Tag: research

Donate Your Genealogical Material To The Archives

(Don’t Forget Family Search!)

While it might just be me, lately it seems that many archives are going out of their way to encourage donations. It even appears that they are targeting genealogists in these pitches. Even if an archive isn’t actively seeking donations, many archives’ websites provide information as to how to donate materials and published works.

Sure, the focus of this post is Canadian archives, but the last time I physically visited an archive was during my last trip to The Hague, where I popped into the Nationaal Archief.

What a great idea, particularly given how much I see on social media by genealogists pondering where their work will go, either because their children don’t care or because they have no descendants or nibblings to pass their work on to. However, even if you aren’t an endling or have someone would happily receive your genealogical materials, you should still consider what you might donate to an archive. If you’ve published a family history book, you should definitely consider it.

Don’t limit your thinking. Archives of all kinds accept donations: municipal, provincial, state, national, private, and institutional archives. Because I am based in greater Vancouver, Canada, most of the examples I am listing are Canadian. Here are but a few:

  • The University of British Columbia, my alma mater. I spent countless hours in its archives and special collections division for academic and personal research – little of which was genealogy related! “Donate“.
  • The British Columbia Archives: “Donating Records“.
  • Most other Canadian provincial archives have a donation page on their website. I’ll note two in particular. First, the Provincial Archives of Alberta. I note on their donation page, they expressly state that the kinds of records they are seeking include personal records of individuals and families: “Donate Your Records“.

Given that there are fifty states and countless other institutions in the US, I will leave it to readers to Google the American archives that might be suitable for their records donations. However, the Society of American Archivists provides a great overview on “Donating Your Personal or Family Records to a Repository“.

Another place to consider – which might seem obvious once you think about it – is FamilySearch: “How Can I Donate?” They accept: family histories; published genealogical books; published historical books such as local and county histories; periodicals; directories; indexes and transcriptions of records in book format; yearbooks; journals (over 70 years old); family bibles containing genealogical information; and autobiographies and biographies.

Donate materials to an archive for all researchers to enjoy and benefit from!

52 Weeks – Week 48: Overlooked

This week, the 52 Ancestors Challenge asks us to consider “Overlooked”. What might I have overlooked? If I knew the answer to that, it wouldn’t be overlooked!

Thinking it over, it’s not so much what I’ve overlooked as what I’ve ignored.

  • All children of my ancestors other than the child from whom I’m descended

This is actually a thing of the past, but it’s a case of doing the work now that I should have done a very long time ago.

Back in the day – decades ago, now – I would sometimes ignore the multitude of children some of my ancestors brought into this world. Sometimes it was when a couple had ten or more children. More often than not, it was something I did when an ancestor remarried, or had an earlier marriage, which produced children. One of my great great grandfathers had 19 children – nine with his first wife and ten with his second.

There were simply so many kids in some families – even in ones with parents who only ever had one marriage – that I didn’t feel like I had to the time to enter all of them into my database or that it was all that important. In the case of previous or subsequent marriages, I’d usually annotate the entry with a note saying how many children the couple had together. Sometimes I’d include the first names of those children, but without their vital stats. What a time saver!

Not the longest list of children in my database!

Of course, anyone who has done genealogy for a while will have immediately spotted the error of my ways. I was foolishly ignoring my FAN club! Also known as “cluster genealogy”, “FAN” stands for “Friends, Associates, and Neighbours”, although over the years many have included “Family” amongst the friends. It is a term coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills, which involves researching the cluster of people around the person who is the target of the study. It often involves research of a person who might seem otherwise elusive. Evidence about their FANs might shed light on the otherwise mysterious relative.

I now make a point of including all the children of my direct ancestors. As well, I have a couple of direct ancestors for whom I am researching all their descendants. Of course, this has meant going back and properly adding all those children to my tree.

  • Citations

You have to take the crunchy with the smooth. As much as I love genealogy, like all things, it has its down sides. For me, it’s writing up source citations.

It is such a tedious time-consuming chore that I’ll sometimes put down my genealogy for weeks or even months at a time. All the while, mounds of data, digital and paper, keep piling up because sometimes I can’t not research. On top of that, I often have a gazillion browser tabs open at a time, waiting for the day that I bite the bullet and start doing the work.

It’s the doing dishes of genealogy, yet absolutely vital to the process.

  • Something I haven’t ignored?

This blog!