Category: family history

A second annual assessment

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I meant to post new articles every two or three weeks this summer, but summer is almost over and I still seem to be in vacation mode. Hopefully when I get back to my desk in September, I’ll feel refreshed and ready to write. 

There is no getting around it: the articles I’ve been posting about my ancestors every week or two require a lot of hard work, so I needed the break. Today, however, it’s time for an assessment. 

Since I started Writing Up the Ancestors in October 2013, I have posted 61 articles. The stories about the Smiths of Macduff and the Hamiltons of Lesmahagow have had the most views, probably because these are common family names – and uncommon place names. But a story called “No Fairy-tale Ending” (The Seigneurie of Milles–Îles, part one),about a young couple who died unexpectedly, leaving their orphaned daughter to be brought up by people who had an eye on her inheritance, has been viewed infrequently. I have changed the title to “The Doomed Marriage of Mary Sophia Roy Bush and Louis Charles Lambert Dumont”. (https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2015/01/sophia-mary-roy-bush-and-louis-charles.html) I want these articles to be found and read.

One of the biggest challenges in writing family history is to bring each ancestor to life. That starts with writing skills, such as finding a good lead for the story. But I usually only have superficial facts about my ancestors, so I have to make sure I don’t get carried away and make assumptions about their actions and motives, and I constantly remind myself that the values and customs of their societies are quite different from mine. 

Another difficult aspect of blogging, at least for me, is preparing proper footnotes. It is picky and time-consuming and I find it hard to follow a consistent bibliographic style. I need to do a better job of this.

On the other hand, source citations are essential, so I try to give readers enough information that they can find my sources themselves. People have told me they like the Research Remarks section of each post in which I describe the resources I have used and where I found them, mention sources of additional information and identify brick walls. I love writing that section and I hope that, even if readers are not especially interested in my ancestor, they will learn something from the research process.

When I first started writing this blog, I had a bank of stories I had already written, and I had research on other ancestors at my fingertips. Now I’ve posted most of those stories, and I need to spend some time researching families I haven’t even mentioned yet. But it is hard to focus on research and simultaneously write regular blog posts. Something has to change, or this will feel more like work and not like fun. 

So this year, I will either post shorter stories on Writing Up the Ancestors, or I will continue to post long stories less often. I’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I will also post short articles about my research processes and discoveries on the collaborative blog GenealogyEnsemble.com. I still have lots of stories to tell.

Maps in Art and Genealogy

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 My passion for genealogy, my interest in maps and the enjoyment I get from painting and drawing become even more fun when they intersect with each other.

I have been taking art classes for many years, and my ancestors sometimes turn up in my paintings in some manner or other. Maps are another frequent theme in my artwork, sometimes just as a layer that I cover with paint, sometimes as an image of a place or a route from one place to another. Sometimes I use street grids or contour lines as the starting-point for a drawing, and a birds-eye view of landforms can inspire me to create an abstract image.  

A few years ago, I collected images that were associated with my great-great grandmother Catharine Mitcheson Bagg and put them together in a collage. I included a photograph of a portrait of her; a hand-painted photograph of Fairmount Villa, the house where she lived in Montreal, a letter she wrote and a painting she did on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where she grew up. I glued all these elements on top of some maps of the area where she lived in Montreal. I found these maps on the website of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, I enlarged and printed several sections, coloured them and then covered them with thin rice paper.

 I love old maps, not only because they can be beautiful. Some show places that no longer exist, or that have been swallowed up by urban centers. They can show political boundaries that have changed over time, land use patterns, railway lines that have disappeared, and the locations of church buildings that are now used for entirely different purposes. That makes them an essential research tool for tracking family history.

Family records said my great-great-grandmother Janet MacFarlane was born in Dunkeld, Scotland, and a handwritten note suggested she was born in Craig O’Gowrie, Perthshire. Other notes said Janet’s father was a stonemason before the family left for Canada in 1833, and the family lived near the Tay River.

These were all important clues, but it turned out they were not entirely accurate. Parish records showed that Janet was baptized in Clunie Parish, Perthshire, which is near the Tay and not far from Dunkeld. Frustratingly, I could not find a place called Craig O’Gowrie anywhere.

I searched a number of old maps on the National Library of Scotland’s website and discovered several hamlets called Gourdie in Clunie Parish, including Craigend of Gourdie. When one map showed there had been quarries nearby, I concluded the family had probably lived there. 

I recently participated in a workshop on art and cartography. Our instructor sent us to the park across the street to map, not what we saw, but what we heard: birds, cars, people walking by, someone raking, a loud machine that didn’t stop. That workshop has inspired me to broaden my thinking about the ways maps can represent reality and social history, and to find new ways to make maps into art.

Image sources:

Collage by Janice Hamilton. “Catharine Mitcheson Bagg,” 1865, by William Sawyer, National Gallery of Canada (no. 26744).

Knox, James. “Map of the Basin of the Tay, including the Greater Part of Perth Shire, Strathmore and the Braes of Angus or Forfar.” Edinburgh: W. & A. K. Johnston, 1850. N. pag. National Library of Scotland. Web. 19 May 2015.