Folio Friday

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So I've come up with a new meme for Fridays.  The idea is to write more reviews of family history or genealogy books on a regular basis.  But we can expand that idea to include not just books, but articles in journals or magazines that we have found inspiring or interesting.  They might be articles on how to do something or developments in technology or sources that we hadn't considered or are largely ignored.

It would be great if you could participate too.  If you do, don't forget to comment on this blog post so we can all find out about great reads and tag your posts with #FolioFriday.  Feel free to use the image above too.  I found it on Pixababy.  

It doesn't matter if the book you choose is a novel or fiction.  Often fiction can give us a brilliant insight into what our ancestors' lives might have been like.

I have a great big TBR (To Be Read) stack beside my bed at the moment.  Hopefully, I will have finished one of them for next week.  

In the meantime, you will have to make do with some recommendations which I found in July's issue of Family Tree magazine as suggested by Kim Cook.  Kim recommends reading factual books like diaries, reports and commentaries to get a sense of your ancestor's historical background.  It will be interesting to see how many I can obtain from my local library or online through something like.....

Here are some titles that Kim recommended: (I have linked to Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive where I could find them)

Rural Rides by William Cobbett - Period 1821-1826 Area - southern England

The Storm by Daniel Defoe - Period 1703 - England, Wales

The Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn - mid-17th century - England and Europe

Two Victorian Girls and Two Victorian Ladies and Vanished West Wickham by Joyce Walker - 1842-1901 - West Wickham, Kent

Leaves from the Diary of Samuel Pepys -1660-1669 - London (or you can just go to this website and read the diary entry on the day if you know what I mean...

Km recommends checking out the following link to explore many historical diaries online.  Given my obsession with memoirs this year, this could be fatal :)

Of course,Kim's recommendations have a very UK focus.  



This is what is in the TBR stack beside my bed:

The Convict Valley by Mark Dunn

Cavan Station by Nicola Crichton-Brown and

The Lost Family by Libby Copeland and

Meet me at Lennons by Melanie Myers - fiction set in WW2 Brisbane and contemporary Brisbane.

What's on your reading list?  Want to join me next Friday with a review? Let me know how you go won't you?

Comments

Janelle Collins said…
Love this idea!
I've just finished Kate Grenville's new memoir of Elizabeth Macarthur called A Room Made of Leaves. She made a lot of it up, but it was still a brilliant insight into her life and putting up with her narcissistic husband.
I can highly recommend The Good People by Hannah Kent. It's a fictional account of a poor family in rural Ireland in the early 1800s. It shows how much their lives were ruled by superstition. I found it fascinating because my Irish ancestors would've likely been exactly the same. There's not much else out there to tell us about the lives of this demographic of Irish society.
I've recently read Esther by Jessica North, which is all about convict Esther Abrahams. I was hoping for a mention of my convict, Esther Spencer, but there was none. I figured they were the only 2 Esthers in the colony at the time, both Jewish. Surely they would've known each other. So while my ancestor wasn't mentioned, it was great to read about the life of one of her contemporaries in the same location.
August 22, 2020 at 9:32 AM
Alex Daw said…
Oh Janelle. Thank you for replying. See! We've got a Family History bookclub happening already :) And now I have more books to add to my "Want to Read" list on Goodreads :) Good to hear about the new Kate Grenville book. Let's see if we can make this meme a happening thing :)
August 22, 2020 at 10:32 AM
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