Labor Day 2024

Wishing you a happy Labor Day from the FHF team!

If you have ever wondered about the significance of this day, look no further as we dive into its origins and reveal some related stories that we’ve helped uncover with our clients...

Labor Day in the United States finds its origins in the labor movement of the late 19th century. Industrialization was rapidly transforming the nation, and workers faced grueling conditions, with long hours, low wages, and unsafe environments being all too common.

The working population had had enough and began to form labor unions that advocated for better working conditions, reasonable hours, and fair pay. This activism led to the first Labor Day celebration, which took place on September 5, 1882, in New York City. Organized by the Central Labor Union (CLU), it brought together all the unions in the city to create a unified voice for workers' rights.

Labor Day Parade in New York's Union Square, 1882

Our client’s grandfather was one of the first card carrying members of the United Mine Workers of America. In 1901 he was sent to the Canadian town of Frank, at the base of Alberta’s Turtle Mountain. Conditions in the mining town were poor, and on behalf of the UMWA he tried to get the miners there to unionise. Unfortunately he was unable to do so, and in April 1903, in part due to the instability of the mine, the mountain collapsed. 110 million tonnes of limestone fell from the mountain, burying nearly half the town.

Turtle Mountain after the slide

It was not long before the idea of Labor Day grew in prominence, with more cities and states recognizing the importance of honoring workers' contributions. By 1887, Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day an official public holiday, with several others following suit.

The movement gained further momentum as labor strikes and protests, such as the Pullman Strike of 1894, highlighted the struggles workers faced. A nationwide railroad strike, it resulted in significant unrest and violence, drawing national attention to the plight of laborers. In response, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation that not only recognized Labor Day as a federal holiday to be observed on the first Monday of September but also contributed to reforms such as safer working conditions, improved child labor laws, and the establishment of the eight-hour workday.

More recently, our client’s grandfather helped set up Dupaco, a credit union with over 150,000 members today. Dupaco was founded in 1948 by 10 employees of the Dubuque Packing Company in Iowa, who started it by each investing $5. The work of the company’s union, and employees like our client's grandfather, ensured that employees of ‘The Pack’ were some of the best paid in the city.

Dupaco Credit Union is chartered by the State of Iowa on July 17, 1948.

Today, Labor Day is more than just a long weekend marking the unofficial end of summer. It’s a time to gather with family and friends, enjoying the freedoms and rights that were hard-won by previous generations.

Long Lost Family

Staging a family ‘reunion’

By Eve Collett, Content Director

‘Reunion’ isn’t, in fact, the right word - the family members we filmed in Philadelphia last month had never met. Indeed they didn’t even know each other existed, until we came in hoping to solve a mystery for our client and had him take a DNA test.  Nonetheless a reunion was what it felt like, because as it turned out, though this generation had never met - their parents and grandparents had been looking for each other for decades. 

Setting up for a reunion

This was not of course the first meeting of estranged family members we had facilitated. There were the second cousins in New York that our English client never knew she had, and the descendants of family members believed to be dead following the Holocaust - who had in fact survived and managed to flee to Argentina. But we had never uncovered a family quite as close as those we filmed with last month. 

As I wrote about in a previous blog post last year, our client's father had grown up in an orphanage prior to the first world war. Naturally our client had always believed that his father was all alone in the world. So you can imagine his shock (and ours!) when we discovered that he had been placed in the orphanage alongside four siblings. The trauma of the years spent in the orphanage had caused our client's father to leave his past as far behind as possible. But his siblings, particularly his eldest sister - never stopped looking for their lost brother. 

Some of the incredible family photos brought to the filming by various family members 

By this time it was well into the 1960s, and so the siblings used the only real avenue available at the time - they hired a private detective. But with little information to go on and without the digitization of records, their search was fruitless. 

Fast-forward to 2019 and before she passed away one of the siblings' daughters put her DNA on ancestry.com in a final attempt to find her lost uncle. Four years later, our client hired us, and after we added his DNA to the database we got a first cousin match - and nearly 100 years, and 2 generations of separation came to an end. 

Handing over to Cosima for a presentation on the family’s roots…

On the day itself we put on a lunch, did a presentation on our research into the family’s pre-American roots and bought balloons. But really we were just enablers, bringing together cousins who said they felt more like brothers and sisters, and reuniting a family who had been trying to find each other for generations.

