I’ve wracked my mind, and I cannot think of who the storytellers in our family might be. However, I have no problem identifying the storykeepers. They might not spin yarns or be captivating narrators, but they are always willing to share the family lore if asked. I wouldn’t call my mother a good storyteller, but I can absolutely count on her to provide the answers to questions I might have about even the most obscure bits of familial trivia.
I’ve been keeping the family history since I was in elementary school!
While I don’t consider myself a storyteller, I definitely count myself amongst the family storykeepers. I think by definition, genealogists are storykeepers. It’s not often that I’m asked, but I’m more than happy to share the stories whenever someone in the family should ask.
I will concede, however, that maybe I have become a storyteller. This blog is now two-and-a-half years old. This is my third time participating in Amy Johnson Crow‘s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and my 129th post as part of the challenge. I’ve even turned my first year’s set of posts into a print book and have nearly completed turning the second year’s worth into a digital book.
After posting last week’s entry, in which I wrote about being my own cousin, I realized that it very well could have fit in with this week’s theme of “Me, Myself, and I”. However, to mark the last (!?!) week of Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2023, the thing I will share about myself is how I have used the challenge to the fullest.
I wrote a family history book!
I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.
Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!
For years I had vaguely pondered a genealogy blog, but really couldn’t think of a niche that wasn’t already being addressed by dozens of other genealogy blogs. However, the 52 Ancestors Challenge was the catalyst to creativity that I needed. So a quarter century after blogging was cool, I created this blog as a means of participating in the challenge.
At the same time, I set up a second Twitter (I refuse to use the “new” name) account that would only be used for genealogy, also named Deck of Ancestors. I’ve since created namesake accounts on Mastodon, the now defunct Pebble, Mastodon, and Bluesky. I’ve largely abandoned Mastodon. I’m active on Bluesky, but it doesn’t seem to be gaining the traction I thought it had when I first joined.
It was hard at times, but I was successful in posting something for all 52 weeks of the challenge. With this post, I’ll be successful for a second year in a row. The second year was more difficult. It felt harder to come up with something I hadn’t written about before and some of the weekly prompts were not easy for me. Nevertheless, I persevered! I’ve signed up for the challenge again for 2024. Looking at the prompts, it looks like it will be another difficult year, but I will try to rise to the challenge.
However, what I’ve always wanted to do is create some sort of family history book. However, I was reluctant to churn out one of those dry tomes that’s just a bunch of pedigree charts and a BMD narrative. I’ve started and stopped all sorts of drafts and have the works in progress still sitting in a folder on my computer.
My real first genealogy book!
Moreover, like a lot of family historians, I had lots of ideas for genealogy-related Christmas presents, but kept putting it off until it was too close to the holiday to get it done.
Thanks to the 52 Ancestors challenge, I inadvertently hit upon what I thought was a winning solution – the blog posts were essentially a book! I had the foresight to start working on this project in the summer, which began with reformatting the blog entries into a book format. The other problem was figuring out how to print it.
Luckily, this year I discovered Lulu, an online self-publishing site. I had used others before, but none worked for this project. In September I ordered a test copy. It passed muster, so I ordered enough copies for my Christmas gift giving – my parents, our kids, my siblings, and my nibblings, plus copies for the Library and Archives Canada. (It may be nerdy, but I was really excited to get an ISBN for the project!)
A Stack of Ancestors!
So here it is, my family history book, A Deck of Ancestors, consisting of my 52 posts for the first year I participated in the 52 Ancestors Challenge. One of my sisters and her kids opened theirs early, as they went overseas for the holidays. I just made it a Hanukkah gift instead. The reviews were great. On Christmas Eve, my sister-in-law sent me photos of my father reading the copy I gave my parents. Seeing that was really special. While my father used to be a voracious reader, he doesn’t really read much anymore since his vision has deteriorated terribly over recent years. What I was most excited for was to see our kids open their copy. I was happy to come downstairs on Boxing Day morning to see our eldest engrossed in his.
In addition to the print version, I created an expanded digital edition (with its own unique ISBN, of course), which I sent to everyone after they opened their print copy. Among other things, I added an Ahnentafel, a 17-generation pedigree chart, and a full index. (I hate non-fiction books without an index!) It would have been extremely expensive to include all that in a print version. Plus, the digital version has all the hyperlinks, which are pretty hard to click in a print edition!
So thank you Amy Johnson Crow for creating the 52 Ancestors Challenge and helping me fill the one gap in my years of genealogy practice – writing!
Needless to say, most of our ancestors were never on what we now consider to be social media. There were forms of communication and systems of social connection that we can consider to be the “social media” of their time. Minstrels, troubadours, and jongleurs were the social media influencers of medieval times. Ham radios and party lines are more recent pre-internet examples of what could be analogous to modern social media.
This is not an ad. Welcome to the olden days of the internet.
Of course, nowadays when people think of more modern forms of social media, things like Facebook and Twitter readily come to mind. I’ve made great use of both of those for genealogical purposes.
However, if you think about it, social media as we know it is getting somewhat long in the tooth, and the internet has been around so long that we no longer capitalize the word. The World Wide Web – another term that’s not used so much any more – made its debut to the general public in 1991. Thousands of genealogy websites were in existence more than 25 years ago. When Cyndi’s list made its debut in 1996, it had thousands of links by the end of that year.
The late 90s was also the heyday of Geocities, which I used for genealogy, among other things.
Here’s a part of the genealogy section of my Geocities site as it was in February 1999. Unfortunately, the background design and images have been lost.
I am amazed to see how many of the links on my old Geocities page still work. Of course, I made several mentions of Cyndi’s List. In fact, my genealogy page ended with this:
I also would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Yvette’s Dutch Genealogy Homepage, which you’ll see is one of the hyperlinks on my old Geocities page. It is now Dutch Genealogy and I still make use of it all the time. Given that 15 years ago Yvette marked its 15th anniversary, this site has now been around in one form or another for thirty years!
Yes, I acknowledge that websites aren’t necessarily social media. However, while the term “social media” was many years in the future, I would argue that message boards, bulletin boards, IRC (internet relay chat), and Usenet were all early forms of social media. Looking through my digitized documents, I am surprised by how many items I saved through those sources as far back as 1995, along with scores of emails I exchanged with other genealogists using good old Pine. Other websites from back in the day that were forms of social media included Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com.
Even blogging easily pre-dates the turn of the century. THIS century, not 1900 as might come to mind to many older people when they hear the term. Blogging networking platforms such as Open Diary and LiveJournal originated in the late 90s.
I still have connections with some of the people I met through those venues, especially Nol, a fellow genealogist from Haarlem. I can’t even remember which bulletin board or Usenet group I met him on, but I have every email we exchanged since 1995. His help over the years has been invaluable. My only regret is that after all this time, I have yet to meet him in real life. The last time I was in Haarlem, Nol was in the United States! I promise we’re not deliberately trying to avoid each other.
My first email from Nol after we moved off the message boards. Not long after we started our correspondence, I learned that the family line of Nol’s wife intersected with mine.
The internet and social media isn’t as new as it’s sometimes made out to be, and it has always been a great tool for genealogists!
A Deck of Ancestors 