Family History – The Centre for Hidden Histories

The Revolution in Family History

April 16, 2015Michael Noble

IWM Private_Tickle Recent years have seen a revolution in family history and amateur genealogy. The possibilities created by broadband internet, the digitisation of official and parish records and the advent of crowdsourcing have created an unprecedented boom in the pursuit of private histories. The popularity of programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? testifies to the the mainstream success of this once esoteric hobby. It has given more people a basic grounding in historical enquiry, and has encouraged the development of skills such as research, paleography and metadata tagging. It also has led to the creation of mini-archives, comprising collections of documents, photographs, artefacts and secondary material such as family trees and published (traditionally and online) material.

The Centenary of the First World War is the first major test of this ‘New Genealogy’. There are several reasons why. The war was such a landmark event, both in terms of national and international histories and for people’s family and personal lives. Generally people retain items that reflect landmark events in their lives –weddings, births of children and so on. The war was one such landmark event that happened to occur to millions of people at the same time.

In addition, the organisational demands of the two world wars form key nodes in personal history searches. Regimental records, war graves and the like provide ‘informational landmarks’ that amateur researchers use to navigate their way through the past. The mass mobilisation meant that for many people, lives that had hitherto been almost anonymous appear in aggregated records. Records that are often now accessible from the amateur researcher’s own home.

The centenary of the First World War is therefore operating as a ‘meta-informational landmark’. The enhanced focus that the centenary provides will create new interest and new opportunities. Projects such as the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War and the National Archives/IWM Operation: War Diary are not only giving people a chance to get involved in genealogical activities, they’re using some of the very techniques that have been developed during this revolution. The question remains, how can we make the revolution useful?

lives-of-the-first-world-war-300x300 During the course of our project we have encountered people who have undertaken such research and who have gathered documents, photographs and other artefacts. They are often older members of the household who have embarked on their project in retirement and have been motivated to do so because they have a personal memory of some of the individuals concerned, assuming a combatant birth year range of c1868-1902. As this generation ages, we will encounter a ‘succession problem’ of what to do with such collections that are too small and/or esoteric to be absorbed into mainstream collections. A related issue is the atomised nature of these items. They reside in spare rooms, on living room walls and in attics and could be hiding information useful to professional historians. These archives, a combination of documentary information and material artefacts are of intense personal value to the people who have carefully curated them. But they have other value too. They are of use to professional historians who can use them in aggregate to build a picture of the social past.

Our aim is to develop activities that make use of the grassroots knowledge of community groups and individuals and the context-placing ability of professionals. For the amateur curators, the advantage would be in seeing their cherished material placed in its proper context. For the professionals, it would be access to the material that has been gathered. Furthermore, we work in partnership with local archives and record offices and national projects, such as the ones already named, to ensure that the material is also made available to the wider public.

We will shortly be launching our Family History Event, with the aim of seeking answers to some of these questions. Watch this space for details.

In the meantime, you may wish to look at Who Do You Think You Are Live, which runs until Saturday.

Germany, Britain and the First World War Event

March 31, 2015Michael Noble

Last week, the Centre held a discussion event about the relationship between Britain and Germany during and since the First World War. With the help of several invited speakers, we discussed the impact of war on the German community in Britain, the realities of internment and the changing patterns of Germanophobia and Germanophilia in the twentieth century.

Professor Panikos Panayi of De Montfort University presented some fascinating material on the changing attitudes to Germany on the part of the British people, including examples and commentary on phenomena such as the proliferation of anti-German invasion literature such as the Invasion of 1910 by William Le Quex, the use of stereotypes in propaganda as well as broadly positive stereotypes of Germans, such as a tendency to efficiency and skill in engineering.

Penny Walker from the Highfields Association of Residents and Tenants in Leicester, discussed her project How Saxby Street Got Its Name, which tells the story of how German-sounding streets in Leicester, including Hanover Street, Saxe-Coburg Street and Gotha Street were Anglicised during the war and are still known as Andover Street, Saxby Street and Gotham Street.

Louise Page, a playwright from Derbyshire, discussed her extensive interest in the topic, including her plans for projects that examine how the spread of anti-German feeling was experienced by members of the German diaspora in Britain. Her focus in on the personal, such as the sensitivity that people felt about their German names, and on the continuity of such attitudes towards other people today.