International Women’s Day at FHF

March 8th marks International Women’s Day around the world, and this month is Women’s History Month in the UK, US and Australia – so we’ve been reflecting on the remarkable stories of female resilience and achievement that we have uncovered or researched over the years. 

Tracing women in genealogical records is a challenge for historians and genealogists. For centuries, recording the details of the lives of women, who were generally not property owners or wage earners, was deemed inconsequential and women’s identities were inextricably linked to those of their fathers or husbands. So when we are able to shed light on our clients’ female ancestors, thanks to either clues in oral histories passed down through the generations or finding unique records, we relish the opportunity to pay tribute to them. These are a few of the highlights:

A visionary businesswoman

One of our clients’ ancestors was left a widow in mid-19th century France, saddled with her late husband’s extensive debts and floundering hotels. She demonstrated extraordinary tenacity and business acumen, negotiating with the banks herself, managing the hotels, paying off the debts and purchasing new properties. At a time when French women did not have the right to vote, she was a pioneer in the hotel industry and built a lucrative real estate empire, which she bequeathed to her descendants, including a hotel that is still in the family today. Poring through contemporaneous newspapers and legal documents, we were able to fill in the gaps in the family lore about this trailblazing ancestor.

The Women’s Army Corps

Women of the Women’s Army Corps

When the US entered World War II, two sisters in one of our clients’ family tree put their skills as Vaudeville performers to use. Among the 150,000 women to join the Women’s Army Corps, the sisters served their country by performing in shows to keep up the troops’ morale. WACs were employed as switchboard operators, mechanics, bakers and in other essential noncombat positions, marking the first time that women, besides nurses, served within the US Army’s ranks. The two sisters also worked as drivers and riveters at Philadelphia’s Naval Shipyard. 

A single mother in south-west Scotland

We frequently research historical stories of single motherhood and illegitimacy – one such story took us to Scotland in the 1850s, when women who had illegitimate children were asked to stand before a local church court and divulge the circumstances of their pregnancy in painstaking detail in order for the church to pursue the children’s reputed fathers for child support. The minutes from these harrowing sessions, known as “bastardy records,” have survived and are very useful to researchers. We used them to learn more about our client’s ancestor’s life working and raising her illegitimate son alone – and to crack the case of his mysterious parentage. 

Women in higher education 

Today, women outnumber men in higher education, but this is a relatively recent development. American women were not even allowed to study at university until 1837, when Oberlin College – founded by one of our clients’ ancestors – opened its doors to female students. Meanwhile, women were admitted to university in the UK for the first time in 1868. Despite the emergence of women’s colleges and institutions, higher education remained largely dominated by men for most of the 20th century, during which time many of our clients’ ancestors were the first women in their families to attend university.

A member of the United Partisan Organization

The strong focus on preserving eyewitness accounts and oral histories in Holocaust research recently enabled us to discover the incredible story of a young Jewish woman in our client’s family tree. She was part of the underground resistance organization operating in the Vilnius ghetto, known as FPO (which stood for Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye: the United Partisan Organization). She was 21 years old at the time. The first organized Jewish resistance of its kind in Nazi-occupied Europe, its members went on to aid the Soviet army’s liberation of Vilnius in 1944.

Members of the FPO

Women’s charity case studies

Thinking about the barriers our research team often faces tracing women's stories, our work with UK and women's charities has been hugely insightful. A wave of philanthropy in 19th century Britain saw numerous organizations spring up to fundraise for women who had 'fallen on hard times'. We studied hundreds of historical case files for these projects, each detailing unique stories of women facing poverty, illness, working as carers or living as single mothers. This was a fascinating departure from, say, census records, that often contain very little information about women without 'official' occupations.

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This month is a reminder of why we go the extra mile to preserve stories of female ancestors in as much detail as they deserve. What’s more, we’re proud to be a majority female company: watch our International Women’s Day discussion on how we maintain a supportive working environment, and our reflections on working as women in the media industry.

'Tis the Season for Reflection

By Eve Collett, Content Director

This time of year, as we gather with our wider families across multiple generations, is an opportunity to share memories and ask questions. One of the most common responses we hear from our clients is, “I just didn’t think to ask”. Too often by the time we have the interest or the impetus to ask questions about our family history it’s too late, and the people who could provide us with those answers are no longer with us.

