RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: brigidmac on Thursday 17 November 16 07:18 GMT (UK)
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In my family relatives are more interested in the social personal histories than all the research .Also I think one way to get children interested in their family history is to tell the story of line character leaving out the research process.
I have become a story teller and as a thanks to rootschaters I will dedicate lottie.s story to you
once upon a december 1899 in Birkenhead England
a young drapers assistant called Lottie Roberts gave birth to a baby girl and called her Maisie Fellman Roberts.
The baby.s father lived nearby he was a travelling salesman but his religion wouldn't let him marry Lottie
Instead he paid her 4 shillings a week to look after the baby
But lottie needed to work so she paid the Hallis family to look after her baby .Edith Hallis aged 30 was a shirt maker in poor health she lived with her parents .her father Sam the tailor didn't want this baby to be sent to the workhouse because he.d been brought up in a workhouse himself and they were terrible places .
Edith died when maisie was 6 years old but Sam and his wife Mary lived a long life and their other daughter lived next door with her little girls who were Maisie's playmates .
Maisie grew up and learned where her birth mother was ...she wrote to her
Lottie was ashamed of her life and didn't want her son(the brother Maisie never knew) to know about her past.
So where had Lottie been and what had she done ...??
....well believe it or not Rootschaters may have found the answers
She was probably an actress with aliases and stage names for 6 years all over England
and she was even in prison for 6 months with..her picture in a newspaper !
But we don't know if she returned to her dressmaking trade or who she eventually " married " or the name of her son !
To be confirmed and continued...
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i'll try and copy the URL link to the research that went into this story
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=702286.msg6081688#msg6081688
It did start with Genes Reunited and 3 years ago this month Family Tree Magazine published the cautionary tale of 100 year search for Charlotte ...a what not to do in Genealogy ...of my mother following the wrong Charlotte Roberts and me not keeping track of ones we'd dismissed and having no idea what became of her after she boarded her baby out in 1900 nand received affiliation money froom George Jacob Fellman
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Nice story brigidmac. Writing up their stories is a great way to get all those non interested family members semi into it and the best way to present your research.
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A much shorter story, so far without any evidence to the contrary. My 'motto' says I am interested in knowing more about Charles Percy Liversidge, one of my maternal great-uncles, born in 1873 in north Wales.
His father was a freemason in the Mold lodge, and the boy was enrolled as a junior member. He appears in the censuses from 1881 to 1901, when he has become an insurance manager, unmarried and living with his long-widowed mother. The last sighting I have of him is with the Lancs & Yorks Assurance Company in the Liverpool trade directory of 1904. After various mergers that company is now part of Aviva, whose archivist has confirmed that he was an Inspector of Agents, a respectable middle-management position, but has no further record. A cousin of mine, sadly now dead, stated that 'he put his head in a gas oven'. So far I have found no death record for him; he seems unlikely to have emigrated, but the family had Irish connections, so he may have gone there.
My scurrilous scenario is that he was found to be gay, or somehow fiddled the books. Probably the truth is more mundane.
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interesting Andrew ..you say theres no evidence to the contrary but is there any evidence for any of the facts
my story is factual and confirmed up to the affiliation payment for baby Maisie March 1900
her as a baby boarder out 1n 1901 census
and the known facts and records about Maisie's life, she was the nana i knew .
we have newsreports, registration documents ,hospital records+ death of her Russian birth father 1906 .1916 1920 and 1924 including 2 photos from registartion as an alien 1916 and hospital admission 1920 so my mother nnow knows what her grandfather looked like
C The birth mother, Charlotte (lottie) Roberts , is still a mystery because if she did become an actress she also used stage names .
and the woman who was accused of baby -trafficking in 1906 is reported as younger than my great grandmother would have been
but she looks older in the newspaper mug shots
and has a certain family resemblance
.the story and location and fact that we cant find any other likely candidates in 1901 and 1911 does make it more and more likely that she is our woman
there are more thingsto look for ..including prison records and1939 register
thanks for your interest and comments too.bird
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interesting Andrew ..you say there's no evidence to the contrary but is there any evidence for any of the facts
It's all 'fact' except the gas-oven bit which is family folklore, quoted with a good deal of assurance. CPL must have died somewhere, but I've seen no record of it so far. The rest of the family weren't globetrotters, except his sister (my grandmother) who married before spending 25 years wedded to the British Education Service in India.
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Things that interest non-genealogists from my experience:
1. Having photos of an ancestor immediately makes them more interesting.
2. Revealing that your ancestors came from a "different place", whether that be a county or a country.
3. Revealing that your ancestors were originally from the same place you live now, but moved away and recent generations only just came back.
