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.