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| Photo
by Nomadic Lass, available under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. |
Thomas’s post regarding week two starts by asking us to go back to where it all
began. For me it began properly when I broke my wrist at the gym on the 23rd
of July 2006. I didn't remember the exact date, just that I really liked the
gas and air I was given, morphine didn't help the pain, and I called my then
boyfriend a gnome; he was a gym bunny. Luckily for my records my mother
recorded the date on my immunisation record card so I’ll not forget it. I was signed off work and bored out of my
brain, the physiotherapist had told me that I wasn't to use a computer keyboard
but she’d said nothing about a laptop. My wrist was kept flat so I figured what
they hell ….
The first thing I did was look up my birth entry on the
GRO index. I quickly moved onto the indexes for the rest of the family and
joined Ancestry.co.uk. Shaky leaf fever then set in. When my dad got home from
work I’d drawn up a tree back to my great grandparents (I was very lucky to
have known three of my great grandmother’s) and my dad started telling tales of
the family.
My Taid then found out what I was doing and he had my
nana go and find all the old documents she could; they came in a shoebox and I
spent an evening scanning them. I was
told tales of a great grandfather (how many times great I didn't know, and I'm
not sure my Taid did either!) who was a tailor and said he was ‘going to London
to buy some fabric’, never to return. But Wait! He was seen by another relative
who was a merchant seaman some years later when they were docked in South
Africa but before contact could be made the runaway great great did another
runner!
And then there was the tale of the great grandfather who
had owned some substantial property in Holywell, only to lose it all in a game
of cards.
How exciting, but how likely? Could these tales be
proved? Unfortunately the last of my great grandmother’s (and whose family all
these stories related to) died in 2004 and my biggest regret is not taking the
time to record her stories. She was 99 when she died. God Bless.
Even back then I knew I wanted to find out more about my
family. Where did we come from? Are we as Welsh as we like to think we are? Why
did we stop speaking Welsh? Without realising it I had set some of my first Research Goals, but they had a wide
scope, and as I didn't realise what I was doing it wasn't very organised.
So my Research Goals for now are:
1.
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Re-evaluate link back to George Rice Price PARRY.
This is the gentleman who supposedly ran away to London / South Africa. Although this is a do-over because he is a long-standing brickwall the line has been done-over previously. I wrote a blog about him and my hunt – it can be seen here. Maybe you have some views on my evidence gathering and analysis.
This time I will focus on the documentation; What does it tell me? What is missing? Have I missed anything?
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2.
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Did ‘my’ PARRY family own property in Holywell, Flintshire, Wales.
A research plan will be constructed around this. The first step of which will be to confirm the ancestry.
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3.
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The PULESTON connection; How does Mary PULESTON relate to the PULESTONs of Emral, Flintshire, Wales, if at all.
A research plan will be constructed around this. The first step of which will be to confirm the ancestry.
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The other two parts of this week focus on Interviewing:
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| Photo
by Eelco,
available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence © Eelco Kruidenier 2005 |
I have never taken the time to formally interview myself
or any member of my family. I’ve asked leading questions whilst the beer has
been passed around, I’ve arranged to meet up with cousins with the primary
reason being genealogy, but I’ve not really thought about what I should ask, or
if I should digitally record it. All my previous tales from the family have
been scribbled down on scraps of paper, different notebooks, typed up as it’s
been spoken.
Sure I’ve taken along the pedigree and family tree to
show (and hopefully jog memories), but my questions have been vague and rambling.
For example, it took me ages to locate the GRO index for my auntie because I
didn’t know she had a middle name. I’d asked my mum “so who are the family members,
what are their names and approximate ages?” but I’d never thought to sit her
down (away from distractions) and ask a structured set of questions that would
help to lead her down memory lane. Instead we ran all over it backwards,
forwards and ended up in the bushes somewhere eating biscuits and drinking tea
(distractions you see).
So my task this week, and I hope my cousins and immediate
family members will participate once it’s finished, is to design a
questionnaire which will extract information about the family. It needs to be
concise enough to cover the basic birth, marriage(s), death and burial information,
but also have enough give to capture any family tales that may provide hints
and clues to unlocking brick walls.
Thomas has mentioned using Family Group Sheets for his
family interviews, and they appear to be central to his planning and tracking
of research. Whilst I agree they are very useful for the genealogists I think
they can be quite terrifying to the uninitiated. This is why I don’t, and won’t
be using them as part of the interview phase in their current form. I use an Excel based Family Group Sheet,
which you can access here via GoogleDrive if you so wish. Feel free to amend, use, or suggest
alterations to your hearts content. I like using the spreadsheet because I can
hyperlink the families easier than in a word processor or .pdf document,
although one problem with hyperlinking is that once you move the files the
links need re-attaching. When I’m out
and about I tend to take print-outs with me, but again it depends how many loose
sheets the archive or library will allow you to take in with you.
