Write a family history from basic information

Genealogy research is exciting, and in the process, we accumulate numerous documents, files, photographs, and notes. But sometimes I wonder what the point is in having all this information unless we have some way of telling the story, the ‘what happened’, that will interest and inspire future generations. How do you go from researching your family history to writing a family history?

Most of us will have investigated beyond the basic details of birth, marriage and death, beyond the census, and will have tried to find the “deeper” history of the lives of our ancestors. However, we all know that this is not always possible. With the best will in the world, sometimes all we have is a few dates and places, an occupation, and little else.

How can you build a life story from such basic details? If you are writing your family history, perhaps for your children, or as a gift to your family members, how can you make the life of an ancestor sound interesting when all you know are the details of their birth, marriage, and death?

Like putting a puzzle together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Learn a little backstory and things will start to fall into place.

Take my own family for example. I don’t have much information on most of them, except for the usual baptisms, census details, marriages, and deaths. However, putting together the known facts, researching history, and using pictorial devices, I have written a biography of my ancestor John Walker Bott.

The key point is to know the time in which your ancestor lived. One book that I find invaluable is the Chronicle of Great Britain and Ireland, which details all the major news stories for each year in the history of Great Britain. The Internet is also full of useful information, maps and pictorial images that you could use to illustrate your story (be careful with the copyright of the images and, when in doubt, ask the webmaster for permission if you are going to make your work public). Museums, libraries, and churches are also a good source of local parish history.

Here is a small excerpt from my ancestor’s biography:

When John Walker Bott and his sister were born in 1814, the nation was celebrating the fall of Napoleon, Jane Austen had just published Mansfield Park, and actor Edmund Kean had made his debut as Shylock at the Drury Lane Theater.

While these bits of information have nothing to do with my ancestor personally, they do establish the context of the world in which he was born.

Books on the history of clothing or housing are also very useful, and again, you can find websites about fashion through the ages that can help you get an idea of ​​how your ancestor dressed.

Learn about the history of the places where your ancestors were born and lived, to provide a setting for their lives. Here, I found out what life was like where John was born:

At the time of JWB’s birth, Newcastle-under-Lyme was a well-equipped city, with good pavement, gas lighting, and a good water supply. It had two churches, the main one being St. Giles, where John would later marry … It would have been a very busy and bustling city at this time, located on the main turnpike road from Liverpool and Manchester to Birmingham and London …

Once you’ve discovered these types of information, other things you know about them start to make sense. When I found out that the new railroad bypassed Newcastle, and the coach trade declined, it really made sense why John, a builder, had moved to Birmingham some time before 1851. The rapidly expanding city of Birmingham must have provided him with much. more work than the now quieter city of Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Following him through the census, his life follows the usual pattern of the head of a Victorian family; the birth of five children, the death of his wife, Louisa, his second marriage two years later, and the birth of more children. By looking at the number of rooms and researching the addresses, we can see that his fortune was increasing as the quality of the home improved. He goes from ’employee’ to ’employer’, and at one point we know that there were 10 people living in the home, including the stepchildren from his second wife’s previous marriage.

Going back to the history books, and if we look at the history of education, we can see that the Education Act of 1872 made school compulsory for all children between the ages of 5 and 13, so it is likely that the children of John have been academics at the nearby school. to the Church of San Marcos.

In 1867, John would have been able to vote for the first time in his life when the Second Reform bill allowed workers with an established place of residence the right to vote.

These are some of the final words of John’s story:

John Walker Bott died on August 14, 1874 at the age of 60. For a hardworking man in a physically difficult trade, this was a good age at this time.

Throughout his life, he would have seen many changes as the Victorian era grew and developed. He had lived through the cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 40s. When young Queen Victoria came to the throne, he would have been a 23-year-old … He experienced the rapid growth and expansion of railways, and would have known about the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. Does he, like many others, travel by train to visit this amazing international exhibition?

I hope you can see how I have used general and local history to establish the context in which my ancestor lived.

So writing a family history doesn’t have to be just a chronological list of personal events. You can enrich yourself with all the information you can find that would have affected your family’s life. Your family history then becomes a living account of real people with real lives that will inspire the next generation.

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *