Worldwide Genimates

I'm a survivor!

Last month I blogged about my rash decision to join the 2016 Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I am pleased to report that I crossed the finish line on time last Saturday with around 1300 other bloggers.

It was a hard slog that ate into my precious time but it was worth the effort. One of the unexpected benefits was that it introduced me to a number of genealogy and history bloggers from around the world. I even discovered that one of my Surname Study contacts was a prolific blogger.

The result is that the number of feeds in my RSS reader has grown significantly.

Reading others' blog posts confirmed my bias towards reminiscing and stories hence the two standout blogs for me were from two Australians, a new contact and a social media mate. If you fancy trips down memory lane do visit Linda and Maureen.

While I saw many old friends in the challenge list some of the new to me blogs I discovered were:

GenWestUK - Ros - England
History Roundabout - ? - England
Molly's Canopy - Molly - USA
My Genealogy Challenges - Dianne - Canada
Old Scottish Genealogy and Blog - Penny and Fergus - Scotland
The Past Whispers - USA
Roots and Stuff - Mary - USA
Southern Graves - Stephanie - USA
Treetrack'n - Mary
The Writing Desk - Ros - England

But wait, there's more - Pauleen has compiled a list of geneabloggers who participated in the challenge.

Better Late then Never

Dear Teacher,

I am sorry that I am late with my post this month but I have a good excuse reason.

I have been very busy playing learning with more than 500 of my friends at a party educational activity called "The 14th Australasian Congress on Genealogy and Heraldry" that was held in Canberra Australia from 26-30 March 2015 . My friends and I just call it Congress.

You may even know some of my Geneablogger friends in this photo below:

GeniAus (Blue shirt right front) and Geneabloggers at Congress

We learnt lots at Congress and also got to visit The Australian War Memorial and Australia's Parliament House. Because I am a good student I went early and spent time working in the National Library of Australia. Some people like Roger Kershaw, David Holman and Simon Fowler came all the way from England and David Rencher, Paul Milner and Colleen Fitzpatrick came from America to share in the fun learning.

I even had to talk to the group twice and that was rather scary. My friend Michelle took this photo of me talking.

GeniAus on Blogging

If you want to see what my friends learnt at Congress you can take a look at this page and see that I have a really good excuse for being late.

It was such good fun that I am going to the next Congress in Sydney in 2018. It would be a good idea for everyone to have an excursion to Sydney for this event as they will learn heaps and have fun too. (http://www.congress2018.org.au/)


Yours Faithfully,
GeniAus
.
PS That link is http://geniaus.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/geneabloggers-at-congress-reflections.html

Want To Be A Geneablogger?

Created on Wordle.com by Fran Ellsworth

My thoughts recently turned to new Bloggers or those that feel the inner pull to join in and and start blogging.  Many I have talked to have wonderful stories to share but are hesitant because they are not sure of what to blog or how to blog.

Following that train of thought I was led to my first year of learning to blog. My daughter set my blog up for me. I had no idea of what I was doing until I found Geneabloggers or should I say they found me and commented on my first blog post. They started expanding my thoughts out to more than just my Hero stories. I  had been motivated by wanting to write my Hero stories, but felt unprepared as to how to thes.  I began visiting other blogs such as Carol on Reflections From the Fence, and Lori's Family Trees May Contain Nuts and Jen on Muddy Boot Dreams.  These ladies introduced me to others through activities and comments on their blogs.   These bloggers also introduced me to Jill GeniAus and Julie Angler Rest. All the blogs I read gave ideas, encouragement, and some how to do research and write about it. They spurred me along.
So if you are pulled toward blogging, you should do it.  It is a lot of fun, you learn so much about yourself and finally about your ancestors.  Why do I say about yourself?  Because you will discover how creative you can become, or maybe how devoted to detail you are, and maybe even become a techie person like Caroline Pointer 4 Your Family Story who started out writing her family history stories.  There is so much diversity in genealogy bloggers. They are from all over the world, I have geni-friends from India, England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Ireland, Canada, and I know I have missed some.  The stories they share are as diverse as they are but the emotional element is the same. Love, strife, challenges, pride, pain, intrigue, etc., they are all felt across the world.
Going back to where I started, if you feel the pull to join the genealogy bloggers and put out some cousin bait as some call it, then here are a few places that can help you with setting out on this journey.

Found on ClipArt Panda

Thomas MacEntee has created the greatest resource for a beginning blogger... GeneaBloggers. Just look at the titles Blog Resources.  Here you find How to Create a blog resources, templates and design tools links.  I started with my own thoughts on my blog picture and haven't changed it... guess I am like that.

