Can HistoryLines Really Build an Instant Personal History of Your Ancestors?

when I read this, I was rather sceptical, and thought it was one ofn those "too good to be true" things Can HistoryLines Really Build an Instant Personal History of Your Ancestors?:

The HistoryLines website bills itself as “Instant Personal History.” Those of us who love family history get really excited when we think we can get a lot of valuable information quick and easy. So at first glance HistoryLines can seem a little disappointing. Instant personal history may be overselling it. But, like any good tool, the more you put into it the more you get out. And on second glance, HistoryLines is a good tool.

But since they offered a free trial, I thought I'd have a look, and, as I suspected, it offered a time line and some boilerplate text.

The first one I chose was my great great grandfather John Bagot Cottam (1836-1911). He was born in Salford, Lancashire, England, and emigrated to Natal in 1863, with his wife Adelaide Herbert (1831-1909) and three daughters. They had more daughters in Durban where he died in 1911.

Now it's possible that the paid-for version offers a bit more, but the free version asks for the first name and surname, date and place of birth and death, and sex of the person and that's all. If it asked for a couple of residence dates and places, or an emigration date and place, it might have been able to come up with more relevant boilerplate information, but it didn't.

It did have the First and Second Anglo-Boer Wars, but failed to mention the Union of South Africa in 1910. It also failed to mention the American Civil War. But why should it, if he was born in England and died in South Africa and was never in the USA?

In the case of John Bagot Cottam, however, that was probably a relevant fact. He emigrated to Natal in 1863 to be accountant to the Natal Cotton Plantation Company. Cotton planting never took off in Natal, but in 1863 the cotton mills of Manchester were desperately looking for alternative sources of raw cotton, since the US Civil War had made the American supply dry up.

If HistoryLines had come up with something like that, I might have seriously considered paying for it. But one can probably get more relevant results by doing your own Google searches using the dates in your family member's time line.

The second test was not a direct ancestor, but a relation who lived in the USA. I thought that as HistoryLines was an American project, it might do better with people in the US, so I thought that to be fair I should try one.

The one I chose was William Nelson Growden (1893-1979). He was born in Tennessee, died in Los Angeles, but spent most of his adult life in Alaska. He lived in Ruby, Alaska, and was in government service, and was at one time a member of the Alaska Territorial House of Representatives.

Again, perhaps if HistoryLines had correlated residence information it might have come up with more relevant boilerplate text, but as it was it did not mention the earthquake and tsunami in Valdez, Alaska, in 1964, which killed William Nelson Growden's youngest son and two of his grandchildren.

So no, though it sounds good in the blurb, I'm not tempted by this one.

Sharing memories

Sharing memories is central to family history, and I suppose that is one of the reasons for keeping a family history blog. Here's a blog post that gives some good reasons for sharing memories, and shos that it doesn't have to be complicated: Your Memories: 5 More Reasons to Share - Treasure Chest of Memories:

You don’t have to write a life story. A memory can be a moment. You can journal your memories or write about individual episodes of your past. You can simply provide a narrative of your memories on a scrapbook page.

In addition to the reasons given in that article, I can think of a few more. One can share memories of good times, but one can also share memories of bad times. One of my memories is of a song, "Even the bad times were good", and that can be said of some of the memories I've recorded in a series of blog posts called Tales from Dystopia | Khanya -- about life in the apartheid era in South Africa. In the introduction I have some of the reasons for recording some of those memories, and I also tried to encourage others to record some of their memories of that period too.

Some share memories on Facebook, and indeed there are some pages and groups on Facebook that are deliberately designed for the sharing of memories. I recently joined one such group called We grew up in Orange Grove Johannesburg, and I am a member of another one called Who lived/s in MELMOTH?

But the trouble with Facebook groups is that they are ephemeral, and it is difficult to find things in them again. Also, you have to be a member of Facebook to see stuff there.

A better way of dealing with such things is to write a blog post about them, and then post a link to the blog post on the Facebook group. The Facebook group shares the memories immediately, but the blog post will last longer, and people will be ab le to find it with search engines and so on.

But even a blog post won't last forever -- if you have a self-hosted (paid) blog, then when you die, or lose interest, unless someone is sufficiently interested to go on paying for it, everything you posted there will disappear pretty quickly. Free blog sites (like this one, for instance) may last a bit longer. There are probably plenty of blogs hosted by Blogger (Blogspot) where the authors have died. One example was Hugh Watkins, a well-known genealogy blogger, whose last post rather poignantly tells that he was going to hospital, where he died. But Google, who own Blogspot, won't last forever either,  and blog hosting sites can die too, so it's best to keep a copy on your computer too.

