Fleshing out your Family History

(Published in Fife Family History Society journal  Vol 16 No 1)

 

A list of birth marriage and death dates can make for a very boring family history. How can you make the story sound interesting, even if you don’t have much information about the family?

Let’s start with the facts that we do know about our ancestors - the births, marriages and deaths. Simply giving the date of these events can make them seem very sudden, but they do not (or at least not always!) happen completely out of the blue.

 

Births

Births are always preceded by pregnancy! Count back 9 months and see how this relates to other events in the family. How long had the couple been married? How old were their other children? Breastfeeding affected the interval between children, and if the interval between the children is very close it is possible to work out whether a child was nursed by someone other than the mother. Don’t forget to work out whether any of the children are twins.

 

Marriages

For a marriage to occur, there had to be a courtship. Try to work out how your ancestors were likely to have met. Did they live near each other, or did they or their parents work in the same industry?

 

Deaths

Was the death sudden or the result of a long illness? The length of the illness is often given on the death certificate. If the illness is something you have never heard of before, try to find out what it is in modern terms.

 

Dates

onsider the following:

Ages of family members at the time of particular events

Compare events to birthdays and anniversaries

Compare ancestor to siblings - were they the baby of the family or the oldest child?

Try working out what day of the week an event happened on. People were not always married on a Saturday or baptised on a Sunday.

Construct a timeline to work out the relative association of events.

Spell things out for the reader. If you just write the dates, a casual reader might not pay close attention. Explicitly state that the child was born just eleven days after the parents marriage.

 

Occupations

Find out what you can about the kind of work your ancestors did. What exactly did their job entail? What were the conditions like? Find out about the person or the company they worked for. Visit museums to find out more about their occupation.

 

Places

Get as much information as you can from the census, for example information on housing like how many windows were in the house, and who else lived in the street.

Find out as much as you possibly can about the local area. The Statistical Account gives descriptions of parishes, some more detailed than others.

Look at old and modern maps. Compare the old landscape with the new. Draw your own map showing important places in your family story.

Visiting the area where your ancestors lived is not always possible but it can give you a feeling for how they may have lived

Try to get photographs of your ancestors gravestones.

 

People

If people outside the family come into the story, try to find out a little about them - how old they were, what family they had

 

Lifestyle

Certificates can tell us more than just where and when an event happened. eg were they illiterate.

What historical events happened at the time your ancestors were alive, whether national, local, international? Look at contemporary references such as newspaper reports, diaries and books.

Write about :

Legal history

Politics

Financial

Religious

Social conditions - clothing, housing, food

 

Structure

Experiment with the structure of the story. It could be chronological - following a person from birth to death, or a family from past to present. But it doesn’t have to be. Or story / topic etc

Break up the text of the story by using photographs and illustrations. These might be of the ancestors you are writing about, but they could also be of the place they lived (whether an old or a new photo), their occupation etc.

Quotes, whether from family letters or contemporary sources, can really bring the story to life.

Compare and contrast - eg one was a nanny and one had a nanny. A story of rags to riches or of a lost family fortune. Tell family stories and whether they turned out to be true.

Speculate - don’t make things up, but use words like maybe, perhaps. Try to think what kind of person your ancestor must have been based on the events of their life. Imagine how they must have felt.

Even if the discoveries you have made are not very exciting, the story of how you carried out your research could be interesting. Start with how you first got interested in genealogy and talk about how you felt as you made each new discovery. Where did you find the information? How long did it take you?

 

 

I am sure that you will now have lots of inspiration to write your own family histories - I hope that you will turn some of them into articles for the journal! You will find that as you flesh out their story you will begin to think of your ancestors as distinct people with their own personalities, and not just names on the family tree.

 

Here are a few websites to help you in the process of writing your family history.

www.dohistory.org - a fantastic example of how you can weave information from a number of different sources into a coherent story.

www.old-maps.co.uk

www.multimap.com

A day of the week calculator http://www.travelfurther.net/dates/datesrus.asp

A history of crime and punishment in Scotland http://www.butterworthsscotland.com/readingroom/walker.htm

Archaic medical terms

http://www.paul_smith.doctors.org.uk/ArchaicMedicalTerms.htm