Remember that everyone was young once

Who Do You Think You Are’s episode last night featured Marianne Faithfull.  Did you hear the sound of hearts breaking all over  the country as men of a certain age found that the “Girl on a Motorcycle” had aged and was now a well-preserved pensioner?

This of course works the other way round too.  In family albums we so often see photos of rather grim-looking widows.  For them the age of photography came too late and they remain forever enshrined as forbidding old bats.

Do we then carry this misconception with us as we research our ancestors’ lives?  Do we forget that they were once young and full of vitality?  That maybe your great great grandmother was  the “Girl on a Motorcycle” to the lads in her street or village?

I remember being given some genuine 1920s snakeskin wedge sandals by my Gran when I was about 18 and being told stories of where she wore them.  I had never thought of her as a young woman before and it came as a bit of a shock that she had frequented the same rather dodgy pubs as I did. 

The thought that she had had a lively life before marrying Grandad was also a bit of a surprise.  Since tracing my family history I have found stories of her life – she got a job as a chorus girl behind her father’s back for instance and in her lunchtimes from the Lace factory she and her friends would go to Nottingham station and sing to the wounded troops on the hospital trains there.

So look beyond the packaging when you are researching your ancestors  - you may be quite surprised.

Obituaries are coming closer to home now

As a family historian I often search the newspapers for obituaries but recently I’ve been looking for those of near contemporaries and former colleagues and with online newspaper archives the search process is now fairly easy.  Obituaries in the Times or the Guardian are really rewarding to find although whilst searching for Cambridge mentions for a recently deceased friend I was saddened to find that I’d missed the death of Robert Jefford, a former colleague, in 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/30/robert-jefford-obituary     

74 seems so young nowadays!

I worked for him at Addenbrooke’s Hospital for only a short time in the 1980s although I’d known him as a colleague and mentor for longer but reading his obituary immediately conjured up a mental picture of him dressed as an elf for the 1984 Staff Christmas lunch, reciting the poem he had written for the occasion in his persona of the “National Elf” of the “National Elf Service”.  (We were all in fancy dress it being the tradition for management to dress up and act as waiters to the rest of the staff.)  Robert Jefford with his Abraham Lincolnesque beard really looked the part.

These kind of memories surface at funeral and memorial services.  Sitting listening to the eulogy we often marvel how little we knew of that person and regret not knowing them better as whole areas of their interesting life are laid bare.  We may know only one aspect of a person or perhaps only one period of their life.  Of course trying to find out all these aspects of a person after their death is what family historians do but how much do we miss because no-one took a photo or wrote the story down?

This is one story that has now been preserved for the future and perhaps someone out there has a photo of the event?  Although hopefully not of me – the skirt of my costume was meant for someone shorter and I spent most of my time trying to stay decent.

Technology and old dogs

Family history research can all too easily become a solitary experience as we search through online databases for that elusive record so getting together with other researchers in a family history group or society is vital to keep us well-balanced.  Whilst the chat is often rewarding and may lead to that breakthrough in your research occasionally we ponder on more weighty matters......

My own family history group members were recently chatting idly whilst drinking tea and eating dark chocolate ginger biscuits when the conversation turned to the digitisation of records and that OCR techonology is now apparently so much improved as to be able to "read" handwriting.

We've all suffered from the sometimes appalling transcription errors in the census records so the thought that perhaps optical character recognition could make a better job is enticing.  But feelings on digitisation were mixed mainly due to the likelihood that once digitised the originals would be deemed rendundant and destroyed.

We all agreed that nothing beats holding an original document in your hand - even when it has given you a hernia lifting the heavy volume from the trolley to the table.  We are used to not having access to the more popular record sets - the census, parish registers and military service records but even as my (hopefully) free-thinking, egalitarian soul rejoices in greater access to documents via the digitisation process a small part of me revolts against the digital age.

I'm drafting this with pencil and paper.  I can't think or write properly using a keyboard and not at all on the on-screen variety where my hard-won touchtyping skills can't operate.  I'm the product of my age - when computers lived in big temperature- controlled rooms, when slide rules weren't allowed in maths exams and we all used fountain pens not biros.  I am in some ways more in tune with those past record-keepers than with today's database manipulators.

Don't get me wrong - I am fairly technologically savvy - I have more than one pc, a laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone and digital camera and use them all fairly comprehensively for my research.  I feel new technology is to be embraced and used to the full but still I mourn its arrival in my life.  I use it but do not love it.