4. Traits of ancestors that match the traits of living descendants. "This is who we get our big noses from".
5. Tales of sadness and hardship.
6. How far back the family has been traced.
Also it helps to stick with surnames they are familiar with. Even if the info you have on your mutual 5x great grandfather is really interesting, it means nothing to non-genealogists if it's a surname they have no immediate connection to.
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Great advice Jak thanks
ps i apologise for my bad punctuation and occasional odd sentences I have had some visual problems and was typing this alone on my tablet ..sometimes predictive text takes over and i miss it in the reread
we are so lucky to have found photos of great grandfather and now a potential photo of great grandmother and it is causing interest amongst cousins who are artistic or interested in photography they are happily comparing family features.
and those who are politically minded may be roped in by her situation did she "sell" babies including her own ? or were she and her boyfriend helping unfortunate women and childless couples and covering their expenses
and was the prison sentence exceptionally harsh because or despit the publicity .
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We are so lucky to have found photos of great grandfather and now a potential photo of great grandmother and it is causing interest amongst cousins who are artistic or interested in photography they are happily comparing family features.
My maternal grandmother's family lived in Liverpool during most of the 1800s, and we are lucky to have inherited several photos of identified people - we also have lots of total unknowns (so the message is to always write on the back!). This one must have been taken in 1865 - the baby is my grandmother's eldest sister, and in the last year or two I have worked out who the old bird at the back is: Sarah Walton, born ±1782, died 1869 in Liverpool, death registered by my gt-gt-grandfather.
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what an amazing photo ..i wonder if it was a special occasion
only rich families or families in the business had photos so early
they do look typically Victorian
I have borrowed my nana's photo album from my mum ...she wrote places on the back or in the album ..occaissionally dates and very rarely peoples names because i suppose she thought she'd always remember them ...we dont think of our descendents puzzling over our lives ,
I'll get my mother to identify as many of the people as she can while she still can 1
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what an amazing photo ..i wonder if it was a special occasion
only rich families or families in the business had photos so early
My gt-gt-grandfather set up as a land surveyor in Liverpool about 30 years before this pic was taken - his wife is seated on the left. I guess the 'special occasion' is the co-existence of four generations. I have been told that when such photos were taken they were usually all female, as this one is. That bias may be partly because people who managed to live long enough then were usually female?
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With JAKnighton's permission I posted this on a german forum.
Things that interest non-genealogists from my experience:
1. Having photos of an ancestor immediately makes them more interesting.
2. Revealing that your ancestors came from a "different place", whether that be a county or a country.
3. Revealing that your ancestors were originally from the same place you live now, but moved away and recent generations only just came back.
4. Traits of ancestors that match the traits of living descendants. "This is who we get our big noses from".
5. Tales of sadness and hardship.
6. How far back the family has been traced.
Also it helps to stick with surnames they are familiar with. Even if the info you have on your mutual 5x great grandfather is really interesting, it means nothing to non-genealogists if it's a surname they have no immediate connection to.
Not a lot of response, but it is worth adding here, perhaps as No. 7 ?
7. Finding and reporting on scandal(s) in the family !!
This is particularly fitting, as it seems that FindMyPast now has more newspapers on file. I previously knew from these newspapers that my GG-grandmother had accused someone of being the illegitimate father of her child, but the court case for a bastardy bond was dismissed.
Now, with more information available, it seems that this was not my GGgrandmother, but her daughter (a different one, not my Ggrandmother !)
BUT ....
7 years earlier, my GGgrandmother was accused (and convicted) of killing her own child, shortly after giving birth to it.
So if she'd killed the "wrong one", I wouldn't be writing this now !!!!
Bob
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i like the idea of time travelling detectives and am really interested in your family history ;)
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Thanks Ali and thanks for the technical help setting things up .
You.re welcome to take over the postcard research ...Leicester market stall holders look out for the 1906 ones for me .
There is something about the changes in ethics at that time in the Abbey Pumping Station museum .I took photos will try and download /upload /copy on here
Oops
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For some inspiration about starting to write down the stories about your relatives, have a look at
http://auntiemabel.org
There are ideas about how to start, and some excellent examples written by the webmaster and others about their relatives.
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For some inspiration about starting to write down the stories about your relatives, have a look at
http://auntiemabel.org
There are ideas about how to start, and some excellent examples written by the webmaster and others about their relatives.
