Leaving the Past to the Future 7: Preserving Memorabilia

In the first blog post about this subject, I mentioned preserving memorabilia (4 March 2024 – Organizing Your Information). I have written before about photos and photo albums (What will we do with future photos, Prized Old Photos, Digitizing Memories, My amazing picture-taking machines), home movies (Preserving Home Movies), family memorabilia (Memorabilia, Old Heirloom Watches), school records (My Mother’s Scrapbook), furniture and antiques (The Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me).

I am a collector of old family stuff: photos (of course), antiques and furniture, drawings, woodworking projects, souvenirs, brochures, bibles, area history publications, family correspondence, cards (birthday, anniversary, Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day), tape and video recordings, phonograph records, tools, farm implements, toys, musical instruments, cameras, various types of collections, artwork (both professional and pieces done by children and grandchildren) and assorted mementoes of family activities, events, workplaces and life milestones.

I still have all the report cards and many of the projects our children brought home from school. These have been digitized so their families can see them easily (and in case they get lost, damaged or thrown out).

And, as I have written about before, all the old original family documents are secured in binders or in my safe.

My family laughs at me for keeping it all but, to my mind these things represent family history. They were important to people who owned and used them.

As much as I have, I am still surprised and annoyed with myself for having given away or discarded many items.

We have given (or will give) a few things to children and grandchildren. By doing so we at least keep them in the family and imbue the recipients with some sense of their ancestral history.

Now that we are in our probable last home, I have made a point of bringing many things out of their storage boxes to display them. A lot of comments are made by preservationists about keeping material in archive-like containers to prevent their deterioration. That is a good idea for many things but putting them out on shelves or hanging them on walls so that people, especially family members, can see them is also important. Stories and memories can be easily forgotten if the tangible pieces that go with them kept are out-of-sight.

One of my projects is to photograph and document all the old stuff that is still kicking around here. That will includes making displays of small but bulky pieces is shadow boxes.

Whatever you choose to keep, make a record of what it is, where is came from, who it belonged to and what dates it was both produced and acquired. Without that information, your descendants and family will not have any knowledge of its importance or provenance.

1-Grandma Miller's irons, 2-Dad's home made chess set, 3-Dad's carving 1934 contest entry made with coping saw, 4-great-grandfather James Shepheard's pocket watch, 5-custom made stained glass window, 6-old family rocking chair, 7-Wayne's 70-year old toy cap guns, 8-Grandpa Miller's farm fork, 9-Wayne's safety matchbook collection

Leaving the Past to the Future 6: Publishing Your Stories

An important part of family history research is putting the information you find into a form that other people can see. You have spent countless hours, or years finding ancestors and learning about their lives and livelihoods.

When you are gone, though, what will happen to all that knowledge?

While you are able, it is important to write down what stories you have discovered, along with the data you have assembled about past family members. That does not mean publishing them in genealogical magazines or writing books, necessarily, although those are not bad objectives.

An important part of family history research is allowing other family members to see it. You may have uncovered stories about certain ancestors that are interesting: they may have been newsworthy; they may have been part of important historical events; they may have been romantic interludes; they may have been associated with life and death circumstances; they may have been about travel, to exotic places or to new homes in search of a better life.

If they are direct ancestors they will, of course, had children and some of those children will have had children, and so on down the years. Each of those families will have had unique histories that added to the overall family narrative. Their individual stories may just have been about normal life passages of growing up, finding a career and having a family of their own, like your own experiences, but no less important.

How you choose to record your family’s history is up to you. If you are just beginning to consider the idea, it is important to not try to bite off more than you can chew. You should also decide beforehand who your audience will be as that may dictate where you publish your information.

Any type of medium or format is fine to consider. Perhaps, as a starting point, it is easier and more palatable to look at picking a single interesting event or person and telling others about it or them. Then add more stories and data to produce a more comprehensive piece about an entire family line.

You have probably already assembled a family tree and have it stored on your computer or online. I posted some ideas about that earlier in this series (Genealogy Software). Within each individual profile you may have recorded information about the people and their families. This may be a good place to incorporate that information into a summary that might form the basis for a future blog post or article, or a chapter in a book if you get that far.

Being a blogger, I always suggest this as a great place to put short stories about ancestors. In this blogsite, I have written 109 posts (of the over 400 on the site) about family members. Some of them were expanded to be part of published articles. Your blog might be public, like mine, or set up just for family with a controlled distribution list. Making it public offers a chance that it will be seen by cousins or other researchers you did not know about but may have information about your family.

Other avenues you might want to investigate include:

·         Local family history society newsletters and journals – These groups ae always looking for articles – short and detailed – that will show examples of past family activities and methods of research.

·         Presentations – Again, local societies might be interested in hearing your stories. And in doing so, you would produce a written script that could be published or distributed later.

·         Social media – There are many sites where you may have a personal page, or a family page where you might contribute a story about a past family member.

·         Commercial publications – These publications also have an interest in seeing new articles that present historical events and ideas about family history research. These types of pieces may require some higher calibre of writing expertise thus they may be something to look at after you have practiced with contributions to other venues.

