Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

Jingle 0:04
The Genealogy Guy podcast, demystifying technology and exploring family tree research, please remember to subscribe and share the podcast with family and friends.

Genealogy Guy 0:16
In this episode, I'm joined by Ruth Wilmore, who is the events and Education Manager at Society Of Genealogists, or SOG, as it's also known, which aims to help everyone investigate their ancestors, discover their unique family history and connect with fellow genealogists. Ruth is also working on a master's in genealogy, paleography and heraldry. I don't how you find all the time, and that's from Strathclyde University. So welcome Ruth to this episode of armchair genealogy.

Ruth Willmore 0:46
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Genealogy Guy 0:49
Okay, so to start us off, when and how did you get interested in genealogy?

Ruth Willmore 0:54
Well, just before I joined you, I actually went and got out a book to remind myself. When I was 10 years old, I was given a book called trace your family history, and I dutifully, as a 10 year old, filled it in. And looking back at it, I interviewed my grandparents and wrote down some wonderful facts and figures, most of which I now believe are correct, but some of which I'm not quite sure. Where I got them from back then. And so, yeah, from being quite a young child, it has been an interest, sometimes very much on the back burner of my life while I've been doing other things, but other times it has been sort of my main hobby. And then when I was 20, so just about to graduate, my grandmother inherited a mourning ring from her elder sister, which we were told had been passed down from the from mother to daughter to always going to the eldest daughter, and if there weren't any daughters, to the sort of the next youngest sibling. So it stayed, stayed on the female side of the family for generations. And that ring was inscribed. I have it here. It says on it, Anne Dawson of it, 24 February, 1755,

Genealogy Guy 2:11
Wow.

Ruth Willmore 2:12
So we have this beautiful ring. 20 year old me said, Well, that's got to be straightforward. We'll find out who Anne Dawson was, and how that got to us a considerable number of years later, I still don't know who Anne Dawson is. I do know it is clearly not come straight down the female side of our family. I have found a connection to some Dawsons, but not Anne, and one day I'll get there, but I haven't yet. But that's what really got me started.

Genealogy Guy 2:44
That's fantastic. I mean, that's the Holy Grail. Everybody wants something that connects them with their their sort of ancestors. And that's..

Ruth Willmore 2:52
It's wonderful. Yeah, it's still with my mum. One day it will come to me, and it is already in my will that it will go to my eldest niece. So it is in the family line, and we will, it will get handed down, but it would be nice to hand it on with a provenance of who she was and how it came to us, but maybe one day I'll get there,

Genealogy Guy 3:12
I'm sure you will. It's just fine. As always, it's finding the time. And people don't always realise that genealogy is a lifetime adventure. It really is quick fix and put it in a bookshelf and go, Yeah, done that. Move on, because there's always something more you want to know.

Ruth Willmore 3:27
There really is, yeah, absolutely. And even if it's not collecting those names and dates, it's not just about getting back as far as you can, is it? It's learning about those people and who they were and what they did, what their lives were like. That's what really brings it alive to me.

Genealogy Guy 3:45
How did you get from there and end up in your role at the Society of Genealogists?

Ruth Willmore 3:50
Well, that's a story. I was very happily working in the travel industry for a little tiny travel company who created bespoke holidays for rail enthusiasts. So it was a little local travel company, and I loved it. It was exciting, it was interesting. And then in March 2020, that all went wrong, and I was put on furlough. And as covid progressed, I began to wonder whether I was going to have a job to go back to whether or not the company was going to survive, and realised I actually quite liked being at home. I quite liked having that freedom to structure my day as I wanted, and not having to go into an office. And I started to sort of say to family, what can I do? I'm not sure I actually want to go back to the job that I was doing, even if I have a job to go back to. And I think it was my mum said, Well, you've always enjoyed family history. Is there something in that? And then I started spending more and more of my day working on my family history, tidying up what I'd done over the years previously. Then I discovered the talks at the Society of Genealogists, attended a few of those on. Line, which were extremely popular during covid, when we were all looking for those things to do and to interest us. And one of the talks I attended was how to be a professional genealogist. I could do that, that that would be interesting. I signed up for their long skills courses, the 12 week courses at three different levels. I thought I was doing this about right? There was lots I didn't know, but I hadn't made any terrible mistakes in what the way I'd been researching. So that was really reassuring. And then I started on the Pharos intermediate course. I know you've spoken about the Pharos courses in the past, and then, well, where else can I take this? And I signed up for the Strathclyde masters course. Was really enjoying that. Well, the world started to get back to normal, and I went back to work at the travel company, and within a month, I knew this was not what I wanted to be doing anymore. I had got into the genealogy community. I had made friends. I was loving it, and so I left, and I said I was going to set up a genealogy business and take on my own clients. And within a couple of days of handing in my resignation, the then events coordinator at the Society of Genealogists, who I'd got to know through volunteering for the society, said I'm recruiting for an assistant. I'd really like you to apply. That would be January 2022, I started working for the society, and then she left, and I was promoted. That's how I ended up where I am.

