WikiTree

The following is a press release written by Wikitree:

August 8, 2023— To celebrate its 15th birthday – and this year’s one-million member milestone – the WikiTree community is hosting three days of free events, November 3-5, 2023. Everything is completely free and open to anyone interested in family history or genealogy.

The fun begins with a 36-hour virtual genealogy symposium, starting at 8am EDT (Noon UTC) on November 3. This virtual conference features popular genealogy speakers including Steve Little, AJ Jacobs, Thomas MacEntee, Melissa Barker, Adina Khuna, Mags Gaulden, Sara Cochran, Peggy Clemens Lauritzen, Marian Burk Wood, David Ryan, GenFriends, the DNAChef, and more.

A wide variety of genealogy-related topics will be covered including DNA tools, Irish research, preserving family history memorabilia, Jewish roots, Google maps and other online tools, Appalachia research, military pensions, tech troubleshooting, the 1890 US Census, passenger manifests, research checklists, and … genealogy trivia.

The second part of the event, the “WikiTree Day” birthday party, kicks off at 8am EDT (noon UTC) on November 5. Have some fun with fellow genealogists and casual family historians, and find out why the WikiTree community has become so popular.

There will be research parties, games, and open chats via Zoom and Discord.  The day will also include a special panel discussion about genealogy and artificial intelligence (AI) with Steve Little, Drew Smith, Thomas MacEntee and others.

This three-day event is entirely free and open to anyone. Register now to receive updates and be eligible for door prizes. 

So take a look at what is on offer that might be of interest to you.

Famiy Tree UK Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue :  

• What is it about connecting?
• Pioneering re-weave for Georgian carpet: 250 years on
• Selected digital English and Welsh birth and death records now available from the GRO
• £3.5M makeover for iconic Menin Gate
• Women’s lockdown experience exhibition
• Nationwide history project discovers rare stories and objects
• Sussex record offices celebrate 10 million record views
• Find your ancestors on the 1931 Canada census
• Can you help the Ministry of Defence shape their medal services?
• Cemetery group remembers the ‘forgotten’ dead
• Slow down & plan your research
• Understanding genealogical sources & why it matters
• Still many more places to try...
• How Family History can provide children with life skills & resilience

 

Caring for Your Old Photographs

Once again the question has been asked about how to best store and care for your precious old family photographs.  Especially is, like me, you have become the family repository and your store of old, sometimes antique, photographs continually grows.

The basics

• The best place to store photographs is in a cool, dry place. A cardboard box in the shed or garage is just an invitation for mice to make a nest.
  
• Avoid storing photos extreme temperatures or in extremely high or low humidity. High humidity promotes mold growth and low humidity promotes brittle photos.
• Avoid storing photos in direct light - this will fade the images.  Make a good copy to frame and display.
  
• Avoid magnetic or glue photo albums - these will discolor and ultimately destroy your photos.
  

Photo boxes are a popular way to store family photographs, and they are available from many camera shops and other stores. The best storage is an archival safe box - which means the photo box, album, sleeve, etc that you use is lignin-free, acid-free, PVC-free and is neutral pH to prevent the degradation of your photos.  Even when you are using archival safe photo boxes, however, there are ways to further safe guard your precious photographs.

• Do not over fill the photo box. Stuffing “just one more” into the box risks scratching or tearing of your photo.
• Do not under fill your photo box either. Under filling a box encourages bowing of the photographs.  Avoid this by using the correct size box and use a spacer if needed.
• Store similar sized photos together. This prevents excessive shifting that could scratch your photographs.
• Use archival photo sleeves to further protect your oldest or damaged photographs. Sleeves come in a variety of sizes.  Place only one photo in a sleeve and use a sleeve that is slightly larger than the photograph.  You do not want the edges of your photo extending beyond the sleeve.
• Over-sized photos?  Store in an appropriately sized flat box. Archival photo boxes come in a variety of sizes.
• Remember when you are handling your photographs, make sure your work area is clean and dry and your hands are free of any lotions or oils.

Make sure you disaster plan.  Sometimes the unimaginable happens and somehow your precious photos are damaged or destroyed.  A little disaster planning can prevent their complete loss.

• Have copies made and store them off-site.  Distribute copies among other family members for safe keeping.
• Digitize photographs and back them up in cloud storage and/or on flash drive.  Always have backups of anything precious.
• This can apply to other physical items.  Take good photos of other precious items and heirlooms.  If Great Great Grandma's vase gets broken or her brooch is lost or stolen, at least you will have good photos of them.  
• Remember to record the 'who/what/when/where/why' in as much detail as you can.  It is all very well if you know this bundle of photographs were taken during your parents honeymoon at Hall's Gap in 1968 - but do your children and grandchildren know?  Will those details be handed down to whoever inherits your photo collection? 

 A few simple steps can help protect and preserve your old photos for generations to come.

The Family Histories Podcast

In this Series Five bonus episode host Andrew Martin has chosen to tell the life story of his maternal 5x Great Grandfather John Goltrip, who was born around 1771/1772 in the fenland village of Witcham, Cambridgeshire, England. 

