Two Years Down the Track

Reflection is so important to me as as a family historian and lifelong learner. For the past few years I have published the Accentuate the Positive Geneameme, a tool genies can use to reflect on the things they have achieved. You can access it and join in here.

http://geniaus.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/a-tradition.html

In my first post on this blog two years ago I  introduced myself. Things have remained very much the same in my Geneaworld although I have picked up a couple of extra volunteering activities.

I am sorry that when travelling I have missed a couple of monthly posts to this blog - I will endeavour to correct this in 2016 when I already have about four months of overseas travel planned. I may rejig some of my old personal blog posts and reblog them here.

The work I have done with another local family historian and our local studies librarian to establish the Hornsby Shire Family History Group makes me feel so proud. In just 11 months we have grown to have over 70 members and have exhibited at various community events.

Jennie Fairs from The Surname Society approached me last year and asked me, as a genie who trips about, to write a regular column for their newsletter, The Surname Scribbler. I was honoured to be asked and appreciate the opportunity it gives me to reflect on my geneactivities. Although my columns are fluffy the bulk of the articles are most informative and instructive. It is worth the modest membership fee to receive copies of this epublication (it's cheaper than many commercially produced publications).

You might note that I use a bit of geneajargon in my writing. I have always been fascinated by jargon and made up words so in August 2014 I started the Geneadictionary blog, a lighthearted publication, in which I share words I find and those that my Genimates find for me. Although it doesn't have a massive readership I enjoy putting this blog together. While I had been dabbling with Wordpress for a few years I had never blogged with it seriously. I now use Wordpress for Hornsby Shire Family History Group website and my  surname study blog CurryAus.

I continue to be involved in Rootstech, the greatest Geneaevent on Earth, and will be an Ambassador and Presenter again in 2016. I wonder which of my fellow bloggers I will meet there this year.

Have you reflected on your geneactivities lately?

Going Wayback

In a recent post on my GenAus blog I lamented that I had not kept files of all the websites I had developed over my 20 years on the World Wide Web. Quick as a flash one of my readers, Kylie Willison, reminded me of The Wayback Machine from The Internet Archive. Why didn't I think of that?

Wikipedia describes the Wayback machine thus "The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three dimensional index.".

So taking on Kylie's suggestion I tried to fins some of my old sites in the Archive but didn't have much luck as the search requires a URL and I couldn't remember the exact URLs of my sites. I'll have to go through some old emails and files and see if I can find them.

What I did remember was the URL for my GeniAus blog. Entering that in the Wayback Machine I discovered that it had first been captured by The Wayback Machine in January 2011 and had been "Saved 53 times between January 27, 2011 and September 5, 2015".  I often play around wiht the design and layout of my blog but forget to take a screenshot before I make changes. I intend going through all of those 53 captures and creating a personal archive of my blog changes. My blog is also captured by The Pandora Archive from The National Library of Australia so it should be accessible via one of these platforms for a long time to come.

First capture of the GeniAus blog by The Wayback Machine.

I wondered about my family site and found that "http://www.geniaus.net  has been "Saved 72 times between July 20, 2009 and October 2, 2015". Ain't that grand.

Of course, when I started writing this post my mind turned to the Worldwide Genealogy Blog and I thought I'd see what I could find in The Wayback Machine. I discovered that it has been "Saved 13 times between February 9, 2014 and September 6, 2015.

Here is the very first screenshot.

First capture of Worldside Genealogy Blog to The Wayback Machine

The post from February 9th about using Evernote for family history was from Diane Hewson in Australia.

Have you checked The Wayback Machine to see if your sites or blogs are being archived?