Good recommendation I've just spent quite a while looking and will refer to in the future. Actually I think it's the thing that most people don't do enough of, so many people are just obsessed with going as far back as possible to rather than really concentrating on some of their interesting (or not so interesting) ancestors. I think that why family history seems so dry to so many people. Really studying your source documents to glean every little fact, setting the scene both locally and nationally and researching what day to day life meant along with images of their surroundings really makes people come to life. The partleton in their shoes website was excellent for this but seems to be offline at the moment.
OP I found your story very interesting (I'm sure it has not yet had its final embroidery either) and I'm not even vaguely related!
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Things that interest non-genealogists from my experience:
1. Having photos of an ancestor immediately makes them more interesting.
2. Revealing that your ancestors came from a "different place", whether that be a county or a country.
3. Revealing that your ancestors were originally from the same place you live now, but moved away and recent generations only just came back.
4. Traits of ancestors that match the traits of living descendants. "This is who we get our big noses from".
5. Tales of sadness and hardship.
6. How far back the family has been traced.
Also it helps to stick with surnames they are familiar with. Even if the info you have on your mutual 5x great grandfather is really interesting, it means nothing to non-genealogists if it's a surname they have no immediate connection to.
My brother did ask me how the family tree is doing and I said that one of our ancestors came from our home city, Norwich, and moved to Bethnal Green. He said "So they went from Norwich to London and back again".
Another thing to interest non genealogists is telling them about the 2 convicts in the family transported to Australia. One for stealing a horse, and one for maiming someone. Juicier than stealing a basket of apples.
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I recently 'completed' writing up my fathers line. He is enjoying reading through the various family biographies and commented on how snippets such as a newspaper article about an ancestor being prosecuted for dynamiting the local trout lake really bring them to life for him. :)
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thanks i agree about knowing the context and background life of our ancestors .
even when news clippings are found for me i read the adjacenyarticles to see whatvelse was going on that day ..or to compare punishments what people werer judged on .
with school records i look at the whole page tio find out about the other children in same class ..parents prioffession how long in education etc
in 1910 I Found my 30yr old ggfather taking his 10 year old half -sis to register for school in Birkenhead as parent /guardian the
their father wasstill around but probably travelling that day
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Because of the general interest, I've added this topic to the summary of related topics:
Topic: RootsChat Topics: Organising and Presenting your Family History
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=158638.0
Bob
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With the branch of my family I have done most work on, I have written them all up in narrative form, but I have found it very difficult to make them interesting. The trouble is they never did anything interesting enough to make the newspapers or the law courts, and mostly stayed peacefully in the country. I have done my best with pictures and local information, but I rather doubt if most of it will ever be read.
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Thanks all for your comments and thanks Bob for adding it to a general board
I.m going to run 4 more time travel " story telling workshops" this Friday we will go to 1906 and debate why great grandfather was arrested in Scotland for selling postcards that he.d been hawking legitimately in The Midlands ......We can only speculate as to what might have been considered'indelicate ' or a travesty of modern art
I also have a game to lighten the research mood
..Leicester market stall holders have found some examples of pictorial postcards from1906 one
There is something about the changes in ethics at that time in the Abbey Pumping Station museum .I took photos will try and download /upload /copy on here
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Including a signed language summary each session
Don't know the sign for postcard which is awkward as that's tonight's theme
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I think it's great that you're finding ways to get the younger generation interested. :)
For "putting flesh on the bones" of your ancestors, I'd recommend having a good dig through the newspaper archives. Lots of juicy stories about criminal activities, of course! But also obituaries shed light on people's lives, and local newspapers have lots of articles about poetry competitions, brass bands, May Queens, sport - I've been learning a lot about the sport of fen skating, which my relatives appeared to enjoy!
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What is the skating ?
Tonight.s time travel detectives session is also based on news reports
Great grandfather was arrested 1906 in Scotland
We will have to decide what may have been legal and acceptable in Derby but we're considered
objectionable.
Indelicate
Travesties of fine art
In Dundee
Do you think the verdict would be guilty or not guilty
And what were normal punishment s for crimes of indecency at that time
....And how am I going to act out those expressions in sign language ???
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From Wikipedia:
"Fen skating is a traditional form of ice skating in the Fenland of England. The Fens of East Anglia, with their easily flooded meadows, form an ideal skating terrain."
"As a recreation, means of transport and spectator sport, skating in the Fens was popular with people from all walks of life. Racing was the preserve of workers, most of them agricultural labourers. It is not known when the first skating matches were held, but by the early nineteenth century racing was well established and the results of matches were reported in the press. The cold winters of the 1820s and 1830s saw a number of fenmen make a name for themselves as skaters."
