Tag: Genealogy Ensemble

Eight Years and Still Going Strong

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It has been eight years this month since I started posting articles about my ancestors on this blog. In that time, I have learned a lot, focusing primarily on my direct ancestors and a few of their colourful cousins. Now it is time to reassess and decide where to take the blog in the future.

I have been thinking of abandoning Writing Up the Ancestors altogether and just post on https://genealogyensemble.com, the collaborative blog I share with eight other genealogists/writers. Many of my articles already appear on both blogs. We are each scheduled to post on GE once every nine weeks, and that is about all I have been able to manage lately. In June, I published a history of my father’s family – Reinventing Themselves a History of the Hamilton and Forrester Families (https://store.bouquinbec.ca/reinventing-themselves-a-history-of-the-hamilton-and-forrester-families.html) — and it was impossible to create new content for the blog while also working on the book.

Blogger, the interface on which Writing Up the Ancestors appears, introduced major changes about a year ago, and I was so busy with the book that I didn’t take the time to learn how to use the new version. It was extremely frustrating to see a blog that once was so easy to handle become quite cumbersome, especially when it comes to separating paragraphs. But I will give Blogger a try for a while longer. Meanwhile, my last two posts, both about my headstrong and unflappable world travelling great-great aunt Helen (Bagg) Lewis, appear only on Genealogy Ensemble.

Truth be told, Genealogy Ensemble has a much wider readership than Writing Up the Ancestors, however, people still contact me about various people I have written about on Writing Up the Ancestors. Furthermore, my articles about the Bagg and Clark families appear in footnotes in several recent books about the history of the Montreal neighbourhood where they once lived. Hopefully, my online collection of stories won’t be going anywhere.

Robert Mitcheson, Philadelphia

Now that my father’s family is “done” (although all genealogists know the research is never finished) my attention is turning to my mother’s family, all of them Montrealers since the late 1700s or mid-1800s. Wherever my future posts appear, they will focus on my mother’s side: the Bagg, Mitcheson, Clark, MacGregor, Smithers, Smith, Workman, Mulholland and Shearman families. In the coming months the focus will be on the family of Robert Mitcheson (1779-1859), pictured here.

In the years since I first started my research, many new resources have been digitized, so I’m hoping to make new discoveries, then pull them together into another book.

Meanwhile, before getting started on all that new research, it is time to reorganize. I am putting a lot of stray notes and articles into Evernote in the hopes of being able to find them when I need them, and sorting through the piles of documents related to the Hamiltons and Forresters, giving whatever is of value to an archive and throwing out all the duplicates and references I can easily find again online.

Is this overly optimistic? Perhaps, but winter is coming and the pandemic is not going away anytime soon. I have to do something to keep busy!

Six Years and Shifting Gears

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It is hard to believe that it is six years since I started this family history blog. My first post, Help from the Grave, was dated mid-October, 2013. Since then, I have tried to post an article every two weeks (except during the summers) about my ancestors. This is post number 148.

Over these six years, I made a lot of progress with my research. I broke through several brick walls facing the Shearman family, who immigrated to North America from Waterford, Ireland (Breaking Down My Shearman Brick Wall); I tracked down the elusive Lucie Bagg, half-sister to Stanley Bagg (Lucie Bagg: Her Story); and I unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding my great-grandmother Samantha Rixon’s family (The Ancestor Who Did Not Exist). Writing the blog has helped me to focus on important questions about these people, explain my conclusions and back them up with notes and footnotes.

Samantha (Rixon) Forrester

I knew nothing about my great-grandmother Samantha (Rixon) Forrester until a few years ago, and my research revealed that some of the family stories about her were untrue.

This research has given my husband and me a great excuse to travel to Scotland, Ireland, northern England and London. We’ve also been to Winnipeg, Toronto, rural Ontario, New York State, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. In Montreal, we have become familiar with people and places in Mile End, a neighbourhood that is far from our house but was familiar territory to my ancestors.

I have been very lucky to be a member of a family history writing group. Calling ourselves Genealogy Ensemble, nine ladies meet monthly to share our discoveries and improve our writing skills. Every few months, I simultaneously publish my stories to both Writing Up the Ancestors and to that group’s collaborative blog, https://genealogyensemble.com. Two years ago, we collected our favourite articles and published them in a book we called Beads in a Necklace: Family Stories from Genealogy Ensemble.

I’ve also become involved with a similar blogging project in the small community on the coast of Maine where I spend my summers, encouraging people to write about their own families and summer memories.

Now it is time to shift gears. The new posts will continue, but at a slightly slower pace as I am starting to pull together the articles from my blog, revise and update them where necessary, and collect them into a self-published book. Actually, two books, one for my father’s side of the family in Upper Canada and the western provinces, the other for my mother’s Montreal ancestors and their colonial New England ancestors. These two families’ stories are very different, so two separate books will make everything more manageable. Still, it will involve a lot of work.

As for Writing Up the Ancestors, in the coming year, I will focus again on my Montreal roots, especially the Bagg family. They were well known in Montreal’s 19th-century English-language community and, believe it or not, there is still a lot to learn about them.