Being Human Festival event: Searching for Theatrical Ancestors 21 Nov 2017, 2-4pm (free admission)
Register here: https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/searching-theatrical-ancestors-lost-found/
The Searching for Theatrical Ancestors project takes an innovative approach to this topic by creating a bridge between academic research and family history research with an accessible, freely available online resource with interactive and easy to use interfaces. The STAR website also brings together for the first time 14,000 other online theatre archive records with a new collection of digitized play programmes and an enhancement to the existing 20,000 records from the National Trust’s Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive.
The event format will be a free workshop open to the public at Hull History Centre on Tuesday 21 November 2017 2-4pm, the Searching for Theatrical Ancestors website will be demonstrated by means of an interactive talk (total 1 hr) and followed by Q&A (1 hr) and the invitation to deposit information about ‘STARS Found’ for the website.
The event aims to demonstrate the Searching for Theatrical Ancestors website and to provide an introduction to researching theatre history archives and online data relevant for theatre history research.
The event builds on previous successes when the STAR website has been demonstrated to public audiences at
- British Library project conference, 29 July 2016
- BBC Who Do You Think You Are event, NEC Birmingham, 6-8 April 2017
- NEC Birmingham 6-8 April 2017
- Yorkshire Family History Fair, York Racecourse, 24 June 2017.
The success of the social media response to the British Library project conference led to the STAR resource being listed as one of the top 50 websites for 2017 (BBC WDYTYA magazine, Dec 2016). Evidence of the success of the BBC WDYTYA event demonstration is available from the interview by Nick Thorne and featured in Family Tree magazine (June 2016, p. 7; interview in October 2017, pp. 44-45).
