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Wednesday, April 9, 2008

The Internet IS my mind

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogy

[Originally posted on Familiar Strangers blog]

I think a lot about McLuhan’s claim that media are extensions of ourselves. Here is my latest insight: hypertextuality is extension of our essentially non-linear thinking patterns. Linear text in type can only go so far. Genealogy is a good example. A genealogical narrative is by no means linear. First, you have two parents, and they have two parents etc. OK, maybe that is still linear in a way. But then you add in elements of place, relationship to historical events, interfamilial marriages, non-familial connections, the connection of two people to one document… You get my point.

I also think a lot about how happy I am to live in the age of the internet. This makes me truly geeky, right. No, seriously, I am happy to live in age where every day someone thinks of a new tool to put on the internet to help me extend or reflect my mind. And just to prove my point, here is my latest find: www.mind42.com. I have mapped out my project with this tool and it was shockingly refreshing to be freed from a Microsoft Word outline template. You can see a bigger version of this here.

Click here to see a larger version of the map.

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogyTags: , ,

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Sunday, April 6, 2008

Traces we leave behind

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogy, Ormsby Family

[Originally published on Familiar Strangers blog]

Surprising, I can find a meditative place while endlessly searching Google and databases for the names of my ancestors. And in this place, I have thought a lot about the traces that we leave behind from our lives. The traces aren’t what you would expect and they aren’t something that we necessarily have control over, at least something that the normal mortals among us have control over.

Often, our families carve a stone in our honour when we are gone. But the stones get worn and eventually become illegible. Below is the stone of the infant son of Richard Metcalf who was born and died on the same day in 1885. Soon the carving on the stone will be gone and the one concrete trace of this little life will be erased.


Baby Metcalf’s headstone

(I should mention that getting to rest in your final place for eternity is a luxury afforded to North Americans. In Germany, for instance, you rent your grave for 50 years and after that your bones are disenterred and someone else gets your plot.)

Baby Metcalf didn’t encounter the other most likely place to leave a trace behind: in the thousands of vital statistics documents generated by the Canadian bureaucracy. As we became better at regulating ourselves and our lives we also became better at leaving traces behind. These traces are finding new life as records are digitized, indexed and made available on the web.

No such luck for Baby Metcalf though. He may have been too young to warrant bureaucratic attention or his parents simply didn’t feel that involvement of officials was necessary. I think that at that time the wilderness was still a stronger force in Canada than the bureaucracy.


Birth record for Baby Metcalf’s cousin

Baby Metcalf has a new chance, however, to leave a lasting trace on this world. Genealogy societies in Ontario have been busy transcribing cemeteries for years. Now these genealogists are photographing the headstones and posting the photos online. They are also creating elaborate family trees (hypertextuality reaches it full potential in a genealogist’s hands) and posting them online for other to find and copy. A photo of Baby Metcalf’s headstone, the small (and deteriorating) trace of his life, has been added to the collection of information readily findable with the help of a search engine. It will be copied and reproduced and recirculated. Baby Metcalf now even has a wiki web page all to his own. Baby Metcalf, it seems, got lucky and has been recorded and remembered.

I have to admit that I find this comforting. Why I don’t know. Mid-life, motherhood, natural inclination? Whatever it is, I take comfort in the fact that he somehow made it onto the list of things worth digitizing.

Incidentally, Baby Metcalf’s parents had no other children. However, they did raise two of Baby Metcalf’s cousins whose mother had died at the age of 34 after giving birth to her tenth child. (See the record of his birth below. His brother was required to formally claim witness to the dual events of his mother’s death and brother’s birth. “I have a distinct recollection of these facts,” he claims).

It’s hard not to appreciate both the powers of nature and the bureaucracy, isn’t it.

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogy, Ormsby FamilyTags: ,

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Friday, April 4, 2008

More on the Oro Ormsbys

Posted in Ormsby Family

I’m working away at the Ormsby tree, mostly because I have pretty much exhausted all of my usual channels of research and it is time to wrap some things up.

I am, of course, playing with some of the new tools on the internet. (Sigh of love…)

You might want to check out the Ormsby tree I created on this www.werelate.org wiki. I have been looking for a place to put all of my research and I think that I have decided on werelate.org. Here’s the entry for James Ormsby.

I have also been working on Google maps (now the potential there is wild). Here is my Ormsby Family map, showing their farm and the route they travelled to arrive there:


View Larger Map

Posted in Ormsby FamilyTags: ,

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Sticking to the familiar?

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogy

[Originally posted on Familiar Strangers blog]


In this blog, I hope to keep a record/journal of my research for my final project for the Masters of Communication and Technology program at the University of Alberta.

At this point in time, my ideas for this project remain somewhat vague and mushy, but I know that I would like to look at the some of following areas:
- internet genealogy
- family and local history keeping on the internet
- the effects of technology on our ideas of relateness and place
- qualitative methodologies, including radical ones like self-questioning
- ideas of narrative
- orality and literacy and the internet

Too big an area? Ya, I know, but over the next few months, I should be able to whittle this down satisfactorily, I hope.

Of course, the subject of my project is not completely unfamiliar to me (thanks Olga for reminding me of this pun). While I was on maternity leave last year, I discovered how the world of genealogy had been changed by the internet. My grandmother died last March and in her honour I wanted to create a photo album of family photos. I was missing some vital dates for some of her ancestors, however. What started with typing names into Google has ended in a quite serious pursuit of family and local history. The photo album never got finished, but in its place I have been working hard at recording our family history online. I think my grandmother (and the potential recipients of the photo album) would understand.

