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Acknowledgements
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All data you have gathered must be
double checked with the family’s
recollections. For example
given her maternal grandparents' names,
Pollie was able to recall the names of
aunts and uncles which she had
forgotten, confirming that we had found
her mother's family.
When
using
maps, it is necessary to ‘see’ the
mental map a person has of their
village/town. Proper
orientation of the map is important to fix the
location of places of interest since
there is tendency for an individual to
indicate left/right turns with the hands
from
imagined orientations,
deviating from North, which vary as a
story unfolds. At every turn,
check using street names and landmarks
(such as churches, schools and cinemas)
to calibrate the printed map against
their mental map.
Through this process, we located the
childhood schools, homes and church of
101 year old Pollie, including a
locality only known to her by its
colloquial name as Building Fields. But, once it was
identified and a street name was read
out, she could remember all the other
streets in that neighbourhood, thereby
confirming the location. The
obituary in The Derbyshie Times
also confirmed the street and gave the exact
house number. |
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A site visit is exciting and helpful
for confirming deductions and to photograph/video
the family in their historical settings.
While we were on site, Pollie remembered
another house she had briefly lived in
but which she had forgotten about. |
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Even
by the end of the first week, I had
quite a lot of unlinked snippets of
information and
so I began compiling
all the information into dossiers.
I have not tried out the free and
proprietary software for compiling the
information. Instead, I
hand-crafted
a web (not this
one) on Pollie's ancestors and early
life, with photos and
other documents. The web could be
multimedia, and could include text,
images, audio and video.
As a matter of courtesy, all sources of
information and other input should be
adequately acknowledged. If you
then wish to make a video for the
family for private use, you need to
work on a strong story line and
on gathering material for an effective
presentation, which does not need to be
perfect. A straight forward
documentary can be boring but a
dramatised version can be far too
time-consuming. If it is to be the
latter, then it might be necessary to
re-take videos under better
conditions. Do not forget the
acknowledgements. If you wish to use
data and/or images in publications or in
productions for sale or public
screening, you must get copyright
clearance from the owners. They may
levy charges and insist that they be
acknowledged using the wording they
provide. |
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The Derbyshire
Record Office in Matlock collects original
documents to do with Derbyshire - such as
letters, wills, and parish records. There,
we can view the
original parish registers on microfilm; these
include records of bmd events. We
can also visit the Local Studies Library in
Matlock County Hall which has the GRO index
(sometimes called the St Catherine's House index) for tracking down births, marriages and
deaths so that we can order certificates which
might give us further information and leads.
Alternatively, we could investigate some of
the internet sites which charge for their
services and data, such as
www.1837online.com and others listed in the
resources page, to find the year and quarter of
events not yet transcribed by freebmd so that
certificates may be ordered. Vouchers
(currently £5) may be purchased
from the Chesterfield Library and you can also
use the computers there for free internet access.
I had to leave this project aside
for a while. So I made some notes on
other bits of information which could be pursued
further. In
Appendix 5 I have jotted down some notes on
what I found on deaths, burials and memorial
inscriptions and also on the online 1901 census.
I have also included some data I found after the
two week period, since this introduces another
resource which you may wish to consult.
This data also gives further illustration of how
even information
repeated
on successive census
records can be misleading. I hope that this web based on Pollie's case
study will help you get started and encourage
you to double-check your data.
<<< Update on Chesterfield >>>
Thanks to a
deal struck by the Derbyshire County Council, you can now access the
www.ancestry.com using
the computers in the Local Studies sections of the
Chesterfield Library.
The service is free to members of the Library. This
website holds census records (1841 - 1901) for England and
Wales, bmd records from 1837 and records from Scotland,
Ireland, America, Canada, Australia and Europe (source:
Derbyshire Times, 26 Oct 2006: 17).
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Enjoy
your search. |