#52ancestors Week 5: At the Library

The prompt for Week 5 of #52ancestors is at the library. There are so many ways this can be interpreted, and as a lifelong lover of books and reading there have been so many libraries in my life especially as I have a habit of visiting a library whenever I go somewhere just to see what it’s like.

But, I decided that I would write about the library that first took me as a young person seriously when it came to family history research. I started dabbling in family history research when I was bout 17, when my mother and I set out to find out more about her fist ancestor to arrive in Australia and whether the stories she had been told by her grandmother were true or not. Well, we found out plenty and managed to prove that my great grandmothers stories were fiction in order to cover up the convict in the family. That first little piece of research was enough to have me hooked and I wanted to find out more about the rest of my family, which nobody had any clue about.

But my research really took off after I started my first job as a Junior Shelver at the local library. Not long after I started, a new Local History and Reference Librarian started working there and she soon discovered that I knew a great deal about the local history of the area having grown up there and having an interest in history. She frequently picked my brain on things to do with local history and when she discovered that I also had an interest in family history she was a great sounding board as I shared my findings with her. She and I, along with two other ladies both old enough to be my mother, soon formed a companionable group of family history enthusiasts at work.

For me as a young person, it was great to be not just included in discussions and decisions about the family and local history section of the library but to be taken seriously. Many fellow employees closer to my own age didn’t take me seriously and scoffed at my findings or didn’t understand why I found researching my family so fascinating. So for me, that library in which I worked became a place where I was encouraged in my family history research and felt free to share my discoveries with others. It also gave me the opportunity to develop skills in not just researching my own family history but helping others with their research. These skills have stood me in good stead recently as I have returned to libraries after a 5 year break, and enabling me to assist people coming into the library to do family history research.