I only discovered this because I googled the name of a relative, and a report of his fen skating triumphs popped up!
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Wow that's fascinating I didn't know there was such a thing as Fen skating .
I was on a phone in on Radio Leicester about my new years resolution to learn a few sign language words every week ..The presenter wanted to know more about my family history performance s and is inviting me into studio soon .
Another way to interest non genealogists .
I think it is important to have access to the oral stories hopefully can support visually impaired too
Ps The link to the story of my mysterious great grandmother is :
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=702286.msg5452553#msg5452553
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I've been thinking about how to make it interesting for children. My idea (haven't tried it yet) is to only talk about the ancestors being children - not bring in any boring stuff about getting a job etc (though could mention parents' jobs from the child's perspective). This would also probably be quite a good discipine when researching to make you imagine/inquire more about things you might have overlooked.
Luckily I discovered that my ancestor was 3 when there was a royal procession literally round the corner from their house - so that's my obvious starting point.
Other ideas (not necessarily for children):
- a snapshot in time - see what all your ancestors were up to in a particular year/decade, when of course they didn't know they had any connection to each other - this ties in nicely to using a map as well
- just follow the female line, or go male-female-male-female-, or anything that uses a "rule" to massively crop down the number of ancestors being considered - and making it "linear" like this (a single thread, no branching) can be good because it's more like a story
- tell a single person's life story through their eyes with maximum empathy - how they must have felt when their brother was born - why they might have chosen that job - that horrible decade when five close relatives died - etc
- if people feel disconnected because it's an unknown surname etc, present it as "this is YOUR mum's mum's dad" "this is your great-great-great-great-great-grandma", etc (none of this "five times great" business, give them what they came for!)
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Great ideas brooksburns
I have another idea inspired by a photo of a large family from 1907
Only the adults have been named
It would be fun to work out ages of the children and assign names to them using the census reports for each married sister applying detective work
Maths, common sense and guesswork to see how many children we can name ie the baby and toddler are easily distinguished
but others would be from who they are standing with .their height & other clues
In fact im going to post an example of this on photo board to see if they can get better resolutions of some of the faces.
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Many moons ago I was employed as a local learning officer/community developement officer for several rural villages... in one particular village it had been flooded with 'town incomers' moving in, they commute, their children are driven to school so adults/children didn't interact they just wanted to buy a slice of village life and for it to remain the same 'village' but they didn't use the village school, objected to rural smells and lack of 'convienient facilities', so there was little to no connection between villagers and 'incomers'...
So one of the things I did was set up a stand at the local village fete to 'tell a story' of the village its residents of the past and of the day....so old photographs/new photographs of the same view using an 'incomer' photographer to take them, old school registers and taking some people in them and following their life up to date, one name in there was the schools care taker whose family were also long term villagers who was there to tell her own story, items loaned to me like a beautiful beaded bag, so a story about its life, who made it and the eldery lady who it belonged to who lived at the old post office..what I tried to do was connect incomers with villagers by opening up knowledge about each other and the village both 'sides' loved.
It worked very well people were attracted to the objects on loan and the story told by its owner, people learned about the incomers eg the photographer did school photos and village fete photos, an (incomer) events manager worked with the school/parish committee on new events to raise money to support the village, like organised summer caravan camping, setting up and printing rural walking/cycling maps (incomer printer/villager who knew the areas)
Many incomers became villagers which is exactly what was wanted/needed, active in their own community.
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What a lovely idea ilu
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From the start, I have always researched and written an account of direct ancestors' backgrounds. Where possible I've also found and saved images of their homes, whether it be a terraced miner's cottage; a forge (smithy); a farmhouse; or a windmill/watermill, even though it is now a pile of rubble in a desolate panorama.
In the early days I sent my aunt (b1913) her family tree with notes and she was really surprised when she learnt her mother had travelled to London when she was small to visit her father in 1915 who had been gassed in WWI. The hospital Almoner had organised and paid for her to stay in a local lodging house for a week. My aunt's gt. grandfather had been a miller in the British ruled Kingdom of Hanover on the European mainland. One of the crops was flax, where the seeds were used for oil, one use being in lamps to light buildings during the hours of darkness and the stalks were used to make linen cloth for clothing, etc. Quite a lot o lives were lost in the countryside due to accidents. One such accident was in the windmill where one lady's dress got caught in the in the mechanism and she was dragged towards the large, heavy grinding wheel. A male worker tried to pull her back from danger, but his clothing got caught in the mechanism too and both workers were dragged to their very paiinful death.
