For those of you who haven’t yet seen last weekend’s HangoutOnAir to launch our 2015 Migration Project, you can now catch it on YouTube. We’re going to approach this project in bite-sized chunks where you can pick and choose how much you want to investigate, so hopefully as many members as possible will be able to fit this into their busy research plans.
Other starter material is now available as well, which participants can add to throughout the year:
- Check out the Migration Forum. Just sign into the website and go to the Forum to start swapping ideas with others who are trying to find out more about their places.
- Also check out the Resources page where you’ll find ideas for getting started in the Inspiration List and an already extensive list of books and websites to help build context. You’ll also find a timeline for major British immigration waves – if you’re studying a place other than in Britain, why not add a timeline for your region?
- We’ll have other HangOuts on migration on a quarterly basis, so if you’re not feeling comfortable with how to use this channel yet just send a note to Janet and she’ll be sure that someone gets in touch to give you the basics on a one-to-one basis. HangOuts are held each month, so you may find other topics of interest as well as migration!
- All participants are encouraged to prepare articles for the Destinations newsletter on what they’re finding or what they think might be useful to others. Suzie is already beginning to gather articles for the next issue, so please get in touch if you’d like to contribute.
During the HangOut we discussed some ideas for getting started, such as:
- Set down some of the key questions you want answer about migration for your place.
- Dig into Histpop.org or other relevant population websites to find out what happened with the population of your place and compare it to other places.
- Understand the routeways of your place – roads, rivers, canals, railways – that might help you to see the most likely routes for migration to and from your place.
- In addition to your population and routeways information, start a list or notes on context for your place that you add to throughout the year, things like the economy and occupations, legislative change, religious influences and the like that might have impacted migration.
- Start listing those motivations that ‘pulled’ or ‘pushed’ the people of your place to migrate.
Every couple of months we’ll discuss more ideas to build the ‘big’ picture of migration for our places. And we’ll also be sharing ideas on how to track down the stories of individual migrants, which no doubt will interest many of the project participants.
Hope to hear from you and Happy Hunting!
Kim Baldacchino