He also has Daily Blogging Prompts that will help if you think you don't have any ideas.  Once you have created your blog you can join the Genealogy Blog Roll. Basically we should all be grateful to Thomas for all he does for genealogy blogging. This specific post is a great one. Genealogy Blog Primer 

Kimberly Powell who writes about genealogy on About.com offers this Blogging Your Family History

Lisa Cooke, I love her pod casts, has this on YouTube. How to Blog About Your Family History.

Legacy Family Tree Webinars has a great one on Blogging for Beginners with DearMYRTLE

There are more, but these should be of great help to you. Once you get started you will want to follow fellow genealogy bloggers. You will find the ones that help. You do not have to be a professional genealogist to write your family history blog.

With these thoughts, I will sign off for another month. I hope this finds someone who is on the fence about blogging and they will join our ranks.

Genealogy new year resolutions

A lot of ideas are coming through for reinvigorating our genealogy research in 2015.

Thomas MacEntee has proposed a genealogy do-over starting 2 January. There is a schedule of topics taking us up to the end of March. There is a FaceBook community with 836 members already excitedly exchanging ideas. Many experienced genealogists have come on board and it will be interesting to learn from them.

It is hard to start again but I think it is definitely an opportunity to put into practice all we have learned and apply it to our own family. All of us know more about genealogy research than when we started and do not often revisit the very core of our family tree. There is no question we will make new discoveries. We will probably also be more organised. It is a great opportunity to follow up on Pauleen Cass's post on her three Rs of Genealogy Research : Revisit, Record and Revise.

Some of the ideas that are being shared on organisation:

• Jenny Lanctot on consistency in file naming: http://aremyrootsshowing.jenny-ology.com/2014/12/28/genealogy-do-over-prep-time/
• Miriam Robbins has an elegant way of naming files at http://ancestories1.blogspot.com.au/2008/12/tuesdays-tip-organizing-your-digital.html
• Russ Worthington will not be doing a complete do-over but will be participating. He has already been doing a lot of work with citation templates http://ftmuser.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/genealogy-do-over-and-my-ftm2014.html

I have found blogging to be a great way to revisit and record my family history. A couple of prompts I use to help me find inspiration are:

• Trove Tuesday, started by Amy Lehmann in 2012
• The Sepia Saturday prompts are a lot of fun and it is a very nice community of fellow bloggers (several of whom contribute to this blog)
• Last year I participated in the A to Z blogging challenge. It was a lot of work to produce 26 blog posts in the month of April but I am really pleased with the results. It was very important to prepare so as to be able to complete the schedule.
• Randy Seaver has enjoyable and thought provoking prompts at Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF)
• Thomas MacEntee has lots of prompts and ideas at http://www.geneabloggers.com/

This year I plan to join in the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge by Amy Johnson Crow.

My own family history blog reached 150 posts late last month. I can't quite remember what the prompt was but I decided to print my blog. I used blog2print. It works on various platforms. There are several other providers who also print from blogs. I found blog2print very easy. There are limited options to tweak though you can choose to print only part of your blog using tags or a date range. You can vary the size of the photographs, whether you have a page break between each post ... I am really pleased to have a print copy of my blog. Some of the formatting has not translated perfectly from the screen to the printed page but overall it is a marvellous souvenir and back-up. I look forward to printing volume 2 towards the end of 2015.

Happy researching in 2015

Regards
Anne

The Changing Face of Genealogy Collaboration

We talk about collaboration and telling the stories of our family almost as though it is something new. Surely this is the real reason why so many of us get interested in genealogy in the first instance. Whatever our age we all like to hear about things that have happened be it last week or last century.

This month I have decided to write about collaboration and how the perception of genealogy has changed due to the internet and our increasing use of what is available to connect with others.

When I first started researching our family history (I am also researching my husband's family) the internet was in its infancy and we were on dial up. This was expensive and you would go online pick up your emails and read them later.

Collaborating with others was difficult but not impossible and like many others I used some of the Rootsweb mailing lists of relevance to my research interests.

The only other way of communicating with fellow researchers was to belong to a family history society to find other researchers and contact them by post.

Research in those early days, even just finding a reference to order a certificate, meant heading off to record offices or local archives where you had to trawl through microfiche or film to find what you wanted. There were some indexes available mainly through local family history societies which did help you find the right roll of film.

Programmes like WDYTYA http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575 which is showing its 11th series in the UK have changed public perception and sparked interest in the hobby. Despite only a small proportion of the resources available being online, what is there has made a difference to the way we both conduct and record our research.

