All Blog Posts Tagged 'History' (148)

A couple days ago, my friend and client Jay Steinfeld, CEO and founder of Blinds.com posted a “tweet” on Twitter (Jay is @BlindscomCEO) that read: “If you think hiring an expert is expensive, just try an amateur!”

I found myself laughing in that “I get it but it’s really not very funny” way because it’s so true. Just…

There is a story in every document.

The more I am involved in family research, the more I love it. My personal research aside , the stories uncovered never cease to amaze me. I mean the fact is , what lay dormant  in the archives , is someone’s fascination of the future. Here are three brief examples of just some story lines discovered in my research this…

What information can we find for one family from one page of a Census ?

Well how about 3 marriages, 2 agricultural labourers, a widow, a Coal merchant, a cordwainer, 4 siblings living apart, a widower, a nephew, a father in law, a mother in law, cousins, and several scholars ! Not to mention the uninhabited buildings.

A brief family study in a part of…

As I was waking up this morning, I was aware of a dream that I was having. In the dream, I was sitting at a dining room table with the family of a client that I had done a video biography for. It was obvious that this person had recently passed and we were discussing the biography. A woman seated to my right said, “well that biography was wonderful except for that huge lie that she told about having lived in the palace at Versailles!”

At that point, I woke up and, after having a good…

I have started to place just a few of the several hundred images of Heads stones I have online at Flckr. You can use these images for FREE providing they are for personal use and not commercial.

I am about to lose space, so if you think one of the people might be yours – get there quick:…

Saturday 7^th May 2011 saw the start of a two day exhibition organised by the East Yorkshire Family History Society to commemorate Kingston Upon Hull's worst night of the 1941 blitz. The exhibition was held at Carnegie Heritage Centre and with the help of volunteer groups such as the Heroes of Hull Web Site. The exhibition itself was an overwhelming success with the…

Just a few images of the images I have taken of the General Cemetery in Sheffield, Yorkshire and also the church yard at All Saints in Newton Heath,Manchester, Lancashire.

With about 700 images, and  over 1000 names still to upload, I am now looking at an alternative location as my Flckr account is about to reach its full extent. Ii is my hope that a new web page will…

This is the second year that Texas Monthly has hosted a short film contest during the annual Austin Film Festival. The contest provides a platform for Texans to share their Texas pride by making a film 10 minutes or less about Texas, your experiences in Texas or other insights into our amazing state. You do not have to be from Texas in order to enter, and you do not have to film this in Texas but it must be about Texas. Pretty simple right?

The deadline for submission is June 1st,…

In my quest to upload as many images of headstones as I can shake a stick at uploaded are another 11 headstones featuring 23 names from 4 counties.

Featuring the names Huyton, Dawson, Brown, Archer, Almond, Pickworth, Swift, Baily, Bailey, Garbutt, Knowlson and Thompson. From Ampleforth, Chorley and Kingston Upon Hull, featuring three counties; East Yorkshire, North…

Late last year I started a family genealogy tree on Geni.com and blogged about what exactly Geni is.

Recently my parents were in town visiting and my dad and I sat down for a couple of hours at Geni.com, armed with an old genealogical tree that I had roughly put together about 20 years ago. My intention was to get the remaining tree fleshed out…

These recent images capture the essence of a thriving City centre in Victorian Britain. Each one represents the life and livelihood of our past ancestors and the City’s history from William Gill the shoe maker who operated at 34 Bishop Lane to the now infamous Brown family of High Street. Slave abolitionist William Wilberforce walked these cobbled streets to and from…

The Toll of Time….and Council’s

Still on the theme of local cemeteries. Following a visit to Eastern Cemetery in Kingston, I was astonished to witness in such a well kept cemetery that an eagerness to protect the visitors, the stones themselves were being damaged.

It looks to me as though the sinking of some older graves, very likely due to some flooding and…

A selection of my photographs from a recent exploration of cemeteries in Hull. Dating back to the early 1800’s, there is certainly much evidence of death, decay and disease. Many of the surviving stones had in fact been relocated from previous locations as the City expanded.

One of the most interesting finds was evidence of the 1849 Cholera epidemic in the City and the…