Our blogging and social media prompts have been designed with our members in mind, but anyone can take part – even if they don’t have a formal one-place study (see One-place study blogging prompts 2021 – everyone’s invited!). The prompts are a series of monthly themes or topics for one-place study activities. Those activities can be any or all of the following:
You are free to use any or all of these prompts – you might look at the topics and see that you can do something for January, March, April and June but not for February or May, for example. We hope that this approach will be flexible enough to give everyone an opportunity to take part, whatever the nature of your Place, your favourite areas of research, or the amount of time you have available.
Articles on the topics written by members for Destinations can be sent to the editor at any time for publication, but where possible please post related blog and social media posts during the relevant months.
Hopefully you will find at least one topic which will spark your interest and prompt you to participate. If not, we have more to come – Hopefully you will find lots of topics which will spark your interest and prompt you to participate – and we have more to come! You can of course put forward suggestions for any that you would like to see included.
We’ve chosen the month of Christmas for the prompt of gifts in our one-place studies, but you need not confine yourself to Christmas presents, nor to gifts given or received in your study place in days gone by (for example, have you given or received gifts connected with your place or your study of it?). Lists of wedding presents in newspapers are potentially a rich source of material for this prompt and, as always, broad interpretation of the topic is welcome!
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceGifts
UK Disability Month runs from November 14th to December 20th, so we’ve chosen November as a month to look at the topic of disability in the history of our places. Disabilities can be physical or mental, and may affect people from birth or as the result of accidents, disease or infirmity later in life. Then, as now, disabilities were not always obvious, and finding evidence of disabled people in your place’s community may not be as easy as looking for entries in the ‘infirmity’ column on the census. See if you can find out how, where and by whom people with disabilities, in or from your place, were cared for; what challenges they faced; and how they dealt with those challenges..
Timelines can be invaluable in genealogy and family history – as a way to present information, as a means of better understanding people’s lives, and as a tool to highlight gaps in our knowledge. Have you used timelines for people or families in your one-place study, or for your place itself? If so, share the details and tell us what you have discovered. If not, this prompt might be just what you need to explore timelines as means of analysing data and presenting facts or summarising stories of people, place, or both.
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceTimelines
Who owned the land in your one-place study, and what changes took place over time in terms of individual landowning families, the extent of their holdings, and overall patterns of land ownership? How (and how well) did your OPS landowners maintain and use their property, what were relationships like between them and their tenants, and what disputes, if any, did they become involved in? Share details of the records you have used to identify landowners find out more about them, and tell us how you have made the most of them.
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceLandowners
A prompt for you to investigate oral histories, local accents, dialects or sayings, and more. Have the voices of any people from your place been captured, in writing or through sound recordings, bringing their interests, concerns, or details of their daily lives into the present day, in their own words? Are the voices of current OPS residents being captured, and if so how (and how are they being preserved)? As always, creativity and broad interpretation is welcome: you might try writing (or posting to social media) in the voice of one of your OPS residents, or, if your place itself had a voice – if its walls could talk – what might it say?
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceVoices
This month’s prompt ties in with the A to Z Blogging Challenge held in April each year. Some one-placers are planning to add 26 posts to their OPS blogs over the course of the month, one for each letter of the alphabet. For our prompt however, you can opt for something less demanding. Possibilities include a single or two-part blog post tackling an A to Z of people, features or themes connected your place, in words or perhaps in pictures. If you frequent social media platforms, you could contribute a series of A to Z posts over the month. Have fun finding, and sharing, someone or something for each letter of the alphabet!
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceAtoZ
What lies beneath your place? Use geological maps or other sources to find out what rocks or other materials (such as gravels, sands, clays and mineral deposits) your place and its environs sit upon, and when those rocks and other deposits were formed. Consider how that underlying geology has affected the local topography, soils, watercourses, and vegetation. How, in turn, has all this affected human activity in your place, including settlement patterns (and locally-sourced building materials), agriculture, industry (including mining or brick-making, for example), and transport routes?
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceGeology
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