image created by Julie Goucher using the International Museum Day Website.

As a child I always enjoyed visiting museums. Looking back, my favourite hobbies were old things, books and listening to my Great Aunts talk about the family. I guess my pathway was set from way back in my childhood.

Today is International Museum Day

As a genealogist, museums add context to the lives of our ancestors, whether we have researched back that far or not.

One of my favourite museums is the Underground Hospital on the Island of Jersey in the Channel Islands. None of my family lived on Jersey, yet there is something about the island that I love. Jersey was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War. Everywhere you go on the island is a reminder of that time in the island’s history and also a reminder of the resilience of the islander’s – it was not just Jersey that was occupied, the other islands were too, but Jersey seems to embrace this part of it’s history in a more obvious manner. All the islands honour the people who died there during this time, the islanders who took huge risks and the prisoners, many from Eastern Europe who were forced to work in dreadful conditions.

I have written previously about our visits to the island and to see some of those posts search Jersey in the search box and if I ever find the time I will finish off setting the posts in their category making them easy to find, and according to my notes there are still a few posts that I never got around to writing, so I might do that in the coming months.