The note from Eunice in Queensland reminds me of a little research I did
when writing a family history a few years ago and which I think illustrates
that some delving more deeply when researching local or family history might
well open up a much wider story.
My research into an incident connected with my grandfather began when I
remembered that he had a large framed portrait of the great Russian
scientist Mendeleyev in his living room. I was too young to ask him about
this but years later my mother told me that this had been given to him by
Mendeleyev in the 1890s.
As my grandfather was a civil servant working for the Board of Trade I
checked the records of his department for the 1890s at the PRO, Kew, and
found that indeed Mendeleyev had visited London in 1894 and had met my
grandfather in connection with the British standard weights & measures.
Later my grandfather received gifts from the Russian government "in
recognition of [my grandfather's] co-operation." Presumably the picture was
one of the gifts.
I then read a short biography of Mendeleyev and discovered why he had been
to London as quite an old an ailing man to investigate British weights and
measures. It adds quite a lot to my knowledge of my grandfather.
Unfortunately he left no diary or notes about his meeting with the Russian
but I wonder if one of my grandchildren will one day be inspired to go to
Moscow and see if there is anything about the 1894 visit in the Mendeleyev
archives!
Brian Read
> From: E & R Shanahan <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: "From: Local-History list" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 23:08:57 +1000
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: linking local studies
>
> Frank Sharman said At 10:56 29/12/01 +0000, you wrote:
>>
>> I am also not sure that many local historians are very much interested
>> in how the local picture fits in to the national picture. I have an
>> idea that quite a lot are not interested at all. What local people seem
>> to be interested in is what happened on their patch - and, preferably,
>> what happened there within their own lifetime and that of their parents
>> and grandparents.>
>
> Well in my case it is not so much a case of not being interested but in
> being overwhelmed. If you are starting small - it is too discouraging to
> try to cover a national perspective. I have tried to get around it by
> placing my great grandparents in their time slot and then fitting in
> national events that I think may have concerned their lives, - e.g. the
> Great Exhibition, the Crimean War etc, but unless you have personal
> diaries, you really cannot guess what effect these may have had on their
> lives if any.
>
> Eunice in Queensland
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