On-line Genealogy During Quarantine
by Susan Davies Sit
During this quarantine period, our Welsh Society decided to move our genealogy meetings and Welsh Conversation meet-ups, online. As the weeks have stretched on, it has made me stop and think that this may be a great way for us to continue this way, as well as eventually meeting in person, as members who have moved away have rejoined to be part of it. We used Zoom and we pay $15 a month so we can have more than the basic 40 minutes of time.
In the second of our weekly sessions on the Zoom platform, which usually last for an hour and a half, members Warren, Margaret, Susan, Beth, Marion from Maryland and Barbara from Pennsylvania, shared our thoughts on how we can get the younger generations interested in our genealogy work. We offered each other our own ideas about sharing genealogy with children and grandchildren, with hopes of spiking their interest and for us to, one day, pass on our genealogy work to them.
We each had a story about connecting with grandchildren, such as Beth sharing Welsh words, recipes, and stories with her granddaughters. I shared how I connected a newspaper editor and published poet ancestor from the mid 1800’s with my daughter, who is an editor and writer. I connected my grandson with his great grandfather when I told him that my dad used morse code on a ship after WW2, while 11 year old Aiden was interested in the Titanic. But he is perhaps more interested in my husband’s American Chinese family as, he says, the family is “so old”!
Taking children and grandchildren to visit Wales is certainly a wonderful opportunity to share our roots with them. Walking the pathways, visiting the castles, homesteads and family vacation places are precious. Planning and hosting a family reunion, while posting a paper copy of the tree on the wall for everyone to enjoy, is a huge favorite with family members, especially if you include photos of their ancestors and themselves. They see their place in family history on the wall before their eyes. Susan Meers’ granddaughter loved hearing how she is connected to Princess Gwenllian in Wales, and confirmed her place in society as a princess. Beth’s granddaughters love the stories of their grandfather coming home from the slate quarry in Vermont with both he and his lunch pail covered in slate dust.
Warren was thrust into Welsh genealogy after his father died and left Warren boxes of papers. Warren has taken that work on, and connected it to the bigger picture of Rees Morgan in Springfield, MA, and then from him back to the Morgans of Tredegar House in Wales. His tree goes back to 1000CE in Wales. Warren can even see where exactly the Morgan name transitioned from a first name to a family name. Those boxes of papers, although daunting at first, were an amazing treasure trove for Warren, and connected him to being Welsh, having not even known that the name Morgan was Welsh. However, I’m not so sure our children and grandchildren will want boxes of papers. The last things my son wants me to give him are papers and printed photos. In this digital age, we really do need to think seriously about digitalizing all our records, including all those photos. This can be done fairly easily these days by scanning documents and photos into our family trees. No, don’t throw away those photos and precious old documents if you really want to keep them, and for sure hand them down, but don’t expect them to be kept forever. The children and grandchildren will decide for themselves what they want to keep and hand down, but a digital tree will hold everything for years to come.
I give my son and daughter access to our family trees via the ancestry.com app on their phones, for them to get to know the tree, and to be able to look things up themselves (....when WAS Nain born?) but with instructions not to add/ delete etc. Their time will come to be working on it.
Family history books and family newsletters shared with family members can spark interest too. Try an emailed or printed short newsletter, highlighting an ancestor’s story, one per month. Sharing stories connects our younger family members with their past, and hopefully one of them will catch this hobby bug we call genealogy and carry it forward to future generations.