Genealogy Guy 6:33
What's a typical day like for you as the events and Education Manager at the society,

Ruth Willmore 6:38
dealing with lots of emails, I'm at home. Yeah, I work from home the majority of the time. I go down to London to our resource hub once every month, every six weeks, to meet up with my colleagues and host some of the in person events that we're organising now it's being in communication with some of the top genealogists who give our talks for us, and pulling together courses, and then helping out people who really want to attend online events, but even now have not yet used zoom, and so helping people with those Technological Skills and all sorts of things. And then also talking to people on the phone who are calling the society to say, I'm trying to find this record. How do I do this? Can you help me? So I have those calls about helping people with their genealogy too.

Genealogy Guy 7:34
That brings me on to what's some of the biggest challenges in putting together an educational program for genealogists today,

Ruth Willmore 7:42
I think a lot of the time, it's finding out what people really want to learn about, and it's remembering that this is not an educational program. This is for the vast majority of people coming to our events. It's a hobby, and we're not there to teach them. We're there to entertain them as part of their hobby, but along the way, helping them develop their skills in genealogy so that they can enjoy their hobby more.

Genealogy Guy 8:07
What do you hope members and visitors gain most from the events you organise?

Ruth Willmore 8:12
I'd like to think that they come along because they want to, that they enjoy both meeting other genealogists. The social side of it, we always open our event the Zoom meeting for our events 15 or so minutes beforehand, so that people can chat. And a lot of people, you see them recognizing friends and chatting about how they got on since the last talk that they then are entertained and educated and go away feeling that they can now go and do some more genealogy, that they've learned something new, that they can go and investigate, that that, to me, is the most important thing, that it's not just hearing what somebody else has done, it's finding out new things they can Go and learn about their own ancestors.

Genealogy Guy 9:01
Are the particular themes or areas of genealogy education that that you feel that underrepresented.

Ruth Willmore 9:08
I like to the really collaborative events where it's not just sitting back listening to a talk coming up this weekend. We've got a day all about agricultural laborers, and the final session of that is a workshop I've just been talking to Janet Few this morning about how that's going to go. And the attendees will be given a farm and tools to research that, and in small groups, they're going to look at tithe maps and the national farm survey and things like Geograph to find pictures of that farm and work together whilst they're online to build up a picture of that farm, and then that gives them the skills to go away and research the farms where their own ancestors worked. I mean, who's not got an ag lab ancestor? (Agr.Lab. is NOT the same as farmer. A farmer actually owned his land and would hire Agr.Lab.s to help him work it.) we've all got them. And on the surface, oh, more ad labs and but they're really not boring. There's so much we can find out about where they were, what they were growing, what animals they were looking after. And...

Genealogy Guy 10:14
You managed to answer the next question, which I was going to ask, what makes a genealogy event successful in your eyes, and I think you've just answered it by saying that getting people to actually work together and and share their experience on and methods and how they absolutely are there any new formats or experimental approaches that you're excited to try out in the coming sort of couple of years?

Ruth Willmore 10:36
Two things, as you probably know, we moved into a new building only about 18 months ago, having not had a real premises for a little while. So we're really starting to encourage people to come in. We've got speakers coming in the first Thursday of the month. We're now aiming we'll be open until 7pm and we're aiming to have a live talk that people can come in, listen to a talk, spend some time researching in the library, and then complimentary drinks reception that you can come along, have a glass of wine and just chat with other genealogists. And very often the speaker will stay around. So that's going to be an exciting community event that just meet up with other genealogists, and we're really excited about that. Also, in the next year or two, we're going to be launching what we're going to call self paced learning, and that's some of the courses, some that we already do, some that are going to be brand new. And rather than attending talks at a specific time. There will be recorded talks. There'll be activities and quizzes that you can do in your own time. So whether you sign up to do the course and you do the whole thing in a weekend and you just sit down and work your way through it, or whether you do a little bit every now and then, over two or three years, you'll sign up for access to the whole thing, and that's another brand new thing we're trying.

