Enhancing Your Family History

 I recently attended (virtually, of course) the Ohio Genealogical Society's annual conference. There were several presentations on how to use online resources, such as JSTOR (JournalStorage),  HathiTrust Digital Library, and Internet Archive. The sites are dedicated to digitizing millions and millions of pages of research publications from around the world. Although not dedicated to genealogy, these websites can provide the family historian with some interesting insights into the lives of the ancestors.

For example, if you found that one or several people in your family died during one of the three cholera epidemics that hit the U.S. between 1832-1866, you might want to know something about the progression and treatment of communicable disease in the first half of the 19th century. Believe me. SOMEONE has researched that meticulously and written about it! 

The presentations got me interested in exploring online sites for local or specialized histories. I found a virtual museum dedicated to the work and lives of Nottinghamshire framework knitters (Framework Knitters Museum), a site providing historic photos and maps of the city of Philadelphia, (Philly History), and one online site that's really close to home--Ohio Memory

Ohio Memory is a collaborative program of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio. You can browse by contributor, place, subject or time periods. I browsed the places category using "Muskingum County" and "Zanesville", but I could have browsed by any number of place names, including names of institutions or cemeteries. You can browse by different formats so you can narrow the results to pictures or maps, but I just was interested in general results. There are brochures and programs, letters from individuals, newspaper clippings. You can save or download an item, although there are restrictions on how you can use it. Each item includes a description, and where the original is located. Letters and print materials have been transcribed, and the transcription is available as a pdf file.

If you're looking for ways to enhance your family history so that it's more interesting to those people in the family you're trying to "hook", start surfing some of the many sites that offer digitized materials, or that take you on virtual tours. Photographs are especially eye-and interest-catching, so incorporate them whenever possible. Flickr is a great site to find photos of areas your family came from, no matter how obscure. I once did a family history for a friend whose grandparents came from a tiny, tiny village, Celle di San Vito, in Italy. Someone has photographed the village extensively, and posted the photos at Flickr. Many people who upload photos to Flickr allow them to be downloaded for personal use, and I was able to illustrate my friend's family history with some beautiful photos. She cried. So look for and include lots of illustrations in your family history. If you can bring tears to some family member's eyes--you'll have hooked them on genealogy.

Photo of the church at Celle di San Vito downloaded from Flickr