Thursday, February 05, 2009

The Power of Archives

We're an immigrant family. I do Canadian history, but I don't trace my own roots here at all. My children's family, that's another story, thanks to their mother's vast Canadian ancestry, but the Moore history here is no longer than my own.

The other day the 1911 census of Britain was made available and searchable online at 1911census.co.uk.

On a whim I enter my father's name. Click: there he is, born 1910, four months old when the census was taken. Dead now these twenty-five years, and he lives forever from the tally made during a brief interaction between my grandparents and some census-taker in County Cheshire. The power of archives....
 
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