Storytelling as Aural History

In the early 1990s, we saw the beginnings of the widely available internet. Dial up only, super slow, very expensive.

At one point I read an article in, I recall, Time Magazine, about the explosion of use of the internet by people, often older generations, seeking to research their genealogy using the new resources available.

In the article, I read that Scotland was one of the world leaders in making such registers of births, marriages and deaths open to the public via the internet.

The General Registry of Scotland had partnered with a business called Scotland Online, and they’d even already set up online payments along with this public / private joint partnership. World leading indeed!

My family is largely from Scotland, so my natural curiousity had me, sitting in the Cayman Islands, go online and pay and search records and research my father’s side of the family (reasonably easy, as our surname is not that common), and within literally minutes I could track this back to the 1700s!

I then went online to some bulletin boards (some may remember those!) and found a member of the family from the tree about three generations ago. They had also been researching my great-grandfather and had a fascinating story to tell around his funeral.