If you are looking for information on how to start writing, here are a few sources for inspiration and advice:

·         Cyndi’s List – Writing Your Family History: General Resources. https://www.cyndislist.com/writing/general/

·         Family Tree (UK) How to guides – How to write up your family history. https://www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/how-to-write-up-your-family-history/

·         Family Tree Magazine (USA): 9 tips for getting started on writing your family history. https://familytreemagazine.com/storytelling/tips-getting-started-writing-family-history/

·         FindMyPast – Preserving the story of your ancestry: our expert guide to writing your family history. https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/help/writing-your-family-history

·         Genealogy Stories – Curious Descendants Club: How to go from boring to brilliant family history writing. https://genealogystories.co.uk/how-to-go-from-boring-to-brilliant-family-history-writing/

·         FamilySearch Blog – 18 Writing Tips: Tell Family Stories with Confidence https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/18-writing-tips-for-2018-how-to-tell-personal-and-family-stories-with-confidence

·         Gil Blanchard. (2014). Writing Your Family History: A guide for family historians. Pen & Sword, 228 pp.

Writing stories is a major part of preserving family history and should become a regular task whether they are short summaries of a few hundred words or a comprehensive project like a book.

Start small and practice. 

Leaving the Past for the Future 5: The importance of maps

As an earth scientist I have dealt with maps for most of my life, even created many. Using them in family history research was natural to me.

There is probably no type of map that I have not seen or used, among them:

·         geographical, topographical and bathymetric maps

·         town and street maps

·         geologic, weather and mineral resource maps

·         maps showing areas where natural events like earthquakes or hurricanes have occurred; .

·         air photos and in recent decades, satellite images, forms of maps that are especially useful in looking at changes to landforms

·         socio-economic maps showing the distribution of things like population, incomes, election results and tithe apportionment boundaries

·         Google maps, a prime starting point to look at local, regional, national and continental views

All types of maps have their uses in reviewing and imagining the homes of our ancestors, particularly the older ones.

Incorporating maps into a family narrative is one of the most useful tools a family historian can employ. Knowing where your ancestors lived or originated may be just as important as the era in which they lived and died.

I am a mongrel, having descended from many family lines from many countries and from many regions in those many countries. I have searched out maps for each of the locations in which my ancestors lived – hundreds in total. Regional maps showed me the broad geography of where my ancestors lived and worked. Local county or parish maps allowed me to focus on neighbourhoods or small communities. Property maps produced through the years demonstrated for me how family residences or homesteads changed or developed as families grew.

I have written several posts on this blog about using maps: where to find them, how to use them, what information about areas you can glean from them, and, of course, where people lived and worked. I have written posts about using maps of various kinds (Using Old Maps - 22 July 2014; More About Using Old Maps – 12 August 2014; Even More About Using Old Maps – 26 August 2014. I have pointed out the value of local map sources such as Tithe Apportionment Maps (23 September 2014) and War Diaries and Trench Maps from WWI (14 Apr 2020). I noted looking at the locations of some of the homes we had lived in as shown on Old City Maps & Aerial Photos (1 Mar 2023).

In a series of blog posts about Old Homes and Homesteads (18 February to 22 April 2014) I detailed the homes of many of my ancestors from the British Isles, the USA and Canada, most accompanied by maps of the areas: in Devon, England (Corntown, East Rooke, Lutton, Plympton St. Mary, Torquay); Virginia; Kansas to Alberta; an Alberta homestead; family farms in Alberta; Alberta and British Columbia.

In another series about Moving (14 July to 5 July 2016) I tracked the routes families took between their various homes across the USA and in Canada: the McDaniels, the Keiths, the Mayfields, the Andersons in Ontario and North Dakota, the McDaniels going west, the Millers going west, the Thompsons in Ontario and North Dakota.

In the many posts and articles, I have published about natural event and their impact on families, I have included maps showing where they occurred. In a more recent piece, I used a map of London, England to show where two of my ancestral lines likely lived and how they possibly got together (Marriage & Maps, Family Tree magazine, June 2024).

In one session of a recent course I have been taking (Research Skills Studio by Dr. Sophie Kay and hosted by Family Tree magazine), there was an emphasis on using maps to learn more about the daily lives of families. Sophie took participants through an ancestral walk in a village to get better acquainted with the areas in which their past families lived and the lives they led. “By stepping into your ancestor’s shoes, you’ll notice details about their location which had never occurred to you before.”

No dates have as yet been announced for a repeat of Sophie’s course but readers may find out more in future issues of the Family Tree newsletter.

I have previously listed some websites that are great for maps in the past, but here are a few as reminders or that may be new to readers (some are commercial organizations): National Library of Scotland, Bienecke Labrary, David Rumsey Map Collection, Family Search, Old Maps Online, My Old Maps, Historic Map Works, Old Maps, Norman B Leventhal Map & Education Centre, edmaps, Library of Congress, USGS, University of Calgary, University of Victoria,  Historical Topographic Map Digitization Project (Ontario, Canada), Arcanum Maps,