Where technology meets history

Living and learning with digital natives
Today was ANZAC day in New Zealand and Australia, the time when we remember our war dead and those who have served in the armed forces.
One of my new interests is digital scrapbooking and due to a New Zealand designer developing a heritage ANZAC day kit, I went looking for information and images to put a page together about two of my great great uncles (Claude and Thomas) who died in France.
What started as a personal family history challenge rapidly became a shared experience. Jonathan is a fairly typical seven year old boy with an interest in soldiers and heroes and he was soon sitting beside me to look at pictures of the battlefields, the graves, the saved photos and clips.

We found a photo of one uncle (Claude) on the Cenotaph site and found the exact dates and where they both were killed. As we read the story of the Battle of Messines it was clear that Thomas was probably killed in the first wave of the German counter attack and that was why his grave is unknown. There was a moment of stillness on Jonathan's face as the information all processed together to form a whole that communicated more clearly than words what a deep learning moment he was having.

Once I finished collaging the pictures and stories for my purposes we did a print copy for Jonathan to take to school with some handwritten notes on the bottom of the pages (He had difficulty reading the ornate Vivaldi script I had used.) We went over the pictures so he was sure he knew everything that was important to share, then he looked at me and asked "why did they have to go and fight in the war Mummy?". What a good question ... a question that has so many layers of answers...but one of the reasons he asked it was that he now felt connected to these two young men. He understands what an uncle is, Claude's neice - my grandmother is still living and he still remembers going to see Thomas's nephew - my Grandad at the funeral home 3 years ago when he died. So he had made some connections about family, about death, about sadness. And for a little while today war was real - it was about us - not some distant fighting in Iraq or Afgahnistan, not high tech weapons that destroy at a distance, but a young man going "over the top" if he even got that far - having survived one day of fighting to loose his life the next.

Could he had that moment of insight without the half dozen websites and search engines we used? I dont think so ... I have heard the stories of Claude before and while they have been meaningful the research we did today was at a different level. We could find answers to questions as we asked them and although there is still some paper research I'd like to do it has been the internet's power to bring information to our fingertips that has triggered the journey.

There was nothing horrific in the images we saw from 1916 and 1917. Compared to the nightly news stories of shattered victims of suicide bombers it was pretty tame. Yet for a moment today I was led to reflect that World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars and 92 years later a child is still asking "why did they have to go to the war, Mummy". And one of our most modern pieces of technology helped a modern family make a different kind of connection and relationship - one with the past.