Dr Maggie Butt, of Middlesex University, gave a presentation of her work on the internment camp at Alexandra Palace. From 1915 to 1919 it was used as a camp for civilian internees, who were billeted according to class. Her project includes retellings of the first-hand stories of several specific internees, including the Old Harrovian R.H. Sauter and the anarchist intellectual Rudolf Rocker.

Andy Barrett of Excavate Community Theatre was accompanied by Heinke and Joyce from the Lutheran congregation in Aspley. They have access to a community of elders from the German community who have many stories to tell. They would like to record these stories and present them in a performative way.

Dr Claudia Sternberg from the University of Leeds told the story of Sophie Hellweg and Frank West, a British-German couple whose lives embodied some of the pressure that was felt by the people in mixed marriages during and after wartime.

The sleeping quarters in the Great Hall at Alexandra Palace internment camp

Following these excellent presentations, we held a discussion about the topics and themes that had been raised. This included the relative strangeness of the British experience, with largely fixed borders, as compared to the more fluid nation-states of continental Europe, including Germany. This has contributed to a particular sense of the meaning of the First and Second World Wars that is not necessarily shared on the continent and which is having an impact on the progress of the Centenary of World War One. There is a great desire on the part of the public to learn more about the relationship between Britain and Germany (and between British and German people) that is shared by professional researchers. It is not necessarily shared by official bodies and some delegates reported difficulties in getting public authorities to support their work.

Nevertheless, we finished the discussions resolved to do more to explore this fascinating area of history. The event provided an excellent opportunity for delegates to share contact details and to make plans for collaboration. We are now planning to develop a pattern of projects that will explore and share these histories and ensure that the Centenary does not pass without addressing them.

If you’re interesting in developing a project about the German-British experience, or have a story to share, please get in touch.

Heritage training in Derbyshire

March 12, 2015March 16, 2015Michael Noble

The Derbyshire Record Office is offering a series of training sessions that are aimed at community heritage groups looking to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War. However, they are open to anyone who is interested. The sessions will be half days based at the Record Office in Matlock. They cost £3 per person, not including refreshment. If you wish to sign up for any of the training sessions, please phone the Record Office on 01629 538 347.

Details of the individual sessions are below:

A Guide to Copyright

12th March, morning, 10.00 – 12.30
21st April, afternoon, 1.30 – 4.00

Paul Beattie, Archivist, Derbyshire Record Office

Paul is the longest serving Archivist in the Record Office with 15 years’ experience. He has an extensive knowledge of the collections and understanding of the legislation surrounding them, particularly the new orphan works copyright legislation.

The Copyright session will be aimed at helping you understand more about the recent changes in copyright regulations and where that leaves heritage and community groups who wish to publish images and articles, or anything else which may be under copyright. What can you do? What can’t you do? What is right and what is copyright?

A Guide to Digitising your Images

12th March, afternoon, 1.30 – 4.00
21st April, morning, 10.00 – 12.30

Nick Tomlinson, Picture the Past

Nick has a commercial background in computing, data handling and image digitisation. He has been at Picture the Past for 13 years, managing the creation of the project and overseeing the inclusion of over 114,000 searchable images to its database.

This session will provide a simple guide to what to aim for when considering scanning your images. It will include file types, resolution, output sizes and suggested scanner settings. Come and find out the best way to digitise your images to suit your purpose.

Researching WW1

25th March, morning 10.00 – 12.30
27th May, morning 10.00 – 12.30

Karen Millhouse, Archivist, Derbyshire Record Office

Karen has six years’ experience as an Archivist at the Record Office, having previously served as Assistant Curator, Maritime Collections at the Maritime Museum, Liverpool.

The Research session will help you to find the information you want. It will give guidance on where to find and how to use historic records. There may be documents and sources that you have not thought about, or were not aware of. The session will help you find the information most relevant to your needs.

Exhibitions & Preservation

15th April, (2 courses)
Morning 9.30 – 12.45
Afternoon 1.15 – 4.30

Karen Millhouse, Archivist, Clare Mosley, Assistant Conservator, Lien Gyles, Senior Conservator, Derbyshire Record Office;

Karen is responsible for the Record Office community outreach programme and the collection displays in the exhibition cases at the Record Office.

Clare has six years’ experience at the Record Office and has a foot in both exhibition and conservation camps. Clare has helped Karen arrange many displays of the Record Office collections over the last two years, but her main role is as Assistant Conservator.

