Thank you Linda Teather, David Shaw, Kathy Stone, MLKR, Giggym 🚫👑, Jim the Historian, Linda Stufflebean, Marian Beaman and several more who swam by before I had my head on straight, thank you so much for joining us this Spring (or Fall) day. I know it’s a busy one for those who celebrate Christian holidays and cherish time with family. I appreciate you spending a little of that time with us.
Your thoughts, comments, and encouragement are the glue that holds this community together. Your added ❤️s help ensure others can see this conversation, too. Thank you. Did I miss you? Add your thoughts in the comments below.
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Exploring Ideas / Cooking Up Projects
Today was a rare hole in my event calendar created by the combination of longer months and changing schedules. I knew I wanted to use this time to explore an idea, but I only called in Jennifer Jones of Tracking Down the Family at the last minute. Many thanks, once again, to our brave time-turner for stepping up to join me from 4 am tomorrow in Australia.
The idea for today’s episode was to explore a new idea I’ve been mulling over for a series to follow Stories250. This comes to mind as I start working on the commemorative magazine I’ve promised to participants.
* More about the series, the magazine, and the 30-June deadline here:
The effort has me thinking about how we got here, what worked well, and where I might go from here. My goals for Projectkin center squarely on encouraging more people to get their stories told. Stories250 worked in part by celebrating the unexpected connections between our stories.
As one story crests, it leads to another. It’s the heartbeat of our community.
That led me to think back on the stories we’ve collected about our family history in our own blogs, websites, and publications. So many of them relate to migration stories. Why our family got here, was sent here, or left that terrible famine. These are stories intertwined with place and resilience. We’re already telling them, let’s share them to inspire each other.
Unlike Stories250, this series will be a bit more complicated from a theme perspective, so I’m going to be sorting through the details over the next few weeks. I’ve been thinking about articulating categories, then inviting writers to submit their own posts (on any accessible platform) to be pulled together into the themes and with each in a
* A web page (as I did with Stories250, though I have some new “open CMS” tricks)
* Perhaps contributing to a timeline (though this may focus on moments instead of posts, as I did with the Stories250-timeline)
* Perhaps a magazine of posts, perhaps quarterly or after we have a certain number of posts on a topic.
As for themes, gosh, you can think of them quickly. In the call today, we touched briefly on a few that were opportunistic and others that were forced. I’d love to hear your examples in the comments below.
A few from the chat and my own notes include:
* Earl Grey Girls (my initial connection to Jennifer came from her 2024 post about her 2nd great-grandmother, Ellen Boyle, an Irish “Earl Gray Girl” sent to Australia in 1848.
* English convicts were sent to Australia as punishment for crimes.
* British Home Children sent to Canada
All of this combines with the great migrations we think of here in the US, including:
* Puritans who left England, Quakers who left New England
* Migrations of African Americans from the Jim Crow South for job opportunities in the North and West.
* Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese farm workers who were recruited to work sugar and pineapple fields of Hawaii.
There’s no shortage of examples, I think the challenge here will be finding ways to thematically pull them together to inspire each other. For that, I hope to have a plan together to launch by September. I welcome your thoughts in comments here or in DMs.
This idea will intertwine nicely with our plans for the 2026 All About That Place series coming in October in partnership with the Society for One-Place Studies, the UK-based Society of Genealogists, and the British Association for Local History.
Along the way, please let me know which Member Stories we’ve used as vehicles, what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what you’d like to see more of.
One slight twist we added at the end was a discussion of storytelling forms: from written and recorded posts to visual storytelling in scrapbooks and junk journals.
We’ll certainly be talking more about that in the coming months. Know that I’m always open to new ideas and approaches.
As Projectkin, we’re here to help families tell their stories in any form. I feel strongly that our collections of photos and other artifacts are key to our memories and, in turn, our stories. Do you have friends or family members who may benefit from this? Feel free to share.
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