This Time Last Year (Cecilia Peartree)

 It's almost exactly a year since I published an account of my family history - under my real name, of course. It would seem quite odd to write something like that under my pen-name, although now that I come to think of it, a fictitious family history might be more interesting! After doing research on and off for years, I had been meaning to write it up for some time, and it turned out that the best time to do it was just when there was lots of other stuff going on in my life as well as in my writing. Actually I found it oddly relaxing to write non-fiction for a change, though there was a narrative thread running through this book as it was really the story of how I did the research, and I told it in the order the research happened, i.e. back to front in terms of chronology.

I published it on Amazon, both electronically and in print, not to sell it to others particularly but to let the rest of the family, and some fairly distant relatives I've met in the course of my research, know how far I'd got with it. Because of this I put it into Kindle Unlimited and made it free just before posting a message on Facebook to my cousins near and far. I also bought a couple of printed copies for the immediate family, at least one of whom has read it. The print version includes some photographs and diagrams that aren't in the ebook.

Needless to say, almost as soon as I had published the account, I did a little more research which I wanted to add to the original version. There is nobody famous in my family tree, but some time last year I was contacted by a project team from an organisation called Protests and Suffragettes who were gathering information on Scottish suffragettes in order to create an education pack for schools. My grandmother's sister was one of the women they were interested in. I had already done some research on her and her life, but I had another look at online newspapers soon after they got in touch, and I discovered more information. Incidentally, the materials produced by the project team are now going out to Scottish schools, including a pack of special cards depicting various Scottish suffragettes and labelled as 'A Card Game for Change-makers'. The game is based on 'Top Trumps' and each suffragette card shows different scores for various attributes, e.g. distance travelled in the cause. Here's my great-aunt's card on top of the pack.

My great-aunt had been involved in a Women's Freedom League demonstration at the Houses of Parliament in 1908 which was quite widely reported in the national press, but she hadn't been mentioned by name in most of the reports, so I didn't know exactly what she had done - some of the group had got access to the House of Commons and disrupted a debate, while others had ambushed MPs in a corridor - presumably without cake in this case! - and others had climbed up on a statue outside and started to make speeches to a crowd that gathered there. At last, after ploughing through quite a number of articles about the demonstration, I found a double-page spread in the Daily Mirror of the time which reported it in detail, and I found that my great-aunt was named as having climbed up on to the statue and declaimed to the crowd. It didn't mention what she had actually said, though! This brought her to life a little more, and in fact many of the women on that side of the family were quite athletic and I could well imagine my mother doing something like that. More recently I found this great-aunt in the papers again after World War One, this time telling off the First Lord of the Admiralty about increased rents in the Admiralty housing at Rosyth naval dockyard, where her husband worked.

While looking at old newspapers online, I've found that even in the 19th and particularly in the early 20th century you didn't have to be famous or to do anything very exciting to get into the news.  For quite a long time the only things I knew about one of my grandfathers were that he worked in a bank and died in Inverness at a fairly young age, well before I was born, but thanks to the people who have indexed and digitised old newspapers and put them online, I now know the names of all the bank branches where he worked, and that he played centre-half for an amateur football team in his spare time.

After wondering how to go about updating the contents of the book and letting people know about the changes, I've decided on a kind of two-pronged approach. I will update the ebook and print book on Amazon and arrange another set of free days - I am not sure whether people who have already downloaded it will be able to download it again, which is something I still need to establish. But as well as that, in case people don't want to plough through it again looking out for changes (!) I''m working on a post for one of my own blogs specifically about the updates, and at the same time as alerting the family to the free days again, I'll refer them to the blog post. I think that should be enough (but comments welcome!). It seems to me that this need to publish updates is almost bound to happen with any publication that uses material from an ongoing research project. As family history is never complete, there will always have to be a strategy for changing it.