You can even record other people's memories, in a sense, and stories they told. For example, my wife retired yesterday, and so I wrote a blog post about my memories of her career. That may be of interest to our children one day, even if to no one else.

I remember watching a TV series a few years ago, The Human Footprint, which, among other statistics, mentioned that the average person gets to know about 1750 other people in the course of their life. That inspired me start making a list of people I have known, and what I can remember about them -- friends, acquaintances, teachers, bosses, relatives, work colleagues and even enemies. Sometimes people e-mail me their memories too and I add those, and sometimes there are on-line or published obituaries.

One way I tried to collect family memories, which has been rather unsuccessful so far, is a family history wiki.  That is the ideal tool for such things, but one of my experiences of computer communications is that people are rarely willing to use the best tools for the job, and are more likely to choose inappropriate ones, like Facebook, for such purposes.

And there is also hard copy.

One of the sadder reasons for collecting memories is, for example, children whose parents have Aids, or some other terminal illness, and are likely to die of the disease. New drugs have helped to prolong the life of Aids patients, but the disease is still incurable, and one of the things people have done is to make "memory boxes", in which they collect stories, pictures etc from their and their  childrens lives, so that the children can have them when the parents are no longer there.

Memory boxes are not just for Aids patients either. I knew one family where they had tape recordings of the father telling stories to his children, and then he was killed in a car accident, and that recording became one of the most precious possessions of the children.

Untold Lives - British Library blog

The British Library has an interesting biographical blog, which may be of interest to family historians: About this blog - Untold Lives:

The British Library’s collections contain stories of people’s lives worldwide, from the dawn of history to the present day. They are told through the written word, images, audio-visual and digital materials. The Untold Lives blog shares those stories, providing fascinating and unusual insights into the past and bringing out from the shadows lives that have been overlooked or forgotten.

We hope to inspire new research and encourage enjoyment, knowledge and understanding of the British Library and its collections. In addition to stories from the past, we give glimpses of the hidden life of the Library and provide information about events and exhibitions. The blog contains many links to act as signposts to research information and online resources that you can explore for work or pleasure.

The British Library is one of the Copyright Libraries for the UK, which means that a copy of every book, journal, magazine etc published in the UK has to be sent there by law, so their holdings are extensive.

At one time it was also a Copyright Library for several Commonwealth countries. Until about 1964, for example, it was one of the six copyright libraries for South Africa. I remember, as an editor of a couple of small student magazines, addressing copies to "The Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum".

What this means is that as a library of record for several countries, its holdings are extensive, and many quite obscure publications, which might otherwise have vanished, may be found there.

Another source of untold lives is the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, which is worth a look if you are interested in African biography.

The importance of historical literacy

The Witness: LAST Thursday the University of KwaZulu-Natal Special Collections Day provided a showcase for the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archive, the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre, the Centre for African Literary Studies and, the hosts of the event, the Campbell Collections.

My friend (and cousin-in-law) John Aitchison also spoke on the occasion.

academic and activist John Aitchison, who donated his archive to the APC, spoke on the subject of historical literacy.

Aitchison said that “historical literacy­” in South Africa was currently suffering from the three As — “aphasia, amnesia and aporia”.

Aphasia — a difficulty in remembering (and by extension, speaking) because of some head injury or infection. In historical terms the head injury took the form of the destruction of records during the apartheid period­. There was also little writing and documentation undertaken — “it was dangerous to do so” — resulting in a lack of internal writing on the struggle and hence the dominant record was written by exiles with their own particular ideological and political perspectives.

“We also have a tremendous fight against self-induced amnesia,” said Aitchison regarding the second A. “The often self-service amnesia of whites as well as the tendency to airbrush out the resistance from non-mainline ANC supporters — Nusas and other student protest groups, the Black Consciousness movement, the churches, NGOs, etc.”

Aporia is originally a Greek term denoting an impasse or state of puzzlement, inconsistency, doubt or indecision, another feature of the malaise­ affecting historical literacy. Aitchison said the cure could be found in the special collections and other archives that “different story” documents can be found that cast a new light on our history and deconstruct the new myths appearing about our past.

