In my If you don’t know when you are going reflection on the why of family history, I mention that the longer I have been at researching my ancestors the more I have started to think of my blog as like a digital equivalent of the Jackdaw history series of folders containing primary source documents I enjoyed as a child (e.g. like the ‘Battle of Britain’ one I still own like the example shown below):
And that’s why part of what I am trying to do with this blog is present family history and related content in different ways than is found on likes of Ancestry.com that are really databases for the who begat who of genealogy. I collaborate on that too aspect of family history one the Ancestorium.com site with my cousin Hamish Maclaren and help from a long list of others. It now has a fully searchable database of over 160,000 records that I link to from this site. But what this WordPress blog allows me to do is experiment with how the lives of people listed on that database can be presented in different ways, as well as keep up with the Family News of hatches, matches and despatches of kith and kin.
- Scrapbook of an Edwardian Lady: my 2x Gt aunt Agnes Selina Fox kept a scrapbook. I’ve started to add parts of this to this blog as I try to piece together the people and places she’s included. Not only is it a fascinating record of her life, and the changing times from the turn of the century to just after WW1, but also a different way or presenting information about our ancestors akin to the Battle of Britain Jackdaw history folder above.
- A toffee pig for Christmas: this is a creative work of non-fiction about my mother’s childhood in Lancashire that formed part of her PhD. Again, it is different presentation of family history.
- 31 Generations of The Birtwistle Family: this is the Preface and Contents section from Thirty-One Generations Of The Birtwistle Family, A Family History (Including, But Not Limited To, The Birtwistle, Bertwistle, Birtwhistle, Birtwell Spellings) book compiled by L. Alan Birtwhistle that I am re-publishing on this site as series of blog posts. It includes links to the chapters I’ve added to date.
a tale of downward social mobility 