After marrying Elizabeth Paget in 1798 and starting his family of an eventual six children, a series of world events would eventually lead to John taking a stand against authority and poverty and take part in the Littleport Riots.

This act exposed him to a potentially life changing or life threatening outcome in a nation engulfed by the impact of the Corn Law, the Napoleonic Wars, and the erupting Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora thousands of miles away.

In his brick wall segment Andrew discusses a case that has been haunting him for years – it’s his 4x Gt Grandmother Mary Clarke (later Bailey), who was born to non-Conformists William Clarke and Susanna Rolf on 19th January 1810 in the village of Wattisfield, in Suffolk, England.

Whilst Andrew knows a little of Mary’s parents, and Mary’s descendants, he is desperate to ‘kill her off’, and there’s a very good reason – she was the archetypal wicked step-mother.

Having married widower William Bailey in 1838, Andrew eventually found them, and with their combined brood of children in 1841, after posting a plea on RootsChat.com. Help soon pointed him to a court report in a newspaper from 1840. His 4x Great Grandmother and her husband were both charged and sentenced for neglecting his children, and Mary was also charged with their physical abuse.

After finding her in jail with hard labour in 1841, and tracing her in and out of the workhouse in subsequent censuses, he loses her after the 1881 census. Her last known location is the Hartismere Union Workhouse at Eye in Suffolk, England. She’s there as an inmate, noted as a 68 year old widow (William died there in 1869), and she is noted as ‘housekeeper’.

Attempts to find her on the 1891 census have proven fruitless.  Where did she go after the 1881 census?  When did she die? Can you help Andrew to kill her off?

 

Mapping Women's Suffrage

Do you know if any of your ancestors in Britain were Suffragettes?  The new website Mapping Women's Suffrage may hold the answer for you.

 
The Votes for Women campaign was a long and difficult struggle fought by women and men in cities, towns, and villages right across the country. Mapping Women's Suffrage identifies, plots and records, the everyday locations and lives of as many Votes for Women campaigners as possible across England at the height of the suffrage movement in 1911. You can search or click on the suffrage map to find where the campaigners lived, accessing a cache of biographical information, photographs and archive documents about them. 

The suffrage map has been custom built to create user friendly layers of knowledge and learning capturing the whereabouts and the lives of suffrage campaigners and their roles in the votes for women campaign. The map currently enables a range of digitised materials such as photographs, letters and official documents - often scattered across and between different physical and online locations - to be gathered together for each campaigner, centralised and viewed at the place they were living at the time of the government census survey,of 1911. The map also provides tools you can use to filter campaigners on the map by key data about them. This currently includes which suffrage society they supported in 1911, and whether they took part in an organised suffrage boycott of the government census that year. You can also choose whether to view campaigner locations on a current street map, or a historical 1888-1913 Ordinance Survey Map.
 
Each Votes for Women campaigner recorded on the map, is denoted by a circular coloured icon or ‘dot’ at the address where they were living in 1911. The suffrage map recognises the contribution of multiple suffrage organisations – both law-abiding suffragists and law-breaking suffragettes - in winning Votes for Women. Therefore, the map colour codes each campaigner icon on the map by which suffrage society they were most active with at that time - purple for WSPU, red for NUWSS, and so on. You can use the side menu tools on screen, to turn on and off campaigner icons on the map, either by suffrage society, and/or by their stance on the census boycott.

The website is still a work in progress as new data is added and the online database grows, but take a look to learn more about the struggle for women's right to vote, and see if your ancestors were involved in the movement.

Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue:

• Search like a pro Who Do You Think You Are? genealogist Laura Berry reveals the professional tips you can apply to your family history research
• Scottish census Chris Paton on how you can get more from the Scottish census records for less
• The history of ice cream Caroline Roope gets the scoop and cools down with the refreshing history of everyone's favourite summer treat
• Convicts How to trace ancestors who were transported to Australia online
• Reader story Margaret Smith is related to one of Charles II's mistresses
• Cornish family history Discover new family history resources in the south-western peninsula

Ironclad Sisterhood

The Ironclad Sisterhood has recently been launched by the Society of Australian Genealogists, based on the original research into the lives of convict women by society member Jess Hill. 

Jess Hill was a member and volunteer of the Society of Australian Genealogists from 1964 until her death in 1995. During her time at the Society, Miss Hill worked as a Honorary Library Research Assistant, helping others find ancestors, solve long-held mysteries, and uncover lost details about individuals across the ages. In 1970, she began to collect biographies of women convicts transported to Australia from 1788 to 1818.

She began this work in 1970 – an unusually early time to begin investigating convict ancestors, particularly women convicts. Miss Hill joined a small coterie of passionate Australian historians who demanded that women’s history be taken seriously, and women be understood as historical agents in their own right.

In 2021 Miss Hill’s work was rediscovered and the Ironclad Sisterhood project was launched with hopes to further Miss Hill’s research agenda and build a searchable database of convict women filled with biographical details pulled from multiple different sources.

So if you have female convicts in your family history, or simply want to know more about the lives of the women convicts who helped build the colony of Australia, check out the website and see what it has to offer.