about our ancestors has been lost. The official documents may survive but what happened to those individual memories have they survived. In most cases the sad truth is that much of our oral history dies with each generation.

Whilst today's generations may be more literate than their ancestors with the advent of computers are we changing the way in which we record our memories and if so how do we capture them for the generations to come.
This blog post by author Steve Robinson illustrates what I am trying to say Technology, and its impact on genealogical research.

Many genealogists own or have created scrapbooks containing pictures and mementos from their family, others have albums of photos and cuttings and other documents in paper or digital format. 
The organised amongst us have them carefully catalogued, but for many this is a project in progress. 
Most genealogists will be like me and have a pile of unidentified photographs that we will probably never identify.


So we already have plenty to keep us occupied surely just getting on top of the photos and documents is enough. 

Is this really all that we want to pass on to the next generation? 

Will they be interested in a bunch of photos and papers?

We can interview the family we are in close contact with but what about the more distant family?

Devon Lee in her blog post from the 10th October discusses about how we might inspire the younger family members to preserve the stories of today which is part of what I am trying to do with a project I am trying to set up.

If you have not been involved with Julie Goucher's Book of Me then I suggest you take a look at it, and ask as many members of the family as possible to participate with as many of the prompts as possible.
Don't forget to ask them to either send you a copy or let you know where they have recorded their memories and thoughts. This way you can provide your descendants with the opportunity to connect with other members of the family and their reflections. 

As many of the younger members of my family are on facebook, I am going to set up a secret group there, so that our family can share photos and memories and post anything they want to about their memories of the family. I will provide links to the Book of Me and any other sites that may help with ideas, and also provide suggestions on where and how to record anything they want to leave as a record, but not share with the group.

If I am in contact with family not on facebook I will create a pdf file that I can email to them to let them know what I am doing and request that they send me anything they want to add to the group.

The ultimate goal is to get as many of the family as possible involved so the whole thing needs to be flexible and hopefully the technology will work for us.

We all have our own memories and see events in our lives from our own perspective. Knowing more about siblings and cousins and their memories of the family will leave much more of a legacy for everyone.

Using Time Lines as a Family History Writing Tool

The thing I enjoy most about writing family stories for my two blogs, Family Stories: Photographs and Memories, and The Other Half of my Tree - Stories of my female ancestors, is putting together all the different snippets of information that I have gathered.  I love piecing together dates of birth, death and marriages with newspaper clippings and events of the day into a short story that reveals a little about a particular ancestor.

This is often a difficult task, especially when of writing about female family members.  So today I thought I would share with you the tool I find the most helpful.    A time line of events in their life! 

There are many different programs and apps designed to assist you with this task, for example: Easy Timeline Maker, Timeline Builder, Capzles, Tiki-Toki and Timeglider to name a few. However, I have found the most useful form  is to create a simple time line in Excel. 

To show how I use this format, I will share with you a section of the time line I developed when researching Elizabeth Taylor (nee Rushworth). I wrote a series of blogs on Elizabeth's life, and it is my hope in "time to come" to will be able to write a short book on her fascinating story.

Part of Time Line for Elizabeth Taylor (nee Rushworth)

Using an Excel Sheet I enter every little bit of information that I can find. It is important to remember, in the case of women, to record all the dates and events of the male members of her family as these are often more easily found and will add background to her story:

• birth, death and marriage dates (bdm) for the person with details of place etc 
• bdm dates for their children, parents, siblings, grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, if they occur during the person's life time line.
• census dates, with details of where they lived
• dates they started and finished school
• dates of illnesses, or other life events that you know about
• details from any newspaper articles that you have been able to find on them, i.e.winning prizes in the local show for flower arrangement, being involved in an accident, receiving an award
• military service of the person or a family member
• immigration, travel
• land or business ownership
• courtcases

and the list goes on.  

Then, on the same excel spreadsheet, I build another timeline of events that could have impacted on Elizabeth Taylor's life. This is, I think the key to putting your ancestor's story together and places it in context.

Examples of events that should be included into the supporting time line are:

• Start and finish dates of Wars, eg WWI, Crimean War
• Times of economic depression, eg start of the Potato Famine, cotton famine
• Launch of post office savings scheme, first postal service
• Establishment of Trade Unions
• Workers strikes
• Events in the town, ie Establishment of local Borough, or council, building of schools, starting of hospital or ambulance service, opening of Town Hall
• Women given the right to own property
• Laws passed to make it compulsory for children to attend school
• Visits from dignitaries, major sporting events, opening of local cinema, Circus comes to town
• Natural disasters such as  disease outbreaks, storms, floods and droughts

Searching for this information can take time, however today with access to so many online newspapers, and historical sites there is a lot of information available to plump out the details of your ancestors life.  I have even found it possible to go search the local newspaper on the date of an important event, ie wedding and found the weather forecast for the day.

Often, a small piece of information entered into the second part of the time line will give meaning to an event in your ancestors life.  For example an outbreak of typhoid and the death of a number of family members at the same time, or trade union strikes or closing down of a local factory could explain why your ancestor decides to move to another village or district or even immigrate.

The development of a time line is vital to gain an understanding of the setting of your ancestors life and helps put life events into a clear frame of reference with the lives of their families, events in their community and outside influences.  Do you use timelines when researching your ancestors?  Do you have any other suggestions for the composing these stories?