Back in June 2019, I was a keynote speaker for the Ontario Genealogical Society (OGS) annual conference, which was being held that year in London, ON. I don't consider myself a genealogist, not the least because I have never spent more than 20 minutes at a stretch digging into my family history, but the work I do in museums is "genealogically adjacent." All community museums hold material that may be useful for people trying to track down family history, stories, neighbourhood, regional, or community connections. Especially at the Secrets of Radar Museum, the work I have done closely aligns with genealogy, where researchers are family members trying to understand what it was their parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles did during the Second World War. I help people track down service records, I cross reference names in books and memoirs, I search for their family members' within the archival and artefact collections. For the keynote address, I used the story of one radar veteran--a museum founder and volunteer--to illustrate how his experience intersected with information about another veteran, whose family had come with questions.
That talk had some surprising spin-offs, namely that suddenly I became something of a sought-after speaker for genealogy groups. I was invited to present at The Genealogy Show, a massive event in the UK, which, due to the pandemic eventually was moved online, but I was also to a handful of smaller genealogy groups here in Ontario. The radar story isn't local, but national, and I can find links to through its personnel to most of Canada, but there are some regions that were something of a hotbed for producing radar technicians, and Southern and Southwestern Ontario are two. I was approached by the Huron Branch of the OGS (Ontario Ancestors) to give a talk centring that county's radar people, and also by the Bruce County Genealogy Society, a smaller group not officially affiliated with OGS.
The cool thing about my PhD research--okay, there are lots of cool things, but one especially important to this particular story--is that I've been able to delve into the Secrets of Radar Museum archives in a way I never had time for when I was the curator. The greatest historians of the radar program were the veterans themselves, as no one else in Canada could be arsed. Partly because the program was under a veil of secrecy that lasted fifty years, and partly because Canadian war histories are few and far between, and those historians that do write them seem bafflingly obsessed with Dieppe and other perceived failures, rather than the depth and breadth of the services, or, even worse, are happy to regurgitate the British and American centric narratives that downplay Canada's roles, even when those roles are central, like radar! Anyway, sorry to digress, but what that means is that there is no "authoritative" history of the radar program that hasn't been written by the veterans themselves. The veterans have done an excellent job chronicling their work and experiences, and have produced a number of authoritative volumes, and one of the great things they've done is track down as many radar veterans as possible, listing their service as well as post-war activities and communities. The archives also hold mailing lists for thousands of veterans and their spouses, which is a treasure trove for genealogical information, and can then be cross-referenced to cemeteries, obituaries, community histories, etc., which is exactly what I do to furnish my talks for regional genealogy organisations.
All this was really a preamble to link to the proceedings of the Bruce County GS September 2021 meeting, which includes my approximately hour-long talk to the group. I really enjoy speaking to local groups about how small museums can be boons for genealogical and historical research.
