Iremember when computer genealogy was widely regarded as tantamount to supping with the devil, and social media as merely funny cat pictures and peoples’ dinners. Having participated in newsgroups in the ’90s, sharing email discussions on a myriad of topics internationally, including family history, I slid seamlessly into Facebook and Twitter, as I still like to call it. Frowned upon by those who don’t trust Zuckerburg, and now Musk, I like social media. Used sensibly and selectively, it’s wonderful for family historians. Even more so for me in recent weeks. Growing up in Coventry, I expected my origins would be in that ancient city. At school I did projects on its medieval past, and at university wrote a thesis on my former primary school. I was shocked and fascinated to find I was the first to be born in the city, fittingly enough, some would say, in the former workhouse infirmary. Though it was then Gulson Road Hospital, an imposing if still sombre edifice fronted by sandstone city wall. More on this wall later.
I still live near, so I was delighted when I found a Facebook group called The Coventry We Used to Know. It was enticing for one who grew up through many changes, from post-war bomb damage, New Elizabethan town planning and what, I’m rather offended to learn, is known as Brutalist concrete architecture. It seemed jolly to me, even throughout Boomtown to Ghost Town and back again to City of Culture and a two-university campus style city centre which reminds me of giant Lego, and in which I would now be thoroughly lost.
Not many people can include in their family history a photograph of the exact spot where they were knocked down by a car, aged three