To use a tagline of several fellow genealogists, ‘wouldn’t that be a good title for a book?!‘…. well, it will be in due course. But today, I am 3,500 miles away from home (as the crow flies!) at Toronto Public Library and I am not just ‘a speaker’ but the ‘keynote speaker’ for the event (so my badge says!).
I am guessing that, when planning an Industrial England Workshop, it is probably a prerequisite to invite an English speaker to head up the day! Well, that would be me…. three lectures (to get ‘value for money’!) including ‘How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World’, ‘The Raw Materials of Industry and Industrial Power’ and finishing up with ‘Reading Industrial Communities’. Delegates have the pleasure of a day-long exploration into the social, economic and cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution on the lives of English people between 1750 and 1900, and six fellow lecturers are delivering a wider variety of topics from education to cookery, specific industries such as the cotton mills to particular places (including Birmingham, Sheffield and the East End) in between my three plenary sessions.
Welcomed like a returning cousin to Toronto, I have been delighted to put faces to names of those who I have ‘met’ on social networks and re-ignite friendships made at the OGS Conference at Brock University in May. Already, I have sold nearly all the copies of my Tracing Your West Country Ancestors book which travelled with me from England and wouldn’t it have been good to have my Industrial Ancestors publication completed by now…. ah well, I can bring it with me next time, when I return for OGS Conference 2015 in Barrie.
Out on the tiles tonight with Christine Woodcock (@genealogytours) and then heading to Ottawa tomorrow – more light-hearted material in tomorrow’s lectures on ‘Solving problems through family reconstruction’ and ‘Searching for Surnames: Challenges, Pitfalls and the Downright Ridiculous’. What it is to be an international Rockstar Genealogist!
