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 Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Fluffing Out My Family Tree With Social History
Posted by Diane
Compared to the sprawling family tree on my mom's side, my dad’s paternal side looks like the
Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It goes back only to my
great-grandparents, and has my grandfather and his siblings, and my
dad and his sisters.
I haven’t found any siblings of my great-grandparents, and I’m
not ready to tackle genealogy in the old country, Syria.
I’ve accepted that my paternal tree is going to stay short for the time being. So what I’m focused on now is fluffing out and decorating
this Charlie Brown tree with social history details that
tell me what my relatives’ lives were like.
Here’s one find: I learned from a city directory that in 1924, after
he’d graduated from high school, my
grandfather was a helper at the Collin
Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas.
From Google searching, I learned that the bakery is still in business and
pretty well-known.
I Googled the bakery name and history, and found a catalog
entry from the Baylor University Institute for Oral History, describing a 1971 interview with owners of the
bakery. A transcript was available. I found a Contact link and
asked about the best way to get a copy on
paper or digitally. Within two days, I had an email with a link to
download a PDF.
Two of the men interviewed had started working at the bakery as
young men, around the time my grandfather did, and they chatted with the interviewer about their work. Here’s a description of wrapping the
bread:
The bakery also made fruitcake, which it's now famous for:
I'm not sure Grandpa was around for fruitcake season, since another 1924
city directory for Austin says he was a student at the University
of Texas.
From this and
other records, I know he attended the engineering school then and
again in the 1930s. Searching online
for the history of the school, I turned up a booklet titled:
A history of the department. It looks to be a draft, because it
contains editors' notes. Besides information on the school,
professors and student life, it gives the curriculum my grandfather
likely followed:
Social history is everything that was going on around your ancestor. It could be an acute local event—the county fair,
a new business opening up or a natural disaster—that directly
affected family members. It could be a long-term occurrence, such as a
population migration or war. Or it could be a contemporary issue they shook their heads over.
I'm starting
close to home with my grandfather's school and work, but there's a
lot to explore. These free FamilyTreeMagazine.com articles will help in your
social history search:
Check
out all FamilyTreeMagazine.com's social history articles (both
free and Plus) here.
A fun approach to discovering social history (and reminiscing with Mom and Dad) is our book Remember
That? A Year-by-Year Chronicle of Fun Facts, Headlines, & Your
Memories, which lists
news and facts on politics, fads, sports, music, movies, inventions
and more from 1930 to 2010.
You'll also find places to start in our
ShopFamilyTree.com downloadable
Resource Roundup of social history websites.
Also don't miss the History Matters column in every issue of Family Tree Magazine.
Do you have a favorite social history tip or resource? Click Comments below to share it.
Libraries and Archives | Oral History | Research Tips | Social History
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 2:51:56 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) 
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