I could probably interest boys of a certain age with tales of how 17th and 18th century owners of sailing ships protected their passengers and cargo from pirates/buccaneers with cannon guns. Human urine and feces are now contaminated with chemicals but further back in time I think children would turn up their noses at the knowledge of how the dry soilman would bring his horse and cart during the hours of darkness to empty the one urinal allocated to about six houses. The urine would be sold to cure leather hides which would be used to make shoes, etc. and the poo/faeces/excrement from our bowels which would be used as fertilizer.
There was a period after extremely bad winters and bad summers that both arable and pastural farmers suffered. Wool became so scarce that people who were emigrating abroad were banned from taking blankets out of the country and each ship was examined to make sure nobody broke the law. Soldiers going abroad were allowed one blanket each. I have a late 1700s Aberdeen newspaper item that describes how an ancestor's lodging house was burgled by two men who tried to steal bed coverings and the bed curtains from the four poster beds. The old English spelling and phrasing would make any child titter. From the same newspaper are accounts of annual evening gatherings in the local Masonic Hall where prizes were handed to worthy winners of best vegetables, flowers, etc. Surprisingly amongst the many "Mr A, Gardener to Lord X" winners; several of the winners were actually the barons and other gentry themselves. As I have a Farrier as an ancestor, I think my best discovery was finding online an old oil painting of dragoon guards that included the figure of a Farrier with his official extremely large axe
I haven't looked at my gedcom for a long time but last month one of my sons asked me to send him his ancestral tree. As many lines go back to late 1600s and early 1700s, I was expecting a thick wad of pages to be printed showing names, dates and backgrounds but only a few pages emerged from my copying machine. After a desperate search in the computer gubbins I realised I didn't have any background information left - I'd put at the back of my mind and thus had forgotten that a few years ago a GEDCOM programme update had asked a few questions, which I'd answered and then (too late) discovered I'd ticked "do not save comments, etc".
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People do like their recent history too
One of my best finds was a record of my grandmother travelling to Malta to join her husband with 3 year old daughter and "baby macdermid" I didn't realise that my father had spent first year of his life in Malta and what a hard journey that had be
I told a friend I could find ships sometimes. his mother was from Poland ...I found her but the ship was from India ..he confirmed it was her with siblings and they'd made a very long circuitous journey .
Also as a child loved museum where they had a;50s style living room compared to a 70s one
Seeing how parents lived .
now both living rooms are "historic "
I've seen the house where my own father lodged in 1948 .it's been preserved in 50s / 60s style and national trust organises visits. Because a famous person lived there!
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Here's link to the photo made into a game someone suggested i find pics of the children as grandparents and
Trying to match them up :
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=849885.0
*Weve started to identify 2 of the family groups and i found out more about who married who .
Its not a family that i have researched myself .so most information taken from
Existing trees . one of the sets of twins turns out to be one boy whod been listed under his middle name on some records (so trees have 2 boys )
Its a fun game & turning out to be a learning experience
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Here's link to the photo made into a game someone suggested i find pics of the children as grandparents and
Trying to match them up :
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=849885.0
What a lovely historical record to have!
One census asked how many children women had and I've got one record where there were 18 children born to a couple where the husband was a patentee of a paint factory in County Durham. Unfortunately I've only got one photo with a group of six men of that family, (all wearing city suits) taken at the patentee's retirement farm in the county of Suffolk called "The Croft". I do wish somebody had written the name of the country lane it was on such as A46, etc. because as usual new owners had obviously changed the name and I found no record of its whereabouts even in old directories.
I usually concentrate on our direct lines so I'm pleased I didn't have to sort out the children of those 18 siblings, as I'm sure they must all have named their oldest son William after William the patentee with the surname "Ward". A nightmare surname when surfing due to most results showing Political "wards held by X party", or hospital wards, and parts of names and other nouns such as "Howard", "coward", "forward" etc., etc.
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It might be worth posing tnat photo on Durham board ...someone else may have a photo of workers at the company with their bosses festured and named .
One of my JONES distant connections had a photo of his grandmother's mother ( brought up by father)
It took us a long time to work out dna connection then someone whose grandmother had been adopted saw the picture on my tree and had the exact same one in her grandmother (adopted) s collection
she was a half sister of the other grandma and the photo proved that both half sisters stayed in touch with birth mothers side of family
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I have been asked a few times "Found any relatives who were on the Titanic"? Not yet but some of my ancestor siblings lived in Southampton, so likely, and one of them was a steward on the Olympic for years.