Monday 27 September 2021

Sharing Your Family History Online update

I've just learned from Pen and Sword that my last book, Sharing Your Family History Online, which was published at the start of this year, has already sold over 800 copies! A quick thank you to all who have bought the book - I've spoken on the topic this year to several societies, and it seems to have really resonated with many folk in a way that I wasn't quite expecting, so it is truly appreciated!

 

Last week, in one of my Pharos course lessons, I set an exercise for students which involved looking for the children of a couple of ancestors of mine, to make a point about dealing with how names are registered. One of the students (thank you David!) went a little further, and on FamilySearch identified that a photo of a brother of my great grandfather had been uploaded in July this year, to its online tree hosting facility. This is someone I have been trying to locate an image of for many years, because the London based brother, James, helped to look after my civilian family in Brussels during the First World War after the death of my civilian great grandfather David. 

 

By contacting the person who uploaded the image, I have since received several additional images, including an image of a clock that David is believed to have given James on a visit to Belgium, prior to his death in 1916. I had contacted a second cousin of my father about ten years ago to enquire about his line, and although he gave me some great stories, no images had been forthcoming - well it transpires that those images did in fact exist, as it was his son-in-law who uploaded them a few months ago!

We're used to going to archives and websites to look for documents about our family, but not all useful records are in archives, and we can actually use what we find to generate further leads for our research if we only put it back out there. So put some cousin bait on your line, and go fishing!

pen-and-sword.co.uk/Sharing-Your-F #genealogy #familyhistory - and once again, thank you!

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

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