Family History vs Genealogy

Over the last 10 years, I've delved into the murky waters of family history or genealogy more than a few times. When I worked at Museum London, I had numerous offers of donation that required some geneaological mapping in order to fully comprehend the provenance accompanying the objects.  Sometimes the donors supplied their own family trees, but at other times I was expected to take down names and relationships and map them out myself.  Genealogy can be quite complicated, but when inheritance comes into an object's provenance, it's incredibly useful for figuring out who had what, when, and often where.  Other times, family histories, which could be a little more vague, sufficed, especially if the family was well known in the region, or if only one or two closely related family members factored into a donation's importance.

I work with family histories and receive research requests from genealogists at my current museum, too.  In this case, because the Secrets of Radar Museum has a strong bias toward military history, it often comes as requests for assistance filling out the sketch of someone's military service records.  I don't spend much time tracking down the personal history, but provide context and explanations for the places they might have been posted.  For me, the best part about history are the people.  People make history, afterall.  Events are recorded and remembered by people.

I have colleagues and friends who are trained genealogists and they really are good at what they do.  I have, on occasion, relied on them, myself, because they usually have subscriptions to fancy pants software, or a special attention to detail that escapes me when I'm tracking five generations of men all named William.  Plenty of people do their own research, tracking down obscure branches of their family.  My first cousin, once removed (so my mother's cousin) on my maternal side, has done a lot of research into her family lineage, which is fascinating.  That half of the family is Scottish and parish records helped her trace back.  For me, my paternal side is a lot more complicated, what with waves of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe filtered through Ellis Island and Mexico.  If I were to really go into it, I would hire a professional, but for now I content myself with a general knowledge of that part of my family history. 

If you're interested in genealogy and family history, the Library and Archives of Canada have a helpful site that explores both forms of familial tracking.  Be careful, though, just sketching out a short family tree can be a massive rabbit hole from which you may never return !

The Old Funding Model

Today was an important day at the museum I manage, The Secrets of Radar Museum. An important day because an event took place that may have a tremendous bearing on its future. The event was a meeting with representatives from the Province's largest funder, to which SoRM submitted a grant request back in November. The interview means the application made it to the short list, but the Museum has been here before and we all know there's no guarantee the application will be accepted. It's a request for funding over two years, not of an extraordinary amount, to fund most of two part-time salaries and materials that SoRM will use to undertake a massive collections inventory and accessibility overhaul. So, for an hour and a half this morning, I sat with a board member and did my best to answer difficult questions about how this funding will increase future sustainability.

How do you honestly answer that in a way that doesn't make potential funders run away screaming?

The Canadian museum sector has been struggling with this question since the mid-90s. For a number of the big museums, it seems like they have started to find a public-private balance, but for small museums, especially those not run by their municipalities or attached to another parent institution, the challenge is only getting worse. The current funding climate is very bad, with fewer dollars spread across more recipients and increased bureaucracy between the need and communicating the need. How does a museum like SoRM, with its unique, but rather a-typical subject, find sustainability? Its traditional membership has dwindled; the veterans who were its beating heart are themselves passing into history. Although the story it shares is important and timely, particularly given the World War II anniversaries and the popularity of TV shows like Bletchley Circle or the recent film The Imitation Game, how do you convince new funders that they should support a weird little museum over a flagship art gallery, youth-at-risk program, or cancer care unit?

I don't have answers for those questions. I spend a lot of my time trying to come up with fixes for the Museum's funding problem. I work quite hard to drum up interest and support, to varying degrees of success. I communicate my passion for its mission and mandate in everything I do, but I can't answer a question about how this incredibly necessary project will truly affect the Museum's bottom line, because, we in the museum sector have largely been trained to see value, merit, worthiness in ways that don't translate easily into standard business models.  So, SoRM will wait with the relentless optimism to which me and so many of my peers subscribe, to hear back about the funding decision, meanwhile struggling to make ends meet and continuing to strive for awesomeness.

Designing Exhibits for Small Spaces

It never fails to suprise me how many times this little presentation is accessed from my academia.edu site.  I took a little time to update the original file, which accompanied a talk I gave to the Huron-Perth-Middlesex Museum Network back in 2013.  Practical advice for exhibit design on a shoestring budget and for small spaces is sometimes hard to come by, and this slideshow is hardly exhaustive.  It was meant mostly as a spark for conversation, or as a starting point in the creative (or desperate) planning stage, for other museum staff and volunteers struggling to freshen up old exhibits or design new ones. 

You can download the newly updated file here in all its copyright infringing glory.  I received no remuneration for this presentation or accompanying talk, and offer it freely.  Photos I used were scraped from the Internet because they show examples that depict excellence and/or creativity in small exhibition design.

Throw-Back Thursday for a New Year

That time in 2011 when my exhibition, Spic and Span, was written up in the Toronto Star by Peter Goddard:

Do you get YOUR vitamins?

“I can’t separate history from art or technology from material,” exhibition curator Maya Hirschman tells me in an email. “They inform each other and to a large extent form the basis for culture. Art and design are integral parts of our everyday life, from the shapes of our appliances to the furniture in our homes.”

It was a pretty spectacular feeling to see my work in a newspaper read by millions, with a reasonably articulate quote relating to my curatorial practice, about an exhibit for which I was quite proud.

Spic and Span was a lot of fun to curate, not only because it was jam-packed with vintage artefacts from an era when good design and aesthetics was still deeply important.  Using period advertisements throughout the exhibit, often paired with similar or matching artefacts, added powerful subtexts about gender rolls, sexism, consumerism, and marketing influences on societal norms.  

Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone !  Let's make 2015 in museums, heritage, art & culture a tremendously successful year, okay?!