I don’t think that it was an accident that I became so interested in family history shortly after I started my own family. The standard plotlines in genealogical research (birth, death, marriage) are real, oh-so-real, to me now. Who can understand, for instance, the tragedy of lost children better than a new mother? Navel-gazer that I am, I started to think seriously about how we record our lives, who records our lives (mostly the bureaucracy), and how we can remember those gone before us. The internet, our tool of the future, is, it turns out, quite a good place to record the past. I can use blogs to tell my family about my research. I can use Google maps to map out the original homestead of a family member. I can look at the digital collections at Libraries and Archives Canada and find out that my great-grandfather almost died of enteric fever during the Boer War. This list is endless and this flurry of information, historical minutae, is all made possible thanks to our friend, the internet. How can this not help but change how we understand ourselves and our place in the world?

When I returned to work in September, I suddenly had much less time to pursue my twin hobbies of genealogy and internet exploration. When I started the MACT program, I vowed to write a final that would be immensely USEFUL. (There’s some history here). But faced with the possibility of getting to spend more time playing in the internet sandbox, doing more genealogy, and THINKING about it all at a completely theoretical level was impossible to resist.

Posted in MACT Program, On genealogyTags: ,

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Friday, February 8, 2008

The Ormsby Family of Oro Township

Posted in Ormsby Family

One of the projects I got involved in as I started my genealogical adventures was looking at the family of my grandmother’s sister/cousin, Pat. Pat’s parents died of TB when Pat was young and she was raised by my great-grandparent who were also her uncle and aunt. Confusing, huh. Pat didn’t know much about her mother’s side of the family and when I started this and found some documents, I asked Pat’s daughter if they would be interested in learning more. They were… And away I went.

Thus began my involvement in the researching the Ormsby family of Oro Township, Ontario.

Ormsby Family of Oro

(Click on photo to go to album).

Pat is a descendant of James Ormsby (1783-1873), an Irishman who settled in Oro Township, Simcoe County, Ontario. James was a soldier in the British Army and in 1830 in lieu of his pension, he took land in Canada. While James and his family succeeded in the Canadian wilderness, many of the soldiers who made the same deal did not.

James and his wife Elizabeth had two sons who survived: George Billings and James Jr. These two sons married two sisters: Jane and Eleanor Reid. And this is where things start to get complicated.

Genealogy is a very humbling adventure because you start to realize how easy it is to make mistakes. I’m sure that I have made many that have yet to be discovered. In any case, one of the things that I discovered in looking at the Ormsby family is that Pat’s branch of the tree had disappeared over time for many of those doing research on this family.

Pat is a descendent of Maud McKenzie (1870-1953) and William Ormsby (1862-1906), son of James Jr. However, most of the Ormsby trees online (there are many) overlooked this branch or get it wrong.

But there was some good reasons why this mistake got made:

1) Maud McKenzie and William Ormsby’s marriage certificate has a big mistake on it and lists James Ormsby as the groom. I have plenty of proof that she actually married William (birth certificates of their children, obits, local history documents, etc.). I can only assume that the marriage certificate is incorrect. But I had the advantage of going backwards through the documents. Other researchers have married Maud to:

  • William’s older brother named James. Not too sure what happened to him.
  • Alfred James Ormsby. In other trees online, Maud is often also linked to Alfred James Ormsby who is actually the son of George and Jane Ormsby. He died in 1893.
  • Arthur William Ormsby. Maud’s William is also sometimes mistaken for George and Jane’s son Arthur William who was born in 1869 and moved to Edmonton, Alberta. I checked Arthur William’s marriage certificate at the Alberta archives and confirmed that he is George and Jane’s son.

2) The fact that the Ormsby brothers married the Reid sisters and the families lived side-by-side seemed to cause lots of confusion not only for genealogists but also for the families themselves. One of the most thorough histories of Oro Township (Kith n’Kin) lists many of the Ormsby children as having the wrong parents. It was hard to keep track of all of those children!

It didn’t help that both families had a son named Robert (James and Eleanor’s son Robert survived; George and Jane’s didn’t).

3) No one from Pat’s branch of the family was doing any genealogical research. William and Maud McKenzie’s family has a tragic history. William died young of cancer in 1906, and the town of Severn Bridge where they lived burnt down that same year. Two daughters died of TB (Evelyn and Norma) and a third of myocarditis (Wilma) by 1922. Another daughter married because she was pregnant (Olive Ormsby Williams) and their son Osborne joined the Canadian army in 1917 at the age of 13 (he lied on his application form). His lie was discovered in time and he never saw the war, but I think that it is another piece of evidence that the family was undergoing some turbulent times. Their eldest daughter Edrie’s only child, John Stewart, died in WW2 in Europe.

I have not had any luck tracing other descendants of William and Maud Ormsby, and I am slowly coming to the conclusion that I might not find any of them. My last hope is to find descendants of Olive Ormsby Williams or Osborne Ormsby aka Fred. (If you think you are related, please let me know at twigg3d@gmail.com!)

These are the children of William and Maud:

My entire Ormsby tree is here if you are interested: http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=ormsby-mckenzie.

Posted in Ormsby FamilyTags: ,

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