Meet the User - Denise Houghton
Our ‘meet the user’ segments give you the chance to meet one of our YourArchive customers and to understand why they chose the platform to store and share their precious memories. This month we meet Denise Houghton, our recent competition winner to catch up with how she has been using YourArchive! Here is her story…
My name is Denise Houghton and I live in Lancashire. The photo below is me in Norfolk where we lived for 3 years when I was little.
As we get older, meeting up with family members tends to be more at funerals than at happy occasions and at one such funeral in January 2020 a seed was planted for a big “family reunion” which would include as many living relatives as were able to attend, making it a happy time. Arrangements were made and a venue booked for April 2020. Then we entered Lockdown, so it was postponed until the following October (we thought Covid would be gone by then, how little did we know)! We are still awaiting a revised Reunion but it is looking more likely now.
Having Rheumatoid Arthritis meant that I was considered “Clinically Extremely Vulnerable” and the advice was to shield to avoid catching Coronavirus! So, I was faced with an indefinite time housebound.
Over the years, I had a passing interest in researching my ancestors without actually putting anything down on paper, or looking into too deeply, but with an uncertain time to be spent at home, I took the decision to start delving into it more and that as they say is history. I am in awe at all the information available online through various places and some even held weekly Zoom meetings for presentations etc and they are all so welcoming, helpful and friendly. I joined Facebook Genealogy Groups too. I have found out so much about my ancestors and it meant that lockdown became an opportunity to do more research in the safety of my own home. In my investigations I have found a few tales but my favourite has to be about my Maternal Grandfather:
My grandad is the one standing at the back.
The story is that he ran away from St Helens in Lancashire to Scotland to join the Black Watch and fight in WW1. He was only 17 so his mother got the train to Scotland and dragged him home! I have his attestation papers and it clearly shows how he had lied about his age as he gave 1897 but it has been crossed out and his real date of 1898 written in. He did sign up to fight for his country as soon as he was legally old enough to. From what my Mum remembers about his mother (her grandmother), she said you wouldn’t mess with her but she had five sons so I guess she had to be firm.
I also found out that several ancestors from both sides of the family had Rheumatoid Arthritis which I only discovered through my research. One was in and out of the workhouse with the disease and in contrast another was a Sergeant Major serving 23 years in the Royal Artillery before becoming a Chelsea Pensioner due to Rheumatism. There are several others with the condition I discovered too.
I think it was on Facebook one day that yourarchive.com popped up in my feed AND they had a draw to win 50gb of photo storage for life, “with facial recognition” along with scanning of 100 photos from itsthestory.co.uk. Wow, I had to enter because I have loads of old photos from my grandmother and other family members but I don’t know who some of them are and neither do they! Facial recognition sounded like it could tell me who was who on some unknown photos.
I can’t believe I actually won and the people YourArchive have been so patient helping me find my way round and develop my personal archive. The scanning of my photos was easy (well it was once I had sorted through which photos to choose). I bundled my precious memories up and they were collected by a courier arranged by YourArchive. My expectations weren’t high for the scanned results as most of the photos I sent were old black and white pictures with some slides and some were a little blurred but the results are fantastic with the pictures displaying much better than I had even hoped for.
This photo was taken at my Paternal Great Great Aunts Wedding back in July 1926. As you can see, some people are tagged and the others are currently unknown.
The same wedding photo, showing the people that have been identified using the automated facial recognition feature.
YourArchive has so many features but I have to say my favourite is the facial recognition if it wasn’t already obvious. I like the way you can display who they are as like an overlay on the photo but they are also listed under the photo.
I also like the slideshow feature which I will probably use to send photos to family members on special occasions like milestone birthdays. The slideshow adds in photos I choose from YourArchive and can be sent to people of my choice.
A suggestion to improve the already comprehensive site would be a “search” or a “how to” feature because there are so many features available that unless you use them regularly, it would help to have some prompts as reminders. An “undo” button would most certainly benefit me too because I am sometimes a little trigger happy and then realise, I shouldn’t have clicked!
I can whole heartedly recommend YourArchive especially anyone researching family history who have photos of ancestors that they currently have as unidentified. Perhaps it can solve the “brick wall” that we all have at some point when researching our history?
We would like to thank Denise for generously sharing her thoughts and content with us. We look forward to finding out more about her YourArchive journey in the future.