Gaining access to archival documents can prove to be challenging to someone who does not have extensive knowledge of where to look as well as resources available to them. This might cause people to be discouraged from seeking out information they wish to further explore. I know the conversation of my family’s history has come up often over christmas dinners and I think to some degree, everyone is a little curious when it comes to where they are from.  TLC’s show “Who Do You Think You Are” is a perfect example of this, it follows around celebrities as they essentially go around the globe tracking down their ancestors. Alas, not everyone has the money to take off on a plane to go visit their great grandmothers local city hall, or the time to search through extensive records to find who their second cousin married.

This got me curious as to what would be the easiest form of archival documents available to the general public. Thats when I stumbled on ancestry.com. Anyone with a computer and WIFI can sign up for a free trial period and if they like the service they can pay $9.99 a year for personalized archival information. Upon further research there are other cites like findmypast.com that boast themselves as a free service. I decided to put both of them to the test. A couple of email blasts later, I was signed up. I found the findmypast.com was not nearly as helpful as ansestry.com, which would explain the cost. For starters, findmypast.com was much harder to navigate and the documents that were available were not as good compared to the ones that ancestry.com offered.

I then went through the UBC library commons to see if any scholars had done work on this archival resource. To my surprise, there were quite a few articles. One article was highlighting the work ancestry.com was doing transcribing slave records which highlighted the fact that “The company has launched the World Archives Project to expand its current database of 7 billion historical records (Anonymous, 14).” That amount of information readily available to the public is mind boggling, even more so when you take into consideration that fact that the website personalizes all this information to a specific person and shows a person things that they would find relevant. A little more digging revealed that even things like Botanical History was being documented through Ancestry.com. The website appears to be particularly helpful in linking the history of how plants got their name, “Ancestry.com™ provides a virtual interface into centralized, archived records previously of limited availability (Branch, 245).” The article further goes on to talk about ancestry.com providing a rich background for students to study on famous botanist (Branch, 245).

Today my ASTU class got the privilege of being able to look at the rare archives of important figures to British Columbia and it was an amazing experience. There really isn’t a way to describe the feeling of looking through someones everyday effects- notes they scribbled to themselves, poems they decided to write one day or a picture they kept. You have an understanding of the person that you wouldn’t have if you just read a book. While I realize that online services cant offer that kind of detail and quality of archives, it is at least a start for anyone who wants to find out more about people in this world.

Citations:

Anonymous. “Ancestry.Com Transcribes Slave Records.” Information Management 43.4 (2009): 14. ProQuest. Web. 22 Jan. 2016 .

Branch, Anthony R. “Exploring Botanical History Using Ancestry.com™” Harvard Papers in Botany (2008) 13.2: 245-251. Bio one. Web. Jan 22. 2016