Who Do You Think You Are Magazine: May 2022

Perhaps your attention is immediately grabbed by MAPS on this magazine cover.
When I opened the cover and read in Editor Sarah Williams column that there was an article on weather and our ancestors all other priorities for a couple of hours went out the window.

The article, by Norfolk genealogist, writer and educator, Gill Blanchard is a comprehensive look at a myriad of types. There’s a panel with six essential maps for family historians, another on using the National Library of Scotland online map collection, and yet another on 10 useful map websites. Included is Faden’s Map of Norfolk, new to me, London Picture Archive, and Map History.

Ruth Symes article “Hurricanes and Heatwaves” is an overview of “how you can find out how the weather affected your ancestor’s lives.” Much of the article deals with efforts to digitize weather information from various historical sources. Missing is an explanation of how to get weather information for an event in your family history in the past 150 years or so from official records at the British Meteorological Office. A panel on how to do that, much as in the maps article for the National Library of Scotland maps collection, would have made the article more valuable.

There are lots more: street photos, First World War pension cards, Lost Cousins, postal workers, Rosemary Collins has an article on the pubs of coastal Lincolnshire refering to a project website www.letstalk.lincolnshire.gov.uk/inns-on-the-edge

As always, the issue is available through the PressReader subscription of many Canadian public libraries.