Beginning Wednesday, February 10, PBS will broadcast Faces of America, an inspiring new genealogy series hosted by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who last year produced the much admired documentary African American Lives. In this new series, Gates shows how the latest tools of genealogy and genetics helped trace the ancestors of 12 famous Americans, including actress Meryl Streep, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, political commentator Stephen Colbert, chef Mario Batali, director Mike Nichols, ice skater Kristi Yamaguchi, and many more. If you’d like to know more about this not-to-be-missed program, click here to see the promo trailer. Check your local listing for the broadcast time in your area. I can’t wait!
Tagged as:
Faces of America,
Family History,
Genealogy,
Henry Louis Gates,
Jr.
by Memoir Mentor on January 22, 2010 · 1 comment
A few people who read my last blog post asked me how John Colletta determined the weather conditions on the day his 1860 Mississippi ancestors got married. Answer: the newspaper. You can find all kinds of interesting details to flesh out your memoirs and family histories in newspapers—the smaller, more local these newspapers, the better.
For example, I’ve found my Iowa Parrett ancestors mentioned frequently in the Fairfield Ledger. They were farmers, living lives that were not particularly newsworthy, but not much newsworthy happened in rural Iowa towns in the 1800s! So reporters went out and interviewed the locals about the number of hogs they were planning to sell at the auction and whether the rainy weather had damaged their crops, gathering human interest information that could illuminate your stories about your ancestors’ lives.
I found one article that reported wooden sidewalks were being installed in downtown Batavia, Iowa. That meant an end to the aggravating dust and mud that dirtied the long skirts of ladies who came to town to shop! Now that’s an interesting detail I can use in my description of the daily life of my Parrott folks.
Some newspapers post the minutes of City Council meetings. These are great sources for ”gossip” about local problems and planned solutions to situations that may be troubling to your relatives.
I enjoy looking at the advertisements in small town newspapers, enjoying the descriptions of job offerings and sure-fire cures for mysterious ailments. You can learn a lot from these ads about the culture and commercial opportunities available at that time and place.
Newspaper Archive Sources
So, how do you find newspapers from the locales that interest you? It used to be you had to go to that location and dig through the archives at the newspaper office, local library, or historical society—which, frankly, is how I accessed those Fairfield Ledger articles. But that was over a decade ago. Now those same Ledger articles are posted online! I discovered them just the other day when I was looking at what new had been added to Iowa’s Jefferson County website. Of course, not every county has as many historically minded volunteers as Jefferson County. (They’ve been good to me over the years!) But it’s worth checking outyour county through www.usgenweb.com to see what’s posted.
Both Ancestry and Footnote have searchable newspaper databases—Footnote covers over 300 local newspapers—but both respositories require paid subscriptions. GenealogyBank provides an extensive searchable collection of old newspapers for a fee–$9.95 for a 30-day trial. After that they offer a variety of subscription packages.
I recommend checking out the National Digital Newspaper Program, an ongoing project formed by a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and state projects to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. The database is growing.
Cyndislist is another good place to start. Her newspaper link provides a long list of tantalizing resources.
Memoir Writers Can Benefit
This is not just for ancestral research. Those writing your own personal histories could benefit from researching newspapers from the locale where you grew up. Most of us were too preoccupied about “kid things” to be aware of what was going on in the larger community. Reading local newspapers from your time period will likely spark ideas for stories you can include in your memoir or flesh out and enrich with local color the stories you’ve already written. Maybe you’ll even discover what the weather was like that Christmas you got your Schwinn two-wheeler!
If any of you have discovered useful online newspaper sources, please let us know.
Tagged as:
autobiography,
Batavia,
Fairfield,
Family History,
Genealogy,
Iowa,
Jefferson County,
John Colletta,
Ledger,
life-story-writing,
memoir,
personal-history
I attended a most interesting conference this week, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. I enrolled in John Colletta’s course, “Producing a Quality Family History.” It was relaxing to be a student rather than a presenter for a change, and I so enjoyed learning from such a charming, capable teacher. I read Colletta’s laudable Only a Few Bones several years ago and admired his creative approach to family history. Several of my students have taken his classes in the past and raved about him, so when I saw that he was speaking in Salt Lake, I jumped at the chance to take his course.
Like me, Colletta stresses the story aspects of family history, and his lectures focused on ways to turn biographical facts into a readable and compelling narrative. In one interesting exercise, he demonstrated how he took a brief newspaper wedding announcement and used census records, real estate records, local history resources, contemporary drawings, and a variety of maps to turn dry facts into a story that put real people into an authentic setting and historical context we could visualize. He even calculated the weather conditions on the marriage date! It was a clever teaching tool.
In another class, Colletta discussed the importance of finding a theme in the events of our ancestors’ lives and shaping our narrative around this theme. We discussed typical story themes—ambition, hardship, nonconformity, migration, sacrifice—and examined potential themes in the lives of Colletta’s ancestors.
It’s important that our stories have a theme, whether we’re writing a family history or our own life story. Many personal historians merely narrate a succession of events—this happened, then this happened—without considering whether there’s a theme that ties them together. All stories have a theme and, likely, several sub-themes. Look at the events in your life or your ancestors’ lives and try to identify trends that you can develop into a theme that shapes your narrative. If you’ve put together a life chronology, as I’ve suggested in previous posts, it’s fairly easy to scan through the events of your subject’s life to look for potential themes.
Then, of course, you have to plan how your theme will drive and shape your story–a topic I’ll discuss in a future post.
In the meantime, I will focus my next few postings on other valuable ideas I learned from the SLIG conference.
–Memoir Mentor
Tagged as:
Family History,
John Colletta,
life-story-writing,
Only a Few Bones,
personal-history,
Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy,
writing tips
