History Pin Sharing Historic Photos and Comparing to Now

via historypin.com

HistoryPin This is an interesting site in beta version. It is an interactive map which "pins" old photos uploaded by users on a Google map so that you can see where the photo was taken. Where Google street view is available you can compare the location in the context of that place today.

This would be a great way to share your life story and personal memoirs by uploading a photo and adding a short story about it.

Seems a fun thing to do and will grow to a great resource.

Hand Bookbinding for Treasured Family History Books

I recently came across a great guy, Alan Carpenter, who is a hand book binder.  Alan has had over 40 years of bookbinding experience and was a Gold Medal Bookbinder in 1970.

Alan's company, Valley Bookbinding, is based on the Central Coast of NSW and I have decided to use Alan's service for hand binding Lifetime Memories and Stories Life Story Books.

I have seen examples of Alan's work where he has rebound family bibles and evn preserved what he could of the original binding and it is totally awesome what a professional book binder can do.

If you are in Sydney, Newcastle or the Central Coast of NSW and need some quality hand binding done then give Alan a call on : 0408 290 888

Earthquake in Christchurch Tears Down New Zealand's History

via theaustralian.com.au

"THIS is the greatest disaster New Zealand has ever seen," Agriculture Minister David Carter told The Australian yesterday. Many historical buildings have been destroyed including the historic country homestead of the Deans family, relatives of Wallabies rugby coach Robbie Deans.

For two terrifying minutes at 4.35am (NZ time) on Saturday, New Zealand's second-largest city was tossed around like a rag doll by the most fearsome earthquake to hit the country since 1931.

Friends of mine live in the city and I was very pleased to contact them to find out that they had largely been unaffected. Mother nature is so powerful and we never know when it is going to surprise us.

One of the things we can do though is to document our family history and photograph and protect the key items that connect us. Obviously you can not wrap a huge house up in cotton wool and put it in "safe storage" but perhaps we can make sure that we photograph and then protect those photographs by storing copies in different places.

There are many different on-line options for storing valuable documents and photos for the future these days and perhaps you should look at them for your own family history?

Respect Your Father's Stories

<div class="mosimage" style=" border-width: 1px; float: left; width: 300px;" align="center"><img src=" " width="300" height="450" hspace="6" alt="Preserve your father's life story" title="Image" border="0" /><div class="mosimage_caption" style="text-align: right;" align="right">Port Broughton’s Bruno Carbone spent 33 years in the Australian Army, serving in Vietnam, Malaya and Borneo. </div> It's great to see a man's story, a father's story told.  Too often the stories of the ordinary bloke are not mentioned very much. 

Here, in a short article by the Yorke Peninsular Country Times is a short interview with Bruno Carbone, a first generation Australian, about his time serving in the armed forces of Australia. Bruno is one of a rare breed of men who is now happy to talk about his life and service for his country after having been discharged from the Army suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Bruno spent 33 years in the Australian Army including seeing action serving in Malaysia, or Malaya as it was then called, and Vietnam.

Men in general and particularly those of Bruno's generation, have often had an upbringing which taught them to internalise any traumas and keep there stories to themselves.  When you are approaching your father to ask him for his life story you need to make that approach gently and with respect.  That advice goes for any interview about a person and their life story, however, with men you need to be especially aware to their sensitivities and that initial rebuff may be as a result of how they have been brought up to regard themselves and their life story as something that is very personal and private.

At Lifetime Memories and Stories we often are asked to interview men who have served time in the armed forces.  We have prepared a "Free eGuide to "How to Interview Your Father" which we hope will offer you some very useful practical advice in approaching and interviewing your father or indeed the other significant men folk in your life.  Don't be put off by an initial rebuff when you ask if you can record their life story, the key to making it an enjoyable experience for both parties is to prepare yourself fully in advance and make a gentle and respectful approach with a persuasive conversation tailored to your subject.  Give them time to think about it and don't push into areas where there is a strong resistance.

The resources we have put together for you will assist you in preserving your father's story and enhance your shared time together.

Keeping Family memories Alive

It's a worldwide thing, interest in family history, and I came across an exhibition in Nigeria if you happen to be there. Elo Photos will be holding a Family Portraiture exhibition at the Palms Shopping Mall in Lekki, Lagos, come October, as part of the country’s 50th anniversary jubilee. 

The exhibitor said:

“I realise there was a gap to be filled in family portraiture as a lot of families don’t document their family memories,” Oluwaseun Akisanmi, the photo artist, told reporters at a recent press briefing on August 27.

