Are we as Creative as Our Ancestors were ?

This post was inspired by a post made by Thomas Macentee http://bit.ly/157Yhxu .

So how many of us make our own clothes. Very few is the first answer to come to mind. 

I read somewhere that John Lewis is cutting the area it has for fabrics and other handicraft items but that there may be an increased demand for these items in times of austerity. 

When I grew up (being a child of the 60s) girls would have been taught skills such as needlework at school. We were also taught how to cook. Both skills our parents and grandparents would have been expected to learn at home.

My grandmother brought up in an orphanage at a time when many young girls went in to service would have been taught these skills to ensure her employability. Skills she would later use when she had her own family. I well remember the school jumpers or cardigans that she would knit for us when we were children.

Even after the industrial revolution when fabrics were cheaper to produce the everyday working class of this country would make their own clothes as a necessity rather than a matter of choice.

Alongside this change from homemade to shop bought have we also lost other traditions in our culture?

 In the days when most people attended church on a Sunday the working class would have a set of best clothes often referred to as “Sunday Best”. Does anyone have a set of best clothes today?

“Home made” items also bring to mind organizations such as the Women’s Institute (WI) with the label “Jam and Jerusalem” which many turned their back on but may see a resurgence with all the food scares we have seen.

We will never turn the clock back and society has changed and all of us should ensure we record what we remember of our own past as this will be the stories our families want to read, but have we lost something more fundamental when the basic skills of cooking and clothing ourselves have been lost by the majority.

Should making anything from the basic ingredients be a hobby or should we return to the days when we taught children how to cook and sew at home and backed this up with school tuition.

How many of us have children who cannot even cook?

Has the era of ready meals really done our children any favours?

Do we create less than our ancestors?

Family Stories Getting Our Family to Engage

I have been watching the livestreaming from Rootstech at http://www.rootstech.org/ and in this post I will discuss the main points I have gleaned from the first day Thursday 21st March 2013.

ThursdayPresented by findmypast.com
8:30 AMKeynote – Dennis Brimhall, Syd Lieberman, Josh Taylor
11:00 AMThe Future of Genealogy - Thomas MacEntee and pane
l1:45 PMTell it Again (Story@Home) - Kim Weitkamp
3:00 PMThe Genealogists Gadget Bag - Jill Ball and pane
l4:15 PMFinding the Obscure and Elusive: Geographic Information on the Web - James Tanner

The message from the morning sessions can be summed up for me with the following phrases.

How do we get the younger generations involved more.

What are we leaving for our descendants of our lives.

Storytelling brings others into your world and helps engage those who may think family history/genealogy is boring.

We need to use technology to get our messages across.

Do we need technology designed for genealogy? 

Surely social media should be treated as modern day letters and we should be saving our tweets and facebook posts?

We need to think what our descendants want to know about us.
There are plenty of official records but are these enough.
Will our descendants have access to official records and what will these records say about us.
The future of genealogy is in our hands.
We need to make the right choices.
Do you want someone to be interested in what you have done, if so how are you going to get them to pick up that book, look at that photograph or document, listen to that story and visualise that moment in time and how that person may have felt, where they were and what living conditions were like.
With the information we have in our records and on the internet we need to paint a picture to Tell Our Story to engage Our Family.

If you have not managed to see the presentation by Lisa Louise Cooke  on using Google Earth I would recommend you try and catch up with her DVDs as I believe this is a great way to visualise your heritage and it can be updated.

Also have a look at the article in the April 2013 edition of the Who Do You Think You Are magazine discussing a world tree.

Above all we need to SHARE if we want to GROW.

Inspiration

Who inspires you?

I went to Who Do You Think You Are Live last year and went to the talk by Lisa Louise Cooke of the Genealogy Gems podcast.

I have listen to all her free podcasts and have been a premium member since it started.

Lisa has done a lot on using Google for Genealogy and her talk focused on using Google Earth. I found it very thought provoking and really wanted to get down and use the ideas.

Whilst I have not yet found time to put what I learnt to the test by sharing with the family I hope to do this soon so that everyone of the family with access to a computer can see that Genealogy is not just a load of charts and it can be truly interactive and relevant to the 21st century generation.

Lisa's website can be found at http://lisalouisecooke.com/

Wikitree - More than an online tree

I have briefly posted about Wikitree as I joined a while back.
It is set up in such a way as to allow collaboration with fellow researchers but in this post I want to tell you about how it has been used to reunite some photographs with my family.

Whilst I was on holiday recently I received a message via the private messaging on Wikitree.
This message was from another genealogist who was not a relative.
He told me he was trying to reunite some photographs with a member of the family.
Having exchanged some information as to who was in the photographs it appears that some of the people in the photographs were cousins of my grandmother.

It also transpired that there was a thread at Rootschat regarding this search see http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,612466.0.html

I thought I was fortunate when I received a family bible belonging to my husband's family now it seems good fortune is to come my way once again.

