Ensuring your family’s stories live on
Contact Kenneth H. Thomas Jr. at P. O. Box 901, Decatur, GA 30031 or www.gagensociety.org.
Are you capturing the essence of your family’s story, or are you just mired in the begets and begats like in the Bible?
One way to quickly bore relatives is to engulf them with charts and statistics about which they know little and aren’t likely to embrace if swamped. The Olde Mecklenburg Genealogical Society in Charlotte recently had Margaret Bigger, an author and writing teacher, speaking on how to best tell your family’s story, make it interesting, and thus perhaps ensure that some of your stories (and your research) make it through another generation.
Some of the points she made: try to bring to life the people you have known, the things that were interesting, perhaps peculiar, like writing a character in a book. One of her pupils did just that and wrote short stories about family members capturing their essence as well as recording important family events and genealogy.
I can remember tales of a runaway wife, an ancestor with 15 living children, the revenuers coming after those who ran a still in the hills of North Carolina, as well as the tragedy of a young great-uncle dying from a snakebite.
You can tell stories like this or at least draft them and get help embellishing them to capture the interest of others. As Bigger stated, don’t wait until you are too old; then it’s too late. She said to be sure to include who, what, when, where and why in your story.
Researching photographers
E. Lee Eltzroth is the leading authority on Georgia photographers and how to research specific ones, their studios and other details. She now hosts a blog, “Hunting & Gathering,” at georgiaphotographers.wordpress.com with a new feature, “Tuesday Tips — Researching Photographers Working in the South.” She started with Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
So if you are interested in how to research a particular photographer, she may have some suggestions. She also maintains a list of Georgia photographers and when they operated at a particular address from the mid-19th century until about 1900. This is a good place to go for historians and archivists, as well as genealogists, to learn more on this research process and early photographers in Georgia.
Researching in a new locale
J. H. Fonkert in the July-September issue of the “NGS Magazine” writes about “Five Tips for Starting Research in a New Locale”: know the geography, the local history, the record-keeping jurisdiction (who has the records?), the range of available records, and who are the researchers who know the city’s and county’s records and can advise you. For more, see www.ngsgenealogy.org, the National Genealogical Society’s site.