This was the situation recently with a client we’ve been working with this year. His father grew up in an orphanage and was never adopted. Apart from a few scant (and as it turned out, misleading) details - our client knew nothing about where his father’s family was from. With the help of DNA testing we managed to find his father’s birth family and incredibly, put our client in touch with living cousins.

But what was most interesting about this revelation was not the discovery itself, but the way in which it made our client think back over his past and his interactions with his late father. Suddenly memories that had been dormant for decades came back - a comment his father once made that he didn’t understand, a chance encounter with a stranger in the street whilst on holiday. These were all questions he didn’t know he was asking, until the truth came along to explain the memories and fit the puzzle pieces back together.

Sharing our findings 2023

Although his father chose not to share his story during his lifetime, and the client never asked the questions, what this experience has shown is that it’s never too late to know the truth. Even after someone has passed away, knowing their story can help you make sense of your own - and however surprising it may be, uncovering the truth is always worth it.

With the stresses and pressures of life a little further away during the holidays, it’s the perfect opportunity to look back. If you find yourself in a conversation with a grandparent or great-aunt, take the time to ask questions. And if it’s too late, and like so many of us the opportunity to ask questions has passed you by - seek the answers out anyway, you never know how valuable the truth can be.

Family, filming and (just a little bit) of history

Learnings from our most recent filming trip

By Eve Poppleton, Content Director

I’ve recently returned from a long weekend in the Hamptons. No, unfortunately not quite the relaxing break it sounds - we were there to film a client at his vacation home near East Hampton. In fact this was our last port of call on a whistlestop tour through the North East. Four locations in 3 days - beginning in Philadelphia - Manhattan - Brooklyn and finally out to Long Island.

Three of these locations were places that personally meant a lot to our client - where he’d grown up, where he worked and where he and the family now spent their time. One of the locations was not so familiar. It had originated from our research into his family tree - it was a special place to the city of New York and a place that our client had a very interesting ancestral connection to.

There are worse places to spend a weekend…

Despite this however, it was a hard sell. From the outset our client had been clear that the ‘history’ - though interesting - was less of a priority for him than capturing the immediate family. This was not an unfamiliar request, and being an entirely bespoke service the focus of a project can shift any which way the client desires. Nonetheless to fully understand where you are you have to understand where you’ve been. Relevant historical stories, contextualising the family today, never fail to add depth and perspective to our projects.

Thus it was that I persuaded him and the family to this location. We introduced an expert (the best in the business) and as we stood in the sun, looking at the Manhattan skyline, our client’s teenage son said the words I’d been hoping to hear - ‘I never knew we had any connection to this part of the city - it makes me feel like I’m more of a New Yorker than I ever imagined.’

Nico, Sophie and I in front of that skyline

The next day saw us down at the Hamptons, for a day of filming interviews and capturing a sunny May day on the beach. Now it was our turn to be a bit reticent. Filming interviews and capturing the family is a key part of every project - but filming just four people, two of whom were children, surely wouldn’t require a whole day? Being used to juggling a multi-team shoot with numerous experts, locations and a litany of family members - I was slightly worried how we would fill this time. 

Filming on the beach at Amagansett

I needn’t have worried. The extra time allowed us to conduct several hours of interviews with our client, going far deeper into his business and personal philosophy than usual. Even the filming on the beach was a joy, the client and his family so engrossed in playing in the waves and throwing a stick for the dog they forgot we were even there. When we wrapped that day I felt the usual pride at what we had achieved, but with the added bonus of knowing we’d captured those relaxed, intimate moments for that family forever. 

So what I think about most when I think back on that most recent trip is collaboration. A true collaboration between us and our client. He learnt that history could be more interesting and valuable then he may have first thought, and we learnt the value of standing still for a day, to capture those everyday interactions that might otherwise pass us by.

Oh, and not to take the Lincoln Tunnel at 5pm on a Friday.

Treat someone special in your life to a trip down memory lane

Give your loved ones a boost by taking them back to that special place.

By Nico Docherty, Family History Films

A Curated Trip

A trip down memory lane is a key part of the FHF process and an experience that adds immeasurable value to our films and immeasurable joy for the participants. It works like this: We take you or the people special in your life on a journey to the significant places of their past. Our film team captures the trip and the reminiscences along the way. This can be a grand, multi-day overseas trip or a modest drive around the local neighborhood. It can be a private journey for one or a day out for the whole family. It all depends on you and your story.

