Here is just one of Joe’s presentations that a number of our very small community-based groups have found especially useful, as they brace themselves to dip a toe in the (deep, dark, shark-infested!) waters of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps even begin to plan for launching a blog.

Enjoy!

Social media is an ideal place to serve up tantalizing teasers to whet the appetite of your prospective audience.

See, for example, my recent conversation with the Fredericton Region Museum (formerly the York Sunbury Museum) on Facebook:

The York Sunbury Museum:

people always ask… what is in the museum? well… we have a lot of NEAT things… as well as the coleman frog! we have underwear, 100yr old cake, amputation saws, nazi paraphenalia, wwi trench clubs and… well… lots of things … you should visit!

Rebecca Leaman:

Wait a minute – you have 100-year-old cake??

Museum:

Yes we do … on exhibit. A piece of Coronation cake from King George V Coronation in 1911!

RJL:

Very cool. Petrified?

Museum:

Very dry and fragile. It’s wrapped in tin foil. The conservationist at the NBM recommended that we keep it in it’s tin foil. When it was sitting on my desk, being prepared for exhibit, I could smell the sweet from the sugar. A very cool artefact!!

Museum:

A picture: http://yorksunburymuseum.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/coming-soon-%E2%80%A6-fall-winter-2009-officers%E2%80%99-quarters/

RJL:

The lovely pair of duelling pistols used to be my favourite artefact(s) in your collection, years ago, but I think the coronation cake must now take the cake. Thanks for telling me more about it. :)

The Museum “liked” my last comment, and we went our separate Facebook ways… but with a key difference. A connection was made.

The museum’s status update had been, capitalization and punctuation aside, well crafted for social media: a casual tone and a variety of popular topics — underwear, food, wartime artefacts — tossed out like breadcrumbs to birds! More importantly, they were paying attention and followed up when I responded, and took the opportunity of my piqued interest to offer more information and bring me from Facebook to the museum’s own website.

So, what do you think?

Did they lead me from the website to the bricks-and-mortar site? Did I go visit the museum to see the 100-year-old cake, and the rest of the Museum Treasures exhibit?

It’s like… it’s like… a big giant list with a search function. Practical, convenient, and flexible. Perfect for writers and researchers who fear that we’ll drown in a sea of index cards!

Why do I think Workflowy is a more useful organization tool for researchers and writers than a text document (or twenty)? Everything’s all in one place, to start with.

Workflowy can be used for making notes on research, for writing outlines, for capturing ideas, for project planning, for journalling, and yes, for keeping a “to do” list, and almost any other kind of word-based information sorting that you can imagine.

Now, you might think it could be overwhelming — having one big giant list to “organize your brain” — but oddly enough, not so. Workflowy lets you:

• Expand and collapse any part of your list with a click of the mouse;
• Zoom in on any list-within-a-list to minimize distractions;
• Tag items so you can quickly find them later;
• Drag-and-drop items to re-organize and re-order on the fly;
• Export all or part of your list to other software programs;
• Share all or part with your colleagues…

Oh, and if there’s a limit on how many words can be in one item, I haven’t hit it yet.

Two more reasons to like Workflowy:

1. Workflowy is a web-based tool. If you’re working away from home, as one so often must in the research phase of a large writing project, it’s handy to be able to access and use your list from any place you can get an internet connection. And if your computer dies, you’re not up the creek without your notes.

2. It’s free.

I’ll talk more in future articles about specific uses I’ve found helpful, specifically in organizing research notes and in the writing process. In the meantime, why not give Workflowy a try? As its developers say, use Workflowy for a week and you’ll wonder how you lived without it!

Was your great-grandfather more likely to be a banker than a farmer, because the records say he grew up in a township? It all depends…

What is a Township?

Depending on the location, era, and reference, “township” could be:

• Loosely, a town; a more-or-less-urban community that’s larger than a village but smaller than a city.

• A civil jurisdiction or unit of local government, with greater or lesser degrees of autonomy depending on the state, province or territory of which it’s a division.

• A area of settlement that’s rural, urban, or a combination of both patterns.

• In Australia, “a small town or settlement serving as the business center of a rural area” or the commercial center of a town or suburb.

• In the US state of Michigan, any territory that is not a city. “In Michigan, if you don’t live in a city, you live in a township” — either a general law township, or a charter township:

Charter township status is a special township classification created by the Michigan Legislature in 1947 to provide additional powers and streamlined administration for governing a growing community. A primary motivation for townships to adopt the charter form is to provide greater protection against annexation by a city. ~ Michigan Townships Association

• In Britain, before Henry I came to the English throne in 1100 AD, “the inhabitants of aparticular manor, parish, division of a hundred, tun (small town) or village”; after 1100 AD, “a division of an original parish that had its own church and which usually had civil functions”:

The civil functions of the township or vill enabled it to maintain the poor inhabitants of that community starting around 1540 and continuing until 1906, although most townships disappeared before 1866 either being included into adjacent civil parishes or gaining their own separate civil parish status. ~ A Vision of Britain Through Time: Administrative Units Typology: Township

• In South Africa, “a segregated residential settlement for blacks,” or “a political designation for a specific geographic area,” which could be rural, urban, or a combination of the two. The term has come to be closely associated with apartheid, but the establishment of segregated “townships” in South Africa has its roots in British colonialism and the second Anglo-Boer War.

• A surveyed area, as identified by the General Land Office (US), Dominion Land Survey (Canada), or other administrative agencies, usually for the purposes of identifying parcels for land grants, title transfers, etc.For example:

Central to the federal government’s plan to settle the West was the township and its quarter-section homesteads. As shown here, the typical township had 36 sections, each of which measured one square mile (640 acres) and was divided into quarter sections. ~ The Canadian West virtual exhibition, National Archives of Canada

And those are just some of the variations you’ll come across, when it comes to understanding what “township” means in the course of your research.

The key takeaway here, as with so many aspects of investigations in genealogy and history, is to make a conscious fight against assumptions that come from our own immediate experience. In our own lives, in our own geographic location and era, we use common words like “township” with a general understanding of what is implied. Change the location or change the century, and a common term can have a whole different meaning!