These changes have taken place over a relatively short space of time and it is true that there are those who have not truly embraced the changes.

There has been discussion on social networks about how family history societies may need to change to connect with the needs of their members. Some have been forward thinking and have reached out to researchers across the world by providing access to online education but this may not be an avenue that every society can or should copy.

The societies I belong to in England have changed some of the things they do but we must not forget that they rely upon volunteers. The direction that each society takes will depend upon who has the time and inclination to commit to the development of that society. This can lead to a society stagnating because none of its members has the inclination or time to commit to change. If you belong to a society which may be stuck in the past don’t forget to make suggestions, they may get ignored, but any society is only as good as its members are willing to make it.

What do you want from your society? Don’t forget to tell those who help run the society, you may find that others think the same.

I have mentioned discussion on social networks and these have become the equivalent of the mailing lists of the past but more. Facebook has groups for genealogy and Google+ has its communities. There are also others such as Twitter and Pintrest. Whereas we communicated by email and text in the past we now have a much more visual way of sharing. This has enhanced our ability to share our experiences but opened up more challenges when we publish online what might be copyrighted. Will these copyright challenges limit our experience?

We also interact using our blogs such as this one and many other individual blogs see Geneabloggers http://www.geneabloggers.com/genealogy-blogs/  maintained by Thomas MacEntee.

Whilst webinars http://blog.geneawebinars.com/ are an educational resource they can help provide pointers to things you may not be aware of and they are a great way to get information to those who may not be able to get to conferences or other genealogy events.

Video blogging using the Hangouts on Air on Google+ is becoming increasingly popular and allows genealogists from across the world to communicate by live discussion. They can also be used as a tool similar to webinars and a way to share how you do things.

To finish I would like to tell you about a Google+ community I am setting up to discuss how we get our genealogy software to work for us.

I will post on my blog http://masteringgenealogysoftware.blogspot.co.uk/ when I launch. I want this to be a discussion forum so that we can learn from each other, we all need to collaborate.

A Special Gift.

I’d been trying to come up with a topic all month but wasn’t having any luck until a couple of days ago. I was catching up on a TV show when inspiration struck – My Great Great Grandmother Novie.

In January, my family and I went on holidays to Hawaii for two weeks. My Maternal Grandparents – Mum’s Dad & Step-Mother – managed to fly over from Texas and spend a week with us in Hawaii. Grandad is now 83 and my Grandmother is in her early 70’s. They’ve both had some health issues the past few years so we were very lucky they were able to make the trip. Before the holidays, we knew that they were looking to move out of their house and into a retirement village. Their house is quite big and was getting hard to manage with just the two of them living there…and 3 very active little dogs as well. They also wanted to make the decision about moving into a retirement village while they still could, and not have someone else make the decision for them. A couple of weeks after our holiday, they actually found a house in the retirement village they want to live in and are signing the papers today.

Anyway, the night my Grandparents arrived in Honolulu, my Grandad gave me something very special. His Grandmother, my Great Great Grandmother Novie’s sugar bowl and butter dish. I had never seen these before, nor was I expecting anything at all, so I was very surprised and very honoured to be given them. He actually said “out of all the grandchildren, you’ll probably appreciate them the most” and I sure will!

Butter Dish

Sugar Bowl

So, who was my Great Great Grandmother Novie?

Novie Leona Swindell
Approx. 1901, Texas, USA.

Novie Leona Swindell was born in 1874, in Morgan County, Alabama to parents James Webb Swindell & Elizabeth Roberts. Currently I only know of one sibling that she had; a brother, Erbie Milton Swindell born in 1880. In 1894, Novie married Charles Rufus Thompson. They had six children together – Ethel, Pearl, Roy, Claude, Velma & Robert. Ethel was my Great Grandmother. Between 1897 and 1901, after having two children they moved to Texas. 

Thompson's: Charles, Ethel, Roy, Novie & Pearl.
Approx. 1901, Texas, USA.

Something that I hadn’t known about Novie & Charles until my Grandad told me that week was that at some point they separated. My Grandad doesn’t remember having much to do with Charles who moved to New Mexico. Novie lived with Ethel & her family when my Grandad was little to help with the cooking and cleaning. Novie died on the 19^th of March, 1949 in Corsicana, Texas.

I wonder what Novie would think if she knew her butter dish and sugar bowl had made it all the way to Brisbane, Australia? I will treasure them with all my heart, and when I have children, I hope they will too.

Until next time genea-friends.