Genealogy Guy 12:05
What role do you see SOG playing in digital future of genealogy and particularly genealogical education?

Ruth Willmore 12:13
I'd like to think we reach an audience around the world, because we have so much of our program is online and our talks are online that we reach people all over the world. So we're connecting people, whether they're in California or Australia. So that's one way a lot of our collections are online, and we are increasingly digitising our collections so that people can view them from anywhere. You don't have to come into London. You can see some of our collections online,

Jingle 12:44
Armchair genealogy.com for generations of all ages.

Genealogy Guy 12:50
Let's grab a quick break from our chat with Ruth Wilmore, the events and Education Manager at Society of Genealogists, whilst I give you another one of my Food For Thought Tips. Let's take a quick look at something every family historian needs to think about. File formats, the way you save your work can make all the difference in keeping your family tree safe, shareable and easy to build on. The big one in genealogy is gedcom, G, E, D, C, O, M, that's the universal format for family trees. It lets you move your data between different genealogy software without losing all those births, dates, marriages and relationships you've carefully entered. Then there are PDFs, brilliant for scanned documents, charts or even whole reports. They're easy to view, easy to print, and perfect for sharing with relatives, and can be opened on most browsers for storytelling. Think Word files like Doc X, that's D, O, C, Xor R, T, F. They're great for writing biographies, narratives and detailed research notes with room for both text and images. If you like spreadsheets, then Excel or CSV files are a handy way to keep big lists of names, dates and locations neatly organized and sortable. And don't forget your visuals when it comes to storing images, not all file formats are created equal. Here's some basics, Tiff, or TIFF, known as Tagged Image File Format is the heavyweight champion for archiving. It's lossless, which means it keeps every bit of detail, every shade and every pixel of information that makes it perfect for long term storage and professional use, though, the trade off is bigger file sizes, JPEG or JPEG, on the other hand, is what we call lossy. It compresses the image by throwing away some detail. That's fine for everyday use, but some people steer clear for archiving, because once the quality is gone, you can't get it back. Well, not without some clever software. Then there's PNG, like TIFF. It's lossless, but it's designed more for the web and for graphic design work, not really for high fidelity photo archives. So if you're preserving those precious family photographs, TIFF is the gold standard. JPEG is handy for sharing, and PNG has its place, but not usually in the archive box. Of course, you might also use online platforms like ancestry, MyHeritage or Family Search, which keep everything accessible in one place, though, each has its own quirks. So whichever format you choose, remember this golden rule, always keep backups, ideally in more than one format, and ideally in more than one place that way your family history stays safe, secure and ready to hand down to the next generation. And now back to our chat with Ruth Wilmore, events and Education Manager at society of genealogists.

Genealogy Guy 16:14
How important is collaboration with other genealogical organizations and archives? How important is that to the society.

Ruth Willmore 16:22
I think it's really important. None of us exist in a vacuum. The genealogical community is so important. And this year, we've been working with each month we've focused on one county, and we've had an event which has had the local Family History Society,(www.balh.org.uk/societies-az) or (www.familyhistoryfederation.com/find-a-society) local archives and other local organisations all coming and presenting how they can help family historians. So you might be a member of that family history society, but you might not have visited the local archives and found out what they've got to offer. And for each one, we've also had a vision of Britain through time, (https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/) and they've explained how their wonderful website can really help with that particular county, as well as historic towns trust (https://www.historictownstrust.uk/) and their wonderful historic maps and Victoria County history (www.history.ac.uk/research/victoria-county-history) have also got involved and told us each month how that what they have for each county. So it's really bringing together resources for each county. And those events have been free for everybody, and afterwards, we put them up on YouTube so that they're there for anybody to watch. So when you discover you've got ancestors in one of those counties, you can go back and see and find out all the different resources available, as well as what we've got at the Society of genealogists, of course,

Genealogy Guy 17:46
how do you attract younger or more diverse audiences to the genealogy events

