06 December 2022
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The stories of those women ‘forgotten’ by history is at the heart of a family history project.
A Few Forgotten Women was devised by a group of friends who first got together during lockdown to provide mutual encouragement for family history projects. They realised that, even without meaning to, family historians often focus on the men on their family tree. Merely by virtue of her gender, a woman can become overlooked.
The project aims to preserve the memory of some women who have, until now, been ‘hiding in the shadows’. The project website features a selection of women that the group discovered as part of their investigations into their own ancestry, as part of a one-name study, a one-place study, or when undertaking a wider project.
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Some women are further on the margins than others and the project focuses on those whose lives were touched by issues such as poverty, illegitimacy, criminality, disability, alcoholism, prostitution, abandonment or mental ill-health. With this in mind, the project members explain that they are sensitive to the ethical issues surrounding telling the stories of people of the past, with a balance to be maintained between commemorating their lives and respecting personal privacy. Where the women have descendants, the group has tried to contact them to get permission to tell their ancestor's story.
Visit A Few Forgotten Women and follow at Mastodon @[email protected]; Twitter @Few4GottenWomen; Instagram https://instagram.com/afewforgottenwomen