This is a totally curated affair. In our early conversations with your family, we will discern the places that have special resonance for the key people. The places of significance in one’s life are rarely famous landmarks. Sometimes they are. Our trips have taken us inside 70,000 seater football stadiums and aboard a Balao-class submarine. Yet more often those special locations are ordinary places that mean something because of the unique part they played in your life. It could be the ice cream parlor that your parents used to take you to, or the dance club where they first met. It could be a lecture hall at your former university or your grandparents’ holiday home. 

The team with a navy veteran aboard USS Pampanito

The Family History Films Touch

We organize every detail and ensure the trip is a VIP experience. The journey is carefully planned from start to finish by our team and can be a surprise or organized in cooperation with your family. We ensure that the locations are reserved just for us and can organize cameo appearances along the way, from an old friend to an expert ready to answer questions or provide context.

Our team films the whole experience and conducts interviews at the key locations. The footage captured is without doubt the richest and most emotive of the whole project. How could it fail to be? People are moved and delighted to be revisiting these locations and it is a privilege to capture these moments. 

Back to school

What A Trip Down Memory Lane Adds

The footage we capture on a family trip adds color and context to the final film. It will often feature as an exciting and separate chapter within the larger story. More important than this, however, is the boost a memory lane trip gives your family members, particularly those in the older generations. Revisiting cherished locations is an invigorating and rewarding experience and one that is a joy to behold.  Our trips celebrate places that do not ordinarily receive attention. Our films give the key places in your life the reverence they deserve. They are special to you so they are special to us.

A site of former glories

To discuss what your memory lane trip would look like, or to inquire about a book, film or archive, contact us at jonb@myfamilyhistoryfilm.com.

Succession Planning: A Film for the Next Generation

A focus on the past and present can help you influence the future

By Nico Docherty, Family History Films

A Film About You, Not Just Your Ancestors

The films we create are about you and your family. They are a chance to preserve your story and guide future generations. Of course, ancestry will always be central to what we do. Investigating family rumours and discovering new and fascinating stories in your family’s past is an exciting and fun part of every film. 

Yet our films are also an opportunity to focus on you. We interview you, your parents, your children and any relatives and friends you would like to be involved in the project. We build this around your convenience, filming at your home or a place of significance to you. 

Many of our clients choose to host a family reunion, and invite our team along to capture it. These can be exciting, celebratory days for everyone but more than that, they are a chance for you and your family to tell your story to future generations. How you got to where you are today, the lessons you have learned and the things that are important to you.

Our team prepares for a family interview

Succession Planning

This is where succession planning comes in. Capturing your story and your ideas is not just about sentiment. Many of our clients have business interests that they created or took to new levels. Their children may already be involved or may need to be prepared to take responsibility.

As businesses and other assets expand and grow, it can be hard to maintain the core philosophies that made your idea so unique and successful at the start. We help preserve the story of how that success was achieved and set it in context; the humble beginnings, the challenges overcome, the trials and tribulations along the way. These lessons are invaluable tools for the next generation and help to protect and enshrine your legacy.

Your children have the responsibility of carrying your name and your heritage forward. The context behind the family’s success can be remote to the next generation. Our films give them that story in an emotional and informative package. It is an invaluable resource.

Taking over the family firm can be tough

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

Ok, George Orwell may have had corrupt regimes in his mind when he coined this phrase but the truth of it sticks. The past helps us understand the present and influence the future.

On the rare occasion that you get that old photo album out, how often are you left wondering who that great-grandparent or distant ancestor really was? What were their priorities and their hopes?  We knock down that communication barrier. Our archiving team will digitise your family assets (from the box of photos to the VHS not watched since 1995) and render them accessible at a click to current and future generations. On top of that, our films and books allow you to have a direct and unfiltered conversation with future generations. You do not have to be a mystery to them the way your great-grandparents may have been a mystery to you. This is something that no prior generation in history has had the privilege to achieve and it allows you to guide and help the people that will take your legacy into the future.

Looking at a photo isn’t quite the same as watching a professional interview

Each of our projects is unique and the balance struck between a focus on you and past generations of your family is entirely up to you. You can discuss the shape your book, film or archive would take via email at jonb@myfamilyhistoryfilm.com.