Ruth Willmore 17:52
We find so much that genealogy is a hobby that very often people take up in later life. So many genealogists start say, I wish I'd started this earlier. I could have spoken to my grandparents. I could have spoken to my parents. Oh, yes, and it's so so often, and it's just one of those sad things, but we collaborate with the Family History Federation (https://www.familyhistoryfederation.com/) on a biannual conference which all the speakers are under the age of, I think we've set it at 35 so all the speakers are younger. And, of course, they then tell their friends and they promote it to their younger friends. So that's one way is that we have this biannual Youth Conference, which is a terrible name. Last year we caught last year, we called it next generation, focusing on the gen of genealogy and generation. And that worked really well. The more diverse, it's really difficult.

Genealogy Guy 18:51
Got to try and identify them, and they need to let let you know that they're there and what they're looking for. If they don't tell you, you don't know that they need extra support or more guidance, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so have online events changed the way you think about community engagement.

Ruth Willmore 19:08
I think they've changed the way the society thinks about community engagement. Because I got involved during covid. It was before that, in the old building, in charter house, the society was really quite focused on the building, and the community was those people who came into the building. And, you know, the common room was a, I understand, a really thriving, active place and full of interesting conversations. And that stopped really quite suddenly with covid. And since then, our community has become a global community, that there are plenty of people from around the world who attend the online events and are very much part of the SOG community, who may never come to London. So it's really opened out the organisation.

Genealogy Guy 19:55
And again, you've already answered this one, because I was going to ask, how do you encourage. Networking and connection between genealogists through events and and you've already said it well, you open the events usually earlier so people can catch up with each other, and you encourage collaboration on like workshops. And it sounds a perfect ideal world, really,

Ruth Willmore 20:15
I'd like to think we do pretty well with that thing. We also have a quarterly social that is run by the staff. So the staff present some of the news what's going on in different areas of society. So new things that have come into the library, we talk about some of the new events that are coming up, and then that then we use Zoom for breakout rooms and so that members can chat with each other about anything related to genealogy, about the plans that we have and that kind of thing. And in so those are four times a year. And in between those, we have a group of events volunteers who run what we call our virtual cafe. And that's just an hour with no agenda, no plan, just a group of genealogists who come together just to chat on Zoom for an hour, and we alternate whether they're in the morning or the afternoon, so that people from different parts of the world can come to suit their time zones.

Genealogy Guy 21:14
What would you say is one of the most memorable or inspiring events that you've been involved in.

Ruth Willmore 21:20
It's almost like asking me to choose a child. I think one I'm most excited about is actually one that's not happened yet. It's in a couple of weeks, we're having what we're calling our London Victorian week. And that is a hybrid event, which makes me really quite nervous, and London Transport are not helping, because they have announced a strike during the week that we have this event, but the busses are running, and I've been in touch with the speakers, and we think we can pull it all together. But that's a week we have. I think it's 12 talks, a lot of them delivered by Elsa Churchill, who is our genealogist at the society. She knows our collections inside out, and it's focusing the entire week on Victorian London. And so, how to find your ancestors in Victorian London, how to find out what their lives were like. And then we have other speakers coming in, focusing on all sorts of different things, from crime in Victorian London, disease in Victorian London, some of the housing. And so those talks, all of them, are being delivered live in Wharf Road. And we have a number of people, and there are still a few spaces where you can come in and just spend a week immersing yourself. The library is open. You can come in, listen to the talks, spend the afternoons researching. And we've also organised on three of the afternoons, choices of visits and walks. So we have a walk around the London of Charles Dickens, we have a walk around historic Soho, and then we've got visits to various archives, so you can go on a behind the scenes tour of some of the archives, and they're going to have the specific collections that are relevant to Victorian London out for you to see. But that's also hybrid, so all the talks are available for you to come along to on Zoom, they'll be recorded so that people can catch up afterwards if they can't actually dedicate a whole week to listening to talks. And for those online, we've got some co working sessions so you can come along in the morning. There are some activities follow up from the talks so that people can work together and just chat about what they've learned that week. So I think that's a really exciting event, just to immerse yourself in genealogy for a week. So I'm really looking forward to that.

Genealogy Guy 23:48
Is this one of the first hybrids that you're organizing?

