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Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show a side to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her - that one that the heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are...
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How to Make a FAN Club Table in Excel

FAN club research is one of the most valuable types of research that a genealogist can perform. It can help breakdown brick walls and give you a better idea of what a person's life looked like. One of the main challenges we face when attempting this type of research is how we want to organize our information. In a previous post I explained how I use a network diagram to illustrate these relationships. Although this is a great way of interpreting the FAN club, it often lacks the space to properly record all of the information. I like to use a combination of a table and the network diagram.  How to Create the Table Sortable tables are a great way of displaying genealogical information in Excel. When they are created correctly, they allow you to quickly locate and/or group similar pieces of information. The tutorial on the Microsoft website provides a good walk through of the process.  Selecting the Headers The main focus of creating this table should be the headers. You want t...
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How to Create an Interactive Family Tree in Powerpoint

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When it comes to sharing your family history, one of the first things that people ask to see is the family tree. Of course there are great online family tree builders (such as Ancestry, FMP, and My Heritage) but that often involves family members having to create their own account. Creating a free account on Ancestry can be quite frustrating (Im not even sure how I did that a decade ago...). There are many other reasons why someone may not want to share one of these online trees. For example, I have chosen not to because I explore many theories in my trees, I dont always keep them the most up to date with all my knowledge, I know some of my family members would struggle with the technology, and I still want to maintain a little privacy within my research. For all of those reasons I chose to go the more simple route and create an interactive tree in Powerpoint. (Yes I do realize that this is significantly more work than updating my tree! But I dont care!).  Why Powerpoint? I chose t...
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Excel for Genealogists: Why you should be Constructing Timelines

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Timelines are one of the most overlooked genealogical tools. I love them because they put the events in order and allow me to identify gaps where information is missing, and they let me quickly tell if a record is a match. I started writing timelines out by hand on blank printer paper but quickly realized this was incredibly inefficient because it was easy to run out of space during a certain timeframe (especially if the family was frequently on the move) and thus have to rewrite all the information. For the past three or so years I have been using Excel. I love how easy it is to add information by inserting rows, and how easy it is to customize the way that the information is displayed. My timeline is not a conventional line but rather a chronological table of events. I colour code the cells of major life events to help me visually breakup the information. I have included below the blank template that I use to create my timelines.  On the left hand side I have a summary of the fam...
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Ford's Folly and the Slum of Little Hell

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Battersea: The Sinkhole of Surrey During the Victorian Era, Battersea had gained the reputation as being “the sinkhole of Surrey” due to its widespread poverty and slum-like conditions. Many of the poor in Battersea were subject to irregular income from the building trades. For a family to scrape by in the winter they would have to apply thrift spending during the summer. This was often complicated by the reliance on alcohol which was used as a means of escape from the depression of living in such widespread poverty. The irregular income caused many of Battersea’s poor to frequently be on the move. On average a family lived in one place for less than two years before moving no more than a few streets away. After hopping from neighbourhood to neighbourhood the family would eventually return to where they were once exiled from, moving in only a few doors away from their former address. Ford’s Folly and the slum of Little Hell In Keith Bailey’s report Orville Road, Battersea: a Victor...
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Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show a side to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her - that one that the heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are...
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F.A.N. Club: How to perform a Hub Analysis

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FAN club analysis is one of the most valuable tools at a genealogists disposal. Conventionally it is used to build a network of people around a single ancestor or family, however the process can be reversed to determine the nature of unknown relationships. The Hub analysis is a method that I came up with that helps break a large group of people into small social circles that are centered around something that they all have in common. For example, this could be a place of employment, worship, or even a club/hobby. By grouping the people in this way we can identify what subgroups exists within the FAN club (I wrote a post here on how these subgroups can be visually represented used a net diagram).  The easiest way to explain the process is by using an example. Lets take a look at a list of names that I found of people who called the family following my great grandfather's death.  **Please note that for privacy reasons I have redacted the full surname and addresses of any person...
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