Update on Thomas Richards

If you have not previously read it I suggest you read this page first http://genemeet.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/best-genealogy-find.html as this is an update on this earlier post.
I have been trying to find Thomas Richards on the Army Records at Find My Past but could only find one in the 75th rather than the 76th. However this weekend I found a record for a Thomas Richards in the Peninsula Medal Roll and realised that the 76th Foot was the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. I also found the regimental museum website, as the museum is in Halifax I hope to visit next time we are in Yorkshire to see what I can find out about where he fought and possibly where he was born.

Who Do You Think You Are Live 2012

Leading up to the Event

I had hoped to go to WDYTYA Live in 2011 but a mix up with dates meant I was unable to go so I decide that this year was to be my first visit to the event. Originally I was to make a weekend of it but before I booked anything I realised I would be on my own. For this reason I decided that although it would make a long day I would travel down on the day and return on an evening train.
In the days before the show I received the latest editions of the 2 family history magazines that I have subscriptions for Your Family History and Your Family Tree. The former had items of interest with a bit about tropical diseases including Malaria which mentioned Ronald Ross (see my earlier posting Sunday, 17 May 2009). There was also mention of a new BBC series about the work of Francis Frith the photographer presented by John Sergeant. Francis Frith was married to Mary Ann Rosling (sister of Alfred Rosling, the first treasurer of the Photographic Society)and as you can see in my earlier postings my husband is a Rosling descendant and a distant cousin of his wife.
Your Family Tree had an article which mentioned the Titanic as this year is the centenary. I have previously posted about my link with Captain Haddock and have put a link to this on the magazine forum. I caught up with Adam (YFT Editor) at the show and he suggested I posted a reminder on the forum.

Now to recap my day at WDYTYA Live.

I spent the morning going from one SOG presentation to another and was so glad I paid extra for my advance ticket. Given that there were no tube trains running to Olympia until 10.15 and I needed to be there for 10.20 I took the tube to Barons Court and the train and tube were running on time. A quick walk to Olympia straight in and I was there in plenty of time for the WDYTYA experience of Larry Lamb, whose episode had been voted the best one in the last series. He appeared very relaxed and his sister who had been seen on the programme was there in the audience.

Next up was a talk by Lisa Louise Cooke who had flown over from California to present on Google Earth for Genealogy. Unfortunately she had a problem with her laptop not having a suitable connector. Else Churchill had lent her netbook but she was having problems with the video until the tech guide managed to find another laptop. However as a seasoned presenter this did not phase her and she explained how we could use Google Earth to bring our research into context, especially for the non-genealogists in the family. I found her talk most inspiring and I bought a copy of her DVD Volume 2. She had sold out of Volume1, but as a Premium member of her podcast Genealogy Gems ( which can be found at http://www.genealogygems.tv/INDEX.htm ) I have access to the videos online. Now all I need to do is to decide eactly what I want to put into the presentation and whether or not to add an audio file.
You can find the DVDs here http://genealogygems.tv/Googleforgenealogy.htm .

The final talk was by Gill Blanchard on Norfolk. I had problems finding this as I didn't realise it was downstairs and managed to get a seat just as it started. She went through the variety of records available for Norfolk research most of them I knew there were some I had not come across and when I have time I must have a look for some of the websites that she mentioned. The biggest problem I had with this talk was an inability to see all of the screen.

By this time I was hungry and thirsty and managed to grab a sandwich and a drink.I then had a wander around the stands on the ground floor before my meeting with an expert to try and find out where to go next with my search for my husband's Irish ancestor. Apart from needlessly joining a queue and my expert being double booked I was pointed in the direction of a free website which may be helpful, otherwise I may need to visit The National Archives to consult the muster rolls as he was in the British Army.

I visited the Wiltshire Family History Society stand and signed up to joined them. They gave me a membership form to complete so I found somewhere to sit down to complete it. This was the Genes Reunited presentation area and Anthony Adolph was about to start a presentation on DNA mapping. Since he only had an audience of 3 including me he decided to make it a more informal discussion which worked well.

I had one last look around the stands and picked up a Postal Museum leaflet and one of the My ancestor was books from SoG bookshop on Merchant Seamen and decided to give myself plenty of time to get the tube back to Euston and the 19.10 train home.

One thing you need for these events is stamina and the more you plan ahead the more you get out of the day. I had intended to speak to someone on the stand from Jersey but forgot. So remember the motto of Scouts and Guides and Be Prepared.

Rootstech 2012

This time last week I was catching up with the Live streaming of Rootstech 2012.
I watched what I could last year and found the 2011 Rootstech to be an eyeopener even though only a small part of it is shown online.
The opening speaker set the scene of the coference well and there are some great plans in the pipeline.
The advances being made to upgrade from GEDCOM to something more useful is probably the most significant point made by Jay Verkler this will impact on anyone who uploads a tree to the internet or shares information.
I look forward to seeing this come to fruition as it will impact on how we use genealogy websites.
I felt that the theme was where are we going with collaboration and it appears that we are heading towards the models of Geni and WikiTree but with more links between the various website providers.
To see the sessions that were streamed go to  http://rootstech.org/live#