Getting help with the past

This is not an advert more an appreciation of one of those magazines which have been helping many of us make sense of family history.

Now there are plenty of them about along with web sites and plenty of radio and TV programmes, all catering for that most basic desire to find out where we came from.

In my case it was to carry on the work of my two sisters who did it the hard way in the 1970s, visiting parish church yards and writing off to the family, friends and the General Registry Office.

Now I have never really been interested in just hoovering up past family members and have never had a desire to trace them back to the Doomsday Book.  I stopped at around 1800 and set out to fix my family in the context of where they lived and what was going on at the time, and of course what came to light was a remarkable group of people who “lived out small lives in a big century”.

So the BBC magazine Who Do You Think You Are?* just suits me fine.  There are plenty of reviews and general historical stories to fix a family as well as help pages and an opportunity for readers to share their research.  But above all for me it is the monthly upgrades of what sources have been put online which recently included a “major online Dorset collection,” the digitalisation of more convict records and the Manchester collection.

There are of course those who view all this as just popular entertainment which in one sense it is.  But then shouldn’t we all get some pleasure from finding out about great granddad and on the way learning about the place and time that shaped him?  Doing history always seems a more positive process than just being told something.

And many family and amateur historians do contribute to the bigger picture whether it is turning up unseen documents or providing an insight into the lives of working people a hundred or more years ago.  In our case it was amongst other things a twenty-five hand written letter detailing the experiences of my uncle from the Manchester blitz, via a convoy to South Africa, the fall of Greece and a particularly grim time in Basra.  All of which was complimented by a set photographs which perfectly accompany the letter.

So I think we should take the whole family history industry seriously, after all the history books are full of the lives of the rich, the important and the famous, but the lives of the people who cleaned their houses, grew their food and fought their wars are still under represented.

All of which takes me back to this edition of WDYTYA, with articles on our Servant ancestors, the Catholic registers, Court Records and Gardeners of the Past.  And I know that for some these will be light weight and only skim the surface, but they are a starting point for many just beginning to uncover their past families and I guess the first time they have engaged in history since their school days.

So there you have it.  The July edition of what I reckon is a pretty neat do it yourself family history.

Pictures; from cover of the June edition, and air gram from 1940 in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/