Ruth Willmore 23:51
It is, yes, we've had a couple of speakers come in to present talks. We've also experimented with having a remote speaker, so a zoom event with the speaker presenting remotely too, but showing those on our big screen in Wharf road, so that people can come in and watch as a small group. We're experimenting with lots of different things, but this is the first really proper hybrid event that we're doing

Genealogy Guy 24:20
If I could wave a magic wand and if you could design your dream genealogy event, what would it look like?

Ruth Willmore 24:29
It would have lots of experts around who are willing to give up their time just to chat so that people can sit around they can get on with their research, but they've got people they can go and ask, so you might know that that person's really good on DNA. So if you're sitting there and you can you come and have a look at this with me. Come and look over my shoulder and tell me, tell me what's going on here. And then, knowing that somebody else, you can go and say you're an expert on this area. Can you where do I go for help with this? This particular type of record or this particular geographic area I don't know, almost a lock in at the library. Yeah, have a bar. Have some a buffet meal, so that you can just focus on on genealogy for a while and have people to chat to about it, who are not going to glaze over on now What now, what she discovered. She's going to tell me all about it, whether I like it or not, but people actually want to know.

Genealogy Guy 25:27
So more of a social party.

Ruth Willmore 25:29
Yeah, make it social, make it fun. And

Genealogy Guy 25:33
I quite like the idea of that. I'm just trying to think of the size of the venue, because to have that many people just hanging around, just like milling around with people, and then all the visitors that want to attend, because of all these people are going to be there, it would take a big place,

Ruth Willmore 25:49
And you'd need to have separate areas, because we don't want the tea and the coffee and the wine from the bar anywhere near those precious old resources in the archives. We've got to keep those separate.

Genealogy Guy 26:03
I'm just thinking, off the top of my head, I'm just thinking, it might be quite good to actually ever be able to send somebody out with a roaming camera and actually send them into an archive and have them talk about and have people then say, can you go and look on this shelf and tell me what sort of stuff they have there?

Ruth Willmore 26:19
Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, that would be really fun,

Genealogy Guy 26:23
Absolutely. And the technology is getting better, and it's just interesting that you picked up on the fact that during lockdown, that more people started to use online. And I think for me, that's where a lot of the societies actually sort of flourished, because they suddenly realised we can do this. It's all about the data. We just need to get the data out there absolutely to make the jump. Because it was a huge jump, not just for businesses, but even societies like this.

Ruth Willmore 26:51
It really was, yeah, I mean, so many societies went from being a local organisation to having interaction and sharing their material with people all over the world. And I think that has been such a benefit for genealogy.

Genealogy Guy 27:05
I'd say this to all my guests, but I tend to invite people on that I know will be interesting to talk to, and then I always go just, I just need more time, but we're all busy people. We're trying to do lots of other things. I just hope that you, you manage to carry on balancing all the things that you're trying to do and holding them doing your masters. It's a phenomenal task to be able to, like, sort of multitask on different subjects and involve other people, because other people are the hardest part to organise around anyone's life.

Ruth Willmore 27:37
They certainly can be, but I could not do my job without my fantastic team of events volunteers. I have this wonderful team that are really supportive of me and each other, and they host the majority of our zoom events. They're really good at helping out people who've perhaps not been to a zoom event before, and guiding them through and helping people out when their microphone doesn't work, or they can't hear anything, and yet all those things that crop up on Zoom, they look after the speakers. They don't panic when the speakers vanishes halfway through a talk, or the speakers washing machine floods, or the upstairs washing machine floods halfway through a talk, all of which have actually happened. So they are a fantastic team, and I really couldn't do it without them. So every opportunity I have to thank them, I do.

Genealogy Guy 28:28
Yeah, a big shout out to all the volunteers at all societies, because it's their work in the background that has given us access to all this data and absolutely of events. Well, thank you very much Ruth, it's been a pleasure speaking to you, and I do hope to find the time, as we all do, to try and get along to more of the talks.

Ruth Willmore 28:48
And just lovely to see you.

Genealogy Guy 28:50
So at some point you might see my face appear on the screen and sort of waving in the background, and I will let you know if I manage to get in there so you can look out for me.

Ruth Willmore 29:00
Please do it'll be lovely to see you, and thank you for having me. It's been great fun.

Mell T 29:05
And again, my thanks to Ruth Wilmore, events and Education Manager at Society of Genealogists, or SOG, as it's also called in the genealogy world. Until the next episode, happy and productive research.

Jingle 29:20
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai