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Day 5- Specifying People and Historical Context

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    Today, in preparation for our Clayton Library visit tomorrow, we worked relatively individually to specify which members of our families we wanted to focus on for our Book of Life. For the better part of the morning, we looked towards our dead-ends and then branched off from there, developing questions about what we want to know. In sharp contrast to the past week or so, we were instructed to not do further family research and instead just dive deep into the people who we wanted to include and highlight in our book. We were given flashcards and were then told to write our questions on these pieces of paper and take them to the Clayton library, as it is far easier than luging around our laptops while trying to research beyond the digital sources available to us on Ancestry.com. I surprisingly found a lot of information this morning on my paternal grandparents side and traced back his mom's family tree all the way to the late 17th century in Portugal. The Delaforce family, containing around 10 men named John Delaforce, founded a winery in the 18th century that has remained a family business to this day. This opened up a whole new branch of my family tree for me to investigate going forward and after finding a family history book written by my great uncle, I will definitely be including this lineage in my Book of Life. 


Delaforce family members carrying on winery business.

When we returned after lunch, we shifted our focus towards historical context and examining the major events surrounding our family's migration. Ms. Harrison provided a few examples to kickstart the afternoon, questioning the reasoning behind her family's migration from Florida to Alabama and deducing that it was tied to the Ocala Demands in the 19th century. We then delved into our individual research and utilized the databases on Powerschool, "Internet Archive" and "On this Day", to situate our family's past into a specific era of history or even a specific event. We needed to specifically focus on historical context for the family members we want to highlight in our book and questions on the board guided our exploration, asking what happened during their lifetime, did they do anything important, and what happened where they lived when they were born. I connected a lot of my ancestors past to the French Revolution and political turmoil in Europe and I additionally related my maternal branch to farming crises following the Civil War. Based on what I heard during this afternoon research, a lot of people made historical ties and were able to connect migration specifically to certain events. 

Overall, today was productive in preparing us for the Clayton Library visit tomorrow and I think the activities of today allowed us to really delve deep into the lives of note-worthy individuals in our family lineage. 


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