Doing It For Ourselves

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October Is Family History Month

Please share some of your stories here. Send us a sentence or paragraph and pictures: m.strickland@skcgs.org


SeattleBGRG.org

Telling Our Stories

I heard a wonderful radio show this morning about story telling, which followed a great Black Genealogy Research Group of Seattle (BGRG) meeting yesterday about telling our stories. The focus of both the radio show and the BGRG meeting was not just telling our stories aloud, but in getting them OUT -- to our families, to our friends, to legislators or whoever needs to hear and remember them. The radio show is available for listening here: Three comedians share their thoughts... (31 minutes), ...discover the power of sadness (22 minutes), both highly recommended. 

In genealogy we tell stories about all sorts of things - some technical, such as how to use various record types or sets, how to locate repositories and find what we need, and most important, who our ancestors were and what they did and even stories of our own childhoods. 

Sharing Our Experience

There is a real need for us to share our expertise, and not just leave that to the professionals and nationally-known lecturers and writers. After all, each of us has our own experience with various court houses, museums, archives, online databases, interviews with relatives, mining our own archives (the back bedroom, file cabinet, or attic) and the treasures we extracted from them. 

As MaryLynn wrote about in last week's blog, we in SKCGS need you to share your experience and expertise, and genealogy societies around the state need you too! The Washington State Genealogical Society is trying to expand our Speaker's Bureau beyond those speaking for a fee, to also include those willing to speak to local genealogy societies with no budget to pay. Not only will you make friends around the state this way, you will sharpen your presentation and speaking skills as well! Click over to the Speakers Bureau at https://www.wasgs.org/cpage.php?pt=10 and submit the form with your details. 

We would gladly start up our partnership with the Burien KCLS again, offering monthly genealogy education, if we had enough scheduled speakers. Beginner topics are especially welcome, including getting started with DNA, but also using newspapers in your research, how to use map sites, learning to find land ownership records, working with military records, finding your homesteader ancestors, how to research on a budget, and so many more. 

Writing Stories

If you are not comfortable giving a talk with slides, how about telling stories? We have a new writing group, called Family History Writing. Join at https://skcgs.groups.io/g/Family-History-Writing. No meetings are planned as yet; right now we'll be sharing our story ideas and drafts as we encourage and help one another to get started and keep going! Coincidentally, some of the stories we develop might be perfect blogs! 

Recording Stories

Once these stories are written, you might decide to record yourself telling the story. Did you know that you can record yourself by starting up a Zoom "meeting" and clicking record? You can save the recording to your own computer and critique yourself until you have a version with which you are comfortable, and then send it to your family, put it on Facebook or Youtube, or whatever you like. There are other free recording platforms as well, but most of us have a free Zoom account these days and the software already installed. 

Let's Do It!

Many of us plan to write a history of our family, but have been gathering more records rather than writing. That's understandable; researching is fun, and sometimes even addictive. However, until we write we haven't truly finished, because passing along these stories is what our research is all about. We'll all be getting into the habit of writing as we research, rather than waiting until we're "done" -- because research is never done. There are new records being discovered, indexed and published almost constantly. If you don't believe me, watch the number on this page for a minute: https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/. 

So let's share what we know, NOW! There are so many ways to contribute, even for a beginner. Let's do it! Again, send blog thoughts and images to m.strickland@skcgs.org


[Note: the title was inspired by one of my favorite songs of all time, "Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves" by Annie Lennox. To hear her sing it with Aretha Franklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drGx7JkFSp4&ab_channel=EurythmicsVEVO. 

Listen for inspiration!]






Valorie Zimmerman

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