Despite having spent the last two weeks on a staycation, I’ve done precious little genealogy. You’d think that with all that time, I wouldn’t be completing Week 32 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge with minutes to spare before Week 33.
My eldest son and I attended the monthly on-line meeting of the B.C. Genealogy Society (BCGS) earlier this week. Otherwise, even with a four-hour block of time to myself today in which I planned to tackle some long-outstanding genealogy tasks, I got through exactly three documents. However, what I have managed to do is create all sorts of family memories, especially with our sons. We’ve had lots of outings around our city and participated in all sorts of fun activities, many of which were on the kids’ bucket lists. Creating family history is just as important and fun as studying it!
One thing we didn’t get up to was a trip to the library, which is normally a regular part of our lives. We love outings to the library, which is easy since we live so close to the Steveston branch of the Richmond Public Library. The kids have had library cards since they were very little. In fact, our youngest went to pre-school in the same building as the library, so it was easy to pop in for a library visit.
Trips to the library were also a regular thing with my family when I was little. My earliest memories include trips to the library with my parents – I can remember doing so as far back as when I was three years old. Family trips to the library continued even into high school, although by that time I was going there more often on my own. Nevertheless, I became quite familiar with my parents’ reading interests while cultivating my own. Usually I’d read not only the books I signed out, but often those of my parents, especially my father. He tended to read a lot of biographies and non-fiction, which was closer to some of my interests.
I also loved the school library. In grades five, six, and seven, I volunteered in the school library. Most days of the week I’d be there after school. The librarian was extremely encouraging and supportive. My favourite activity was helping the librarian with the bulletin boards she was always creating to promote reading. They often had a seasonal theme and more often than not involved some form of play on words. It was always a great source of pride when the librarian liked one of my ideas and let me design a bulletin board using my idea.
After graduating with my history degree, I had a summer job as a librarian’s helper in a small government agency. A year later, after I found a career-path job, I took on a second part-time job at the local library for the extra income. I was worried during the job interview, as I had inadvertently incurred some late return fines that I hadn’t yet paid. Lucky for me, it wasn’t an issue. My job mostly involved shelving books and packing shipments for inter-branch returns, but it was a fun place to work and I got to know a lot about how libraries work.
Of course, libraries are a large part of genealogical research. In the days before on-line research, I was quite dependent on the LDS Family History Centre in Burnaby. From the Vancouver neighbourhood where I lived in the 90s, the Burnaby FHC was a 90-minute bus ride each way. I made that trip a lot. After I actually moved to Burnaby in the early naughts (twenty years later, I still don’t know what we’ve decided to call the first decade of this century!), I never visited the place. Developments in technology had minimized the need to so.
One library I wish I could visit in person more often is the BCGS Walter Draycott Library. It’s a wonderful library. In fact, it’s almost TARDIS-like. It seems so much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Unfortunately, it’s a 90-minute round trip and its Saturday hours conflicted with our children’s activities. However, due to the kids’ activities coming to a halt due to COVID, my eldest son (who is also a BCGS member) and I have been able to make the trip to the BCGS library after it reopened following its closure due to the pandemic.
We’re very lucky to have such a gem of a resource, even if we’re only able to take advantage of it infrequently. Of course, with two weeks off work, you’d think I’d be able to squeeze in a visit – if only the BCGS Library wasn’t closed for the summer break!
It was only near the end of my time off that I realized that I could have gone to the Cloverdale Branch of the Surrey Public Library, which has an amazing family history library. The irony is that our most recent family staycation activity took us within 100 meters of the library. In addition to genealogy, our eldest child is crazy for anything transportation related, and whatever the eldest is interested in, little brother is too. So we took them to ride the historic tram operated by the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society. Big brother doesn’t have to know that we were practically across the street from the genealogy library.
A Deck of Ancestors 