“Sometimes, parents get too busy that they allow important times to pass without having a photo documentation to keep these memories alive,” he said, highlighting one reason for the neglect of family portraiture."

Not only is it important to take the photos but it is equally important to preserve them.  Did you know that only abpout 20% of digital photos are printed out, and some of those on paper and with inks that will fade in less than 10 years.

You should take steps to stop the digital rot of images.  You may be interested in a useful post  preserve your family stories and photos on Lifetime Memories and Stories main site.

Log of Logs for Australia and New Zealand

I came across an interesting post from Lyn on the New Zealand Genealogy Website

Apparently there was a lot of work done by an Australian, Ian Nicholson in preparing this list of immigrant arrivals and ships logs and associated information which is all available at the Auckland City Library in New Zealand.

This information will be of use to new Zealand researchers and in preparing to record your family story for the future.

The New Zealand Genealogy Website is a great resource and well worth checking out if you are working on a New Zealand family history.

Genealogical Resources for Family History Research

 I have been reading the "Write Sisters" blog about some less-obvious places to look for information when you are researching a life story or family history.

I found this recommendation to be very useful:

Many of the old Town Histories have been scanned and are available from commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com. At the same time, a lot of them are also on the internet archive (http://www.archive.org/, or google “wayback machine”) – here you are more likely to find an OCR scan that hasn’t been corrected, not as easy to read – but free! 

 

One thing I sort of don't agree with is The Write Sisters take on family histories. They make the point that:

Family history books are self-edited and published, usually the result of someone’s life-long obsession; again they may be self (or rather, ancestor)-aggrandizing, but they also often preserve the memories of people who were elderly a hundred or more years ago.

Yes, all sources need to be checked and balanced for their viewpoint, however, if you can source a real life story of family history that has been made by oral recording or direct interview of some sort then you have some very powerful information at your finger tips.  What is written in the "official records" is not always the correct story.

When you embark on writing a life story or family history sometimes you will need to dig a bit and shine a light on dark corners just to find that loose thread that's worthwhile pulling on and yes, it can get very expensive if you are just stabbing in the dark.  Blog's like The Write Sisters can offer some useful tips on how to short cut your research.

You might also find that the Step by Step genealogy Guide by Chris Clegg can save time and money in getting started.  It has chapters on getting started, creating a family tree, searching and publicly available records.  It certainly seems to be a worthwhile guide.

Memoir from Rosanne Cash

Personal memoirs don't have to be written by "old people".  Most everybody has a great story to tell but those with special connections and talents just happen to have the raw material that makes a memoir interesting to a very wide audience.

Rosanne Cash was born in 1954 and is the daughter of Johnny Cash, from his first marriage.  She has produced a great body of work from her debut alboum Right or Wrong in 1979 through to Rules of Travel  in 2003 where there is a great song about facing one's mortality, "September When It Comes".  This was recorded as a duet with her father Johnny Cash as was made into a tasteful video after Johnny passed away later that year.

Roseanne Cash is gifted as both a lyric and melody writer and this memoir, "Rosanne Cash Composed" proves that she is not too bad with prose either.

If you are interested in Rosanne's memoir then you can find a great review of it with some interesting insights and in Craig Shellbourne's piece on the CMT Blog.

Australian Oral Historian Preserves Many Family Stories

One of the reasons I love oral history and preserving personal memoirs is that when you hear the voice telling you the story the emotion almost transports you there.  Here you are listening to a fantastic story by someone who is actually there.

I came across Oral Historian Suzanne Mulligan's site and was amazed by the number and breadth of the stories she has collected.  Susanne is an oral historian based in Brisbane Australia.

In this exert Suzanne has captures the story of Charlie Gibbs. He was a member of a party formed by the Australian Government to rescue an American aviator, Lincoln Ellsworth, and his pilot, Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, when their plane was forced down through lack of fuel in Antarctica in December 1935. 

We experienced the cold soon after leaving Dunedin, New Zealand which happened to be our last port of call to take on and top up our tanks of fresh water and oil for the ship itself and ensure supply of fresh vegetables. The duration of our expedition was completely unknown, except that if we had to withdraw from the expedition, due to its apparent inability to find the aviators, by a certain date we would then have been locked into the ice and we would have then had to survive on our available cargo."

Visit Suzanne's blog to read the transcript of Charlie Gibbs' story.