Recording a family history on a blog: how it has helped me

Tim Locke timothy.locke@talktalk.net

I’ve been writing a blog about my mother’s family Holocaust experiences for the past ten years, and would heartily recommend this method of recording a family history to anyone. It has helped straighten the story out in my own head and opened up so many avenues and made new contacts – I have even discovered some unknown relatives. And, unlike publishing a book, blogs make it easy to correct and add to published posts as the story inevitably expands.

Back in 2014 I was visiting Görlitz, on the German-Polish border, as part of an extended family meet-up to coincide with the installation of a Stolperstein commemorating my great-grandfather Martin Ephraim, who perished in Theresienstadt in 1944.

I left Görlitz full of impressions and emotions. The intensity of that occasion prompted me to think about sharing my mother’s family Holocaust story. I’d never written a blog before, but an ideal anniversary happened a few days later. Clearing out the house of my late mother I had found a huge mass of material relating to her past life. One item in particular stood out: the ferry ticket from Hook of Holland to Harwich on 10 May 1939 – a relic of her Kindertransport journey from Munich to England. So exactly 75 years to the day after that journey my first blog post began, inspired by photos of objects relating to that event, including the teddy bear that she had taken with her on that life-changing (and almost certainly lifesaving) exit from Nazi Germany.

There were blanks in the bigger story, but I had learned enough from what my mother had told me some years before to sketch out an account using WordPress – which is free to use and is no more difficult to master than a word processing package: text, headings, photos with captions … and that’s it. I’ve found Facebook groups specialising in Holocaust interests are an excellent way of increasing my audience and interacting with readers.

A journalist friend was kind enough to write a piece about my post, and it reached a wider public as a result. As the years passed, the family story broadened and deepened.

And the vast mass of material I had inherited from my mother slowly began to piece together. Through the blog I have renewed family contact with Dachau, the town where my mother’s family lived, and as a result have been invited over there for two commemorative occasions. I’ve had interest from PhD students and other academics, as well as the Imperial War Museum (where the whole archive will eventually be stored), and numerous items are now on display in the Holocaust Galleries.

Then there were the lovely chance contacts and coincidences. Marianne from Sweden found my blog through googling the name of an old family friend whose love letters from a man called Hans she had discovered in her basement – those letters turned out to be from my grandfather Hans Neumeyer, written to her from Dachau in 1937, plus a few postcards from Theresienstadt, where he was incarcerated in 1942 and died two years later. Bruno, an elderly German academic, emailed me late at night in a state of great excitement: he had spotted my grandfather’s name and knew him through family legend as the man who had brought his parents together in the early years of the 20th century. Ron from Pennsylvania was astonished to read my post about my grandmother’s deportation, where the transcript of her letter written on that train to Auschwitz that she was sitting next to Malwine Porsche – Ron’s great aunt. Mentioning these people by name and inserting dates and place names help the Google searches – and that’s how many people have found my blog.

With the story much clearer in my mind, I made contact with G2G with a view to becoming a speaker: and indeed I now present the story of my mother and uncle as part of G2G’s team of presenters.

Do have a look to see how I’ve done it: https://ephraimneumeyer.wordpress.com I’m very happy to offer advice to others who are thinking of blogging their own family story.

Below: An image from Tim’s latest blog post