Video Archives

It's great to understand the era that our ancestors lived in, and I just found two video archives on YouTube that might help put some context around your genealogy.

AP on YouTube


First, British Movietone that:
"is arguably the world's greatest newsreel archive, spanning the period 1895 to 1986.

Discover British Movietone’s newsreel archive, which contains many of the world’s enduring images and is rich in coverage of news events, celebrities, sports, music, social history, science, lifestyle and quirky, via this channel.

British Movietone also offers a weekly series called 'The Archivist Presents' where a treasure from the archive is shared by our archivist Jenny and ‘Movietone Moments’, a weekly selection of topical stories providing context to events in the news and marking anniversaries and birthdays
."
 British Movie tone also includes newsreels from Australia!


The second one is AP Archive :
 "AP Archive is the film and video archive of The Associated Press, one of the largest and most trusted sources of independent news gathering.

View AP Archive’s videos via this channel – the collection offers 1.7 million global news and entertainment video stories, which date back to 1895."

Both these archives  include silent film - quite unusual for us to see pictures and no sound!  They are large archives of film, and it can be hard to find something in them.  Here's a tip on how to do it!





There are two search places on the page when you get to YouTube, one searches the whole of YouTube, the other searches just the channel you are looking at, this is the one you want.  It's located under the banner heading for the channel  (see below)  Just click on the little magnifying glass  (just next to About) and type in what you are looking for.



AP YouTube Channel.

Try searching these historical treasure troves  for the year your ancestor was married and see what was happening at the time.  A good way to use this in your writing is to refer to it in a sentence like the one below:
In 1922 Britians were watching Lenin give speeches when they went to the cinema and lining up to see photos of the Tomb of Tutankhamen in downtown London.  In Australia a total solar eclipse was seen, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge was nearing completion.  They opted to immigrate, and sail to Sydney to begin a new life.

 Just one WARNING! Once you start looking at these wonderful videos, it is very difficult to stop!







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