Lien has twenty years’ experience as an archive conservator and is responsible for the preservation of the collections at the Record Office.

The combined Exhibition and Preservation session will give you ideas for how to present an interesting and informative display based upon your photos and ephemera and will explain how to ensure that they will still be around for the bi-centenary. It will show how to make the best out of possibly limited material and resources to create an attractive and interesting display. The preservation training will ensure that you know the best way to handle and display historic items so that they do not suffer inadvertent damage. What might be harmful to the artefacts you have and what should you do to help preserve them for future generations? Find out at this informal, hands-on workshop.

Oral History

18th May 9.30 – 12.45 & 1.15 – 4.30

Colin Hyde, East Midlands Oral History Archive Outreach Officer, University of Leicester

The East Midlands Oral History Archive is recognised as a leader in the subject of oral history. Colin’s involvement with oral history goes back to the original Leicester Oral History Archive which was set up in 1983. Colin advises on all aspects of oral history work. He has worked with many community organisations in Leicestershire & Rutland, giving talks, training sessions, retrieving existing oral history recordings, and encouraging and supporting new work.

The session will provide you with the skills and information you need to undertake your own oral history project within your community. What equipment do you need? What questions do you need to ask? What should you do with your recordings.

Applying for HLF ‘First World War: then and now’ funding

30th March, morning, 10.00 – 12.30
8th April, morning, 10.00 – 12.30

Glynn Wilton, Derbyshire Lives Through the First World War, Project Officer

Glynn is employed by Derbyshire Record Office to help community groups commemorate the anniversary of the First World War, from the creation of a project idea, to the application for funding.

Glynn has 30 years’ experience of working in museums, interpreting collections, creating exhibitions and applying for funding. The session will help ensure that you meet the outcomes required for a successful project, it will give you the skills to develop your idea and complete a funding application.

First World War Collaborative Projects

January 31, 2015Michael Noble

The Centenary of the First World War provides an opportunity to build on the renewed popular interest in the war to collaborate and share expertise. Here are some of the initiatives that are offering such chances.

Lives of the First World War

lives-of-the-first-world-war-300x300 The Lives programme is the Imperial War Museum’s effort to build a permanent digital memorial to the Lives of the First World War. The site offers people the opportunity to work with the IWM to piece together more than 8 million life stories, share them, and enable IWM to save them for future generations.

Each individual whose contribution to the First World War is recorded in official documents will have a personal Life Story page. Information about each person and their wartime experiences can be connected to Life Stories by members of the public who access the site.

Members can:

Link together evidence relating to the same person, using records from museums, libraries and archives across the world.

Add references to sources they have discovered elsewhere.

Upload digital images of their own precious family mementoes.

Include family stories and personal knowledge.

Group together individuals they are interested in by creating your own Community

As more and more people connect facts to Life Stories, the project can begin to piece together each individual’s life story.

Operation War Diary

Operation War Diary is an effort to tag, classify and understand original documents from the First World War.

It brings together original First World War documents from The National Archives, the historical expertise of IWM and the power of the Zooniverse community.Working together, they and their volunteers will make previously inaccessible information available to academics, researchers and family historians worldwide, leaving a lasting legacy for the centenary of the First World War.

Data gathered through Operation War Diary will be used for three main purposes:

to enrich The National Archives’ catalogue descriptions for the unit war diaries,
to provide evidence about the experience of named individuals in IWM’s Lives of the First World War project
to present academics with large amounts of accurate data to help them gain a better understanding of how the war was fought

All of the data produced by Operation War Diary will eventually be available to everyone free of charge- a lasting legacy and a rich and valuable introduction to the world of the War Diaries.

UK Web Archive –First World War Special Collection

The British Library archives the whole of the UK web domain under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013. This is done in an automated way, typically once a year.

In addition, their Special Collections are groups of websites, usually more than fifty and less than four hundred, brought together on a particular theme. These have been especially compiled by curators and other subject specialist to make useful and interesting Special Collections.

The First World War Centenary 2014-18 is a Special Collection that gathers suitable websites from the centenary period.

The Special Collection is open to sites that are issued from a .uk or other UK geographic top-level domain or where part of the publishing process takes place in the UK.

Sites concerning film and recorded sound where the audio-visual content predominates (but, for example, web pages containing video clips alongside text or images are within scope), private intranets and emails and personal data will not be included.

