Digital genealogy sessions uncover family secrets!
Summary
In October 2008, EverybodyOnline ran a number of online genealogy sessions as part of the Black History Month celebrations. The genealogy sessions took place at the IT suite of EverybodyOnline’s community partners, the Innovations Factory, where members of the Liverpool 8 community were introduced to online family trees. The sessions have proved so popular they are now continuing on a regular basis!
What Happened?
The objective of the sessions is for each participant to create their own family tree based on a simple model. Initially this required everybody to ask the most senior members of their family as many questions, relating to birth places, names, occupations, military service history, and immigration, as possible. The outcome of these mini interviews enabled the group to move on to researching their new found information on online services such as Genes Reunited and Ancestry.com. Beginning with looking at general births, deaths and marriages indexes, the participants searched for possible links to their families - many with huge success!
Owing to the limited resources offered free of charge by these companies, it was necessary for some participants to purchase online credits to look at more in depth census information, for example military service records or, for many of the class, immigration and shipping registers. The sessions made full use of resources available, Some people were put in touch with others in similar situations so that they could contact them and share their stories, some sent off for copies of marriage or death certificates and one applied to receive a copy of his grandfather’s Master Mariner scroll - all in the quest to discover their family roots!
Participants also found the online ‘family tree forums’ useful, one participant, Walter, emailed a woman related to someone of the same rare name that he was trying to trace. They discovered that they may be cousins and have since met to discuss the possibility!
Another course regular, Barbara, had been searching for many years to discover the final resting place of her great grandfather. She was previously unaware of the possibilities of the internet and was amazed at the variety of information available to her online. Her search proved to be fruitful as she discovered, not only the whereabouts of his grave, but new information relating to his ancestry which could be traced back to Bermuda!
Not to miss out on all the fun, EverybodyOnline Project Officer, Sadie Adshead also uncovered some mysterious family history when she looked into her adopted mum’s ancestry. Initially she used her mother’s information as a demonstration to the class, but soon discovered her mum’s entire biological family, including brother and sister, cousins and one remaining aunt all living in Canada and America! Sadie has since visited her mum’s first cousin living near Niagara Falls in Canada, and her mum Sue intends to visit her cousins and siblings in May this year.
Key Successes
• Although this session started as a one off event to celebrate Black History Month, the project continues to run as a drop in taster session at the Innovations Factory in Dingle, with the participants developing their internet skills each week
• Many participants used online tools unsupervised for the first time, such as online forums, researching archives and making secure purchases over the internet
• Nearly all particpants found out something really interesting about their family history including an unexpected result for the tutor, EverybodyOnline Project Officer Sadie Adshead