We all have objects and tales that tell stories of where we’ve come from and what’s shaped our lives. For many of us, that involves our family’s stories of migration and immigration.
A family with 10 children are going to emigrate, Jacq Stevens, 1955, Gooi en Vecht Historisch, Netherlands, CC BY-SA
Sharing your own personal migration history can help us to tell a really big story – the story of Europe and the people who live here. We invite you to share your story – through objects like pictures, letters, postcards or recipes – with Europeana Migration, by visiting https://migration.europeana.eu/share
These objects are important parts of your heritage. Recording and digitising them is easier than you might think. Once it’s done, they will become part of the Europeana Migration Collection.
Your story is part of Europe’s rich and shared history of migration, and now it can be recorded for the future, and made freely available for anyone to discover and use for education, research, inspiration and pleasure.
Here are some of the stories that have been shared so far.
In addition to being able to contribute online, today sees the launch of our Europeana Migration Collection Days, events with partner institutions designed to engage local communities and help tell the story of Europe through migration.
Our first event of this pan-European campaign kicks off today, Thursday 15th through to Saturday 17th March, in partnership with the House of European History, in Brussels.
Throughout 2018, the European Year of Cultural Heritage, Europeana will run a series of collection days and events involving museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections across Europe asking people to add their personal migration stories, with material such as pictures, diaries, videos and letters, to the collection.
Further events will be held throughout 2018 in Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Wales, Luxembourg, Croatia and Latvia. See here for the full list.