Ahtanum Valley Museum

Genealogy research is exciting, and in the process we accumulate numerous documents, files, photographs and notes. But I sometimes wonder what the point of having all this information is unless we have some way of telling the story, the 'what happened', that will interest and inspire the future generations. How do you go from researching your family history to writing a family history? Most of us will have researched beyond the basic birth, marriage and death details, beyond the census, and tried to find the 'deeper' history of our ancestors' lives. However, we all know that this is not always possible. With the best will in the world, sometimes all we have are some dates and places, an occupation, and not much else.

Joe Sobek, a US-based professional handball and tennis player, is credited for inventing the game in 1950. He introduced the game initially during the Greenwich YMCA. During that time, Mr Sobek had still not considered a catchy name for the sport. The development of racquetball was an outcome of his search for a rapid type of sport that was both easy to learn and to play. During that time, racquetball was created as an option to the popular game of tennis.

Let us take my own family as an example. I do not have much information about most of them except the usual baptisms, census details, marriages and deaths. However, by piecing together the known facts, and by researching history and using pictorial resources, I have written a biography of my ancestor John Walker Bott. The key point is in getting to know the times your ancestor lived in. A book I find invaluable is the Chronicle of Britain and Ireland which details all the main news items of each year in Britain's history. The internet is also full of useful information, maps and pictorial images that you could use to illustrate your story (be careful about the copyright on images and if in doubt, ask permission from the webmaster if you are going to make your work public). Museums, libraries and churches are also a good source for local parish history.

Here is a small extract from my ancestor's biography: When John Walker Bott and his sister were born in 1814, the nation was celebrating the downfall of Napoleon, Jane Austen had just published Mansfield Park, and the actor Edmund Kean had made his debut as Shylock at Drury Lane Theatre. While these bits of information have nothing to do with my ancestor personally, they set the context for the world into which he was born. Books about the history of costume or housing are also very useful, and again you can find websites about fashion through the ages, which can help you to get an idea of how your ancestor dressed. Find out about the history of the places where your ancestors were born and lived, to provide a setting for their lives. Here, I have found out about what was life was like where John was born:

IRA was recognized by no lower than the US Olympic Committee as the national governing body for racquetball in the land. The sport hit its peak in popularity in 1974. That year, it was estimated that there were up to three million racquetball players in the land alone.

One day, Herc passed the microphone over to two of his friends. He took care of the turn table and allowed his buddies to keep the crowd hyped with chants, rhymes and anecdotes while he extended the breaks of different songs indefinitely. This was the birth of rap as we know it.

Hip-hop has evolved from the days of the basement showdowns to big business in the music industry. In the seventies and eighties, the pioneers and innovators of the rap record was the DJ. He was the guy who used his turntable to create fresh sounds with old records. Then, he became the guy who mixed these familiar breaks with synthesizers to produce completely new beats. Not much has changed in that aspect of hip-hop. The guy who creates the beat is still the heart of the track. Now, we call him the producer. Even though some DJs work as producers as well as DJs (quite a few start out as DJs before they become producers), today's title "DJ" doesn't carry the same connotative meaning it did in the eighties. Today's hip-hop producer performs the same tasks as the eighty's DJ.