About us – Why Intriguing?
The word intriguing was adopted as it defines something many of us interested in family history share, a lifelong passion for learning, exploring and discovering connections. In this instance for humanities subjects, digitally enabled and in particular for family, social, local, British and colonial history. It describes (for us at least) the fascination for seeking the answer to a problem as yet unsolved and that is always luring you on to the next set of goals and as yet undiscovered solution. It applies to the detective work of researching the history itself and also the application of technology to enable a range of selected projects. More than anything it is the intriguing notion that if you can just discover some more connections, facts and context you just might make a minor breakthrough in your own individual research and even if we don’t we will be enjoying the endeavour and learning from it whatever the outcome.
About our personal projects
Helen was plotting on a map with pins, postits and every other manual process you can think of, I was interested in the ideas but not patient enough to do it ALL manually. Friends since we were 11 at the Horndean College of Knowledge with a shared interest in history we wanted to make something better than the tools we had around us that could give us our own research platforms for our one name studies Banting Family History and the Dipnalls.
About Intriguing Family History
With individual One Names Studies (Bantings and Dipnalls) ongoing and ten years plus of family history research under our belts together with three decades of IT experience to hand we wanted to take some paper concepts for analysing data and information online. We created IFH to exhibit our early proofs of concepts at WDYTYA Live at Olympia London. Subsequently we led with a small members team some voluntary work to relaunch the web facilities for HGS ( our local family history society) a society we continue to work with, are members of and continue to develop its web capabilities with.
IFH forms the connecting piece between our own individual projects and the wider projects of Intriguing History and Hampshire History. These sites are currently viewed by more than 60k individual users as a minimum per annum and so it would seem we are not entirely alone in our interests. However we have lots more we want to do and share with those who might be interested or want to participate. The concept, content and capabilities together with the art of the possible continue of course to expand. We hope on this site to share tools and techniques, resources and a few select products and services to help us continue to resource and finance our projects and research so that we can all enjoy or own unique products and interests as much as is possible.
About Intriguing History
Intriguing History web project which takes the principles of connecting history with time, events, people and places to help each of us with family, social, local and wider history interests to explore the broader context using a WordPress engine, geocoding and mapping with a variety of connected cloud, web-based and open-source software and services to extend and expand what we can each achieve in this and our own and associated projects.
About Hampshire History
For the love of the history of this ancient and beautiful county of Hampshire, with deep family and historical roots, we decided to take the plunge and try and give something back whilst continuing always to learn ourselves along the way. It continues to be an ongoing experiment, its scope again is huge and our resources and time quite modest but sometimes you just have to take on the challenge and see where it leads you. We wanted to create a resource that was focused on a zoomed-in basis on something of smaller scale, or so we thought, than Intriguing History by utilising and exploring some of the tools and techniques we have discovered, but having a subject which was more tangibly within physical reach and our direct experience. Helen Banham has been leading this project from a content perspective and has invested many hours in her love and passion for discovering and sharing a little of the great enjoyment and information she has been curating and sharing during the last 18 months (as we speak it is Nov 2014.)
About Intriguing Networks
The technology and web capability is provided and developed by Intriguing Networks being a business, marketing and technology consultancy and web developer.
About Deejmedia
David Moore of Deejmedia has led the development of brandings and website designs development and styling in conjunction with Intriguing Networks. His continued commitment to help to get these projects started and onwardly developed is much appreciated and valued.