Historical literacy, according to Aitchison, apart from obviously being based heavily on our normal literacy, requires us to develop the skills to overcome these difficulties of the brutal lack of historical texts, the self-serving erasing of memories about the past, and the difficulty of understanding the “difficult readings” and getting access to them.

Which is why special collections are special.

The full article is well worth reading, as it gives examples of some of the hidden history that can be found.

The Witness: Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives

THE collection includes Alan Paton’s papers, the manuscripts of his poetry and short stories and his correspondence; the archives of the South African Liberal Party; the documents of organisations involved in the struggle against apartheid in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, such as the Black Sash, the Detainees Aid Committee and the Five Freedoms Forum. The Special Collections of the Natal Society, which includes books collected over the past 150 years by the Natal Society, and the O’Brien and Hattersley Collections. The oral history project: ‘Recording the anti-apartheid struggle in KwaZulu-Natal’ recorded interviews with many activists. The centre also houses the Sinomlando Project, the oral history project of the School of Theology.

Website of the Alan Patron Struggle Centre and Archives.

Event-based history and genealogy software for family historians, biographers and others

If you are looking for a lineage-linked genealogy program to keep your family tree and show all your relations, there is a wide choice available. Some, like Legacy and Personal Ancestal File (PAF) are free, others are shareware, and others you have to pay for up front. They all do much the same thing -- they allow you to enter people who are related to one another and show the relationships between them.

What they are not so good for, however, are collecting information about people who you think might be related, but aren't sure of. Lineage linked programs are fairly narrowly genealogical. Family historians often have wider interests, however, and sometimes it is important to show other people who influenced a family -- people like business partners, close friends, bosses and so on. These people are related, though the relationship is not genealogical.

So I think there is a real need for an event-based program to be used as a research tool, not only for genealogists and family historians, but also for general historians, biographers and others. It would differ from lineage-linked genealogy programs in that it would not only include people that were relatives, but friends and acquaintaces, work colleagues, and even enemies. It would be a useful tool for a biographer trying to keep track of the events in the life of their subject, or for someone writing general history as well. It could even be used by detectives tracing the activities of a suspect, or the sequence of events relating to a particular crime or series of crimes.

The main part of the database would be a chronological list of events, with links to people and organisations assocated with these events. The organisations could be both formal and informal groups — a political party, church, club, school, hospital, business firm, trade union, family or any other human group.

The basic outline of the program would look something like this:

The “people” part would not only be for family members, as one finds in lineage-linked genealogy programs, but for non-related people, like friends, work colleagues, teachers, pupils, godparents, acquaintances and so on. Perhaps it could also be useful in testing theories of six degrees of relationship — that we are only six degrees of relationship away from knowing everyone else on earth, and that my wife’s boss’s godmother’s cousin’s penfriend’s vet knows me.

A biographer could use it as a research tool for keeping track of the events in the life of the subject. One kind of early record might be a baptism record, for example. The baptism would be the event, and would link to people who were known to be present -- parents, godparents, and the church minister performing the ceremony, but others who were present as well. The godparents might or might not be genealogically related to the person being baptised, but would be recorded anyway. As information is added to the database, the relationship and influence of that person on the subject can be followed.

It could also be used by fiction writers for keeping track of events and characters in a novel.

A historian using such a program could use it for tracing the history of an organisation and its leaders, and chronologically arranging events in the life of the organisation, with information about the people involved in each event. A literary historian could use it to trace the interrelationships of a school of writers.

I've discussed this with various people, including Dennis Allsopp, the author of two genealogical note-taking and source-recording programs, Genota and Genforms. But this is not quite the same thing as a note-taking program. A note-taking program is for recording evidence rather than conclusions. A lineage-linked program is for recording conclusions (you have concluded that the people you have linked are related) and the evidence that supports those conclusions.

This program would be a research tool for recording both evidence and conclusions. It could be used by genealogist in conjunction with a lineage-linked genealogy program and a note-taking program. It could be used by biographers and historians on its own, or with a note-taking program. It would enable the user to link various pieces of evidence to show relationships between them and suggest conclusions.

My problem is that though I have a fairly good idea of what I want, I'm not a programming fundi, and can't write such a program myself. What it really needs is a group of programmers and researchers who could discuss their research needs, and produce a program that meets those needs.

If you are reading this and feel the need for such a program, there is a forum for discussing it, which you are welcome to join. I've also posted a skeleton of tables in MS Access based on the model above, which you can download to experiment with and comment on.