How many times have you been delighted at the discovery of a trunk full of family heirlooms? How many times has a cousin presented you with a bundle of letters or a previously unknown photo album found in an attic full of old things?
What’s it like to let strangers into your files? Our guinea pig speaks.
It’s never fun being a guinea pig.
What I experienced in the last three weeks would normally be spread out over seven to eight months. I do not recommend the course I took. It was messy.
When Ancestry Magazine approached me with the idea of being digitized, I was hit by a mix of emotions.
It was an interesting concept, digitizing someone’s family history, turning their mountains of mementos, closets of clutter, and family files filled with facts into a personal digital archive. Quite honestly, it was a task none of us at Ancestry Magazine was confident could be tackled easily.
If your ancestors ever went to court—and through business dealings, criminal cases, and civil suits, there’s a good chance they did—happening upon the record of a case while searching through the attic can be a boon for your family history. Who knows, you may even luck into a story that was formerly unknown to any living member of your family.
Cindy Pringle, a forty-seven-year-old photographer, lived with her grandparents for much of her childhood in the big square house that her grandfather’s grandfather built in Paxton, Illinois. So, after her grandmother Edna died in 1997, it seemed only natural that Pringle would help ready the place for sale.
For years, my parents displayed a shiny mound of glass in their living room—three glass whiskey bottles, melted together, to be exact.
The bottles weren’t always a single entity—they fused one hundred years ago as a result of the fires that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
As we prepared to sell my childhood home, we cleaned out the refrigerator, divvied up the furniture, and called the realtor. We thought we were ready for anything—until we ventured into Mom’s genealogy room.
We knew Mom had spent thirty-five years researching family history, but we were unprepared for the sheer volume of records that awaited us.
Ever struggle to find someone in the 1841 UK census? If so, you weren’t alone. Researchers looking at digital or microfilmed images of the now-infamous census are often dismayed to find that most of the replicated enumerators’ books are almost entirely illegible.
Why?
Take a look into some cherished family heirlooms.
Pulling out my mom’s linen table-cloth for a recent party triggered memories of long-ago Sunday dinners with family and friends gathered around the table telling stories about the past.