Now one of the fascinating developments of social media is the way people want to share their lives.
It ranges from photographs of their children to memorable holidays or the very mundane events of a busy and perhaps factious day.
And I have to wonder whether it was always so.
Certainly before the advent of facebook, Twitter and Instagram there were far fewer opportunities to tell family, friends and the world about the ups and downs of your daily life.
Or perhaps back before now we were more circumspect about what we let other people know about us.
After all knowledge is power and when identity theft is a serious threat the less someone knows about me the better.
I doubt my great granfather Montague would have welcomed the new age.
He was born in 1868, and a part from census returns and his army records he pretty much successfully avoided a paper trail making it easy for him to fall through the cracks at the beginning of the 20th century.
All of which is a roundabout way of approaching the question of anonymity and the degree to which someone’s life should be paraded for all to read.
The hundred year rule adopted for census records seems sensible, but then increasingly so much is out there on line that restricting what can be published seems to be less relevant.
I may not know the details of who lived at our old house in the 1950s, but I can track members of my family through the shipping records, discover something of their wartime careers and even if they had a telephone in 1924.
So how should we treat the records of our children’s charities in particular those young people who were migrated?
And this is not an academic exercise as I continue to work on the new book on the history of the Together Trust which has a proud record of caring for children in the twin cities since 1870.*
Throughout the late 19th an early 20th centuries it was known as the Manchester and Salford Boys' and Girls. Refuge.
And it is a real privilege to be able to look at the reports and letters of those who went through the charity, but it does pose a responsibility because even a young person born in say 1860, who was found destitute on the streets and is now long dead still has a right to a degree of anonymity.
The policy of the Trust is to identify these young people by just their first name and that I think is a good working approach.
If contacted by a relative the charity will do a search of their archives, which is a service they do for free and I know from conversations I have had, that that service is much appreciated by descendants who have been helped.
Some may argue that given the efforts to compile a full database of all British Home Children, restricting publication to just a first name undermines that initiative.
To which there is no easy answer, especially given that there are other avenues that can be perused as a means to find names, ranging from shipping records to newspaper accounts.
But there is that simple question of how far we have the right to delve into the lives of others?
At which point I have to concede I do it all the time in the course of writing books and the blog, but even I was stopped in my tracks when I discovered how one of my family died after I received his death certificate which in turn made me ponder on if I was intruding on a very private moment.
I have always justified it by “bringing them out of the shadows” and in the case of the book on Manchester and The Great War, using their lives as examples of the heroism and sacrifice made during that conflict by people on the Home Front.**
Of course if the information is already in the public domain then in one sense it is permissible but when those records are held in trust even if they were created a century and a bit ago I suspect we have to be more careful.
And such considerations are nothing when compared with what we have lost. For while I can trawl the meticulous records of the Together Trust, the records of my family’s time in the Derby Workhouse were thrown away a long time ago and much else will never be released.
Location; Manchester
Pictures; courtesy of the Together Trust and from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*A new book on the Together Trust, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stories-behind-book-nu-2-digging-deep.html
**A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/reflecting-on-anniversaries.html
 |
| Alghero on a hot evening, 2013 |
And I have to wonder whether it was always so.
Certainly before the advent of facebook, Twitter and Instagram there were far fewer opportunities to tell family, friends and the world about the ups and downs of your daily life.
Or perhaps back before now we were more circumspect about what we let other people know about us.
After all knowledge is power and when identity theft is a serious threat the less someone knows about me the better.
 |
| Family stories, 1913 |
He was born in 1868, and a part from census returns and his army records he pretty much successfully avoided a paper trail making it easy for him to fall through the cracks at the beginning of the 20th century.
All of which is a roundabout way of approaching the question of anonymity and the degree to which someone’s life should be paraded for all to read.
The hundred year rule adopted for census records seems sensible, but then increasingly so much is out there on line that restricting what can be published seems to be less relevant.
I may not know the details of who lived at our old house in the 1950s, but I can track members of my family through the shipping records, discover something of their wartime careers and even if they had a telephone in 1924.
So how should we treat the records of our children’s charities in particular those young people who were migrated?
 |
| Emma in the care of the Together Trust, undated |
Throughout the late 19th an early 20th centuries it was known as the Manchester and Salford Boys' and Girls. Refuge.
And it is a real privilege to be able to look at the reports and letters of those who went through the charity, but it does pose a responsibility because even a young person born in say 1860, who was found destitute on the streets and is now long dead still has a right to a degree of anonymity.
The policy of the Trust is to identify these young people by just their first name and that I think is a good working approach.
If contacted by a relative the charity will do a search of their archives, which is a service they do for free and I know from conversations I have had, that that service is much appreciated by descendants who have been helped.
Some may argue that given the efforts to compile a full database of all British Home Children, restricting publication to just a first name undermines that initiative.
To which there is no easy answer, especially given that there are other avenues that can be perused as a means to find names, ranging from shipping records to newspaper accounts.
 |
| Working in the Print Room of the Refuge, date unknown |
At which point I have to concede I do it all the time in the course of writing books and the blog, but even I was stopped in my tracks when I discovered how one of my family died after I received his death certificate which in turn made me ponder on if I was intruding on a very private moment.
I have always justified it by “bringing them out of the shadows” and in the case of the book on Manchester and The Great War, using their lives as examples of the heroism and sacrifice made during that conflict by people on the Home Front.**
Of course if the information is already in the public domain then in one sense it is permissible but when those records are held in trust even if they were created a century and a bit ago I suspect we have to be more careful.
And such considerations are nothing when compared with what we have lost. For while I can trawl the meticulous records of the Together Trust, the records of my family’s time in the Derby Workhouse were thrown away a long time ago and much else will never be released.
Location; Manchester
Pictures; courtesy of the Together Trust and from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*A new book on the Together Trust, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stories-behind-book-nu-2-digging-deep.html
**A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/reflecting-on-anniversaries.html
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