Site owners can nominate their site for inclusion here

The Uses of Family History

December 19, 2014December 19, 2014Michael Noble

As the centenary of the First World War sees family history come of age Michael Noble asks, what opportunities does this offer?

Recent years have IWM Private_Tickle seen a revolution in family history and amateur genealogy. The possibilities created by broadband internet, the digitisation of official and parish records and the advent of crowdsourcing have created an unprecedented boom in the pursuit of private histories. The popularity of programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? testifies to the the mainstream success of this once esoteric hobby.

During the course of our project we have encountered people who have undertaken family history research and who have gathered documents, photographs and other artefacts. They are often older members of the household who have embarked on their project in retirement and have been motivated to do so because they have a personal memory of some of the individuals concerned, assuming a combatant birth year range from the 1860s to the turn of the twentieth century. As this generation ages, we will encounter a ‘succession problem’ of what to do with such collections that are too small and/or esoteric to be absorbed into mainstream collections. A related issue is the atomised nature of these items. They reside in spare rooms, on living room walls and in attics and could be hiding information useful to professional historians.

Two key problems:
1. How do we ensure the preservation of historically valuable collections?
2. How do we give access to them to professional historians and other researchers?

These are questions for family history in general but the centenary of the war can bring it into focus. The world wars, like items such as the 1901 census, act as ‘informational nodes’ for family historians and many of their researches converge on this event. This, combined with media coverage of the centenary and crowdsourcing schemes such as Operation War Diary and Lives of the First World War, offer an opportunity to test the value of family history and a chance to make it useful to mainstream historians without, I hope, robbing it of its very real value to those individuals who have been doing so much work in this area in their free time.

LOFWW-Blog-624x411 We are very keen to hear from people who have found or kept interesting First World War items and who are interesting in using them to foster a better understanding of the war, its effects and of the role of memory in family history and identity. We’re planning some events for 2015 that will help to ensure that these precious items continue to be of value as the war fades into history. If you have something to share, please get in touch.

The Oral History of the First World War

December 12, 2014Michael Noble

Michael discovers a wonderful audio collection of wartime memories

We have mentioned before how the diminishing number of people who were alive during the First World War is having an impact on the role of memory in our understanding of it. Direct experience is becoming a rarer commodity and those snippets that we do have are of tremendous value.

It’s a joy, then, to review the First World War collection at the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). Based on a collection of 300 recordings made in Leicester in the 1980s, the archive has been listened to, catalogued and made available for listeners via Soundcloud.

Grouped under the headings ‘The Start of the War’, ‘Life on the Home Front’, ‘Death and Absence’ and ‘Aftermath’, the clips offer a personal insight into how the war was experienced by people in the Midlands. We can hear about peoples’ attitude to the Germans, ‘I knew the First World War was coming because my dad, right from when we was kids, was always talking about the Germans coming down the street’, about access to food in wartime: ‘The bread was almost black…there were a lot of shortages really…we had to make potato dripping for instance. My aunt was very good at contriving, she was a good cook’ and, dramatically, on unexpected Zeppelin attacks ‘All I heard was a thud on the door…the windows came in. Everything was in confusion’

A treasure trove. Have a listen for yourself.

Find My Past -Free Weekend

November 7, 2014Michael Noble

Always wanted to investigate your family’s past? This weekend might be your chance to start…

One of the most desirable outcomes of the centenary period is that people will take the time to find out more about how the war affected their family, their community and the country as whole. A particularly affecting method for doing this is to trace the records of your ancestors using genealogical tools.

Genealogy was once considered a difficult or even impossible task, requiring intrepid hunters to spend hours in dusty archives on often fruitless searches. Recent years have seen a revolution in the hobby and, with the advent of online resources, it has become easier than ever to trace your personal heritage. If you have never attempted this sort of detective work yourself, this Remembrance weekend may be the perfect chance to start.

Find My Past is one of the country’s most popular genealogy resources that provides access to 1.6 billion searchable records. A paid membership is usually required to access this material but this weekend you can do so for free.

From midday, Friday to midday on Monday, Find My Past are giving everyone the opportunity to explore record sets that include:

Millions of birth, marriage and death records
Many First World War images and documents can be found online
Millions of census records from all over the world
International travel and migration records
Military records, including WW1 collections

By accessing the Findmypast record sets, you’ll be able to unlock brand new information about your ancestors, allowing you to bring your past to life.

Find out more and register by visiting the Find My Past website.