Monday 30 June 2014

Genealogy notes 23 - 30 June 2014 NFHM and writing blogs

Well the last week did not go as planned.Mum's birthday party went well and we had our little trip to Sea World and unbelievably the baby polar bear came out to play when I was standing right in front of his enclosure thinking I was going to miss him. Mum polar bear wasn't far behind him and the Dad polar bear was in another enclosure where we saw him swimming and having a good time too. So all up an excellent few days of family fun.

Then I made the mistake of deciding to rearrange some book cases and the layout of the study. I am happier with this rearrangement but it does take time regrouping and reshelving hundreds of books. We are definitely never moving again! Of course I also found books that I had not yet read so a nice little pile of them to look forward to. The other thing is that I have too many genealogy magazines and I can't bring myself to part even with the very outdated ones. I find that flicking through them gives me ideas or reminds me of things that I have forgotten about. Yet space and storage is a factor.

Some of my genealogy society memberships and genealogy magazines are only digital these days which saves space but out of sight out of mind. I need to write myself reminders to read these digital copies.

I think all of this was a bit of procrastination as whenever I get towards the end of a big writing project I always seem to find other things to do rather than tackle the fiddly bits and pieces to finish a job. Still it won't go away and that is the goal for this week.

There are two new posts in my personal genealogy blog challenge - 52 Weeks of Genealogical Records in 2014. Week 19 is Family Bibles and Week 20 is Mining Records. I am finding it hard to keep up the weekly blogs but it is really good to look at each topic and then to think about what ancestors I want to write about or look up new information on.

National Family History Month is still taking up time with new events being added all the time. I posted an update on my website - read the update here. Invitations to the launch have gone out and I have booked my flight and accommodation for Canberra. I think next year it has to be a warmer launch (but I guess that will be determined by whoever the voluntary coordinator is).

My findmypast.com.au subscription allows me to access British newspapers online and in another obvious display of procrastination I spent a lovely afternoon finding interesting bits and pieces in UK newspapers. I often do this with Trove or Papers Past so it was interesting to spend more time exploring the UK equivalent.

On Twitter I have been following all the new indexes on the Claim a Convict website. They are doing really good work and it is a must go to website for anyone with convicts. Deceased Online is another website that I follow on Twitter for updates on UK burials and cremations and of course FamilySearch is always adding to their website. Then there are all the nice links I pick up from Facebook genealogy friends and sometimes I go on Google + but keeping up with everything is tricky.

Genealogy friend Geniaus speculated in a blog post How Do You React? if anyone ever reads what we write and should we even keep writing. While I do write to share bits and pieces with my genealogy cyber buddies, I also write for myself. It is a way for me to record what I am doing, to write down ancestor stories, and to look back on what I have done over the past few years of having a website and blogging. The Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive) has captured snapshots of my website over the years and this Diary is archived in the National Library of Australia's Pandora web archive accessible through Trove.

So yes I do think people should keep on blogging and imagine if every genealogist and family historian blogged their family stories. We would be finding cousins all over the place and brick walls would come tumbling down which are some of the positives I have seen so far in my own writing.

And on that note I have to get back to some serious work! Until next time happy researching.


1 comment:

  1. Couldn't have said it better! Particularly the digital mags comment. Much hard to remember to read them, thank those arriving via snail mail. The British Newspaper Archives are my current reading too. Really enjoying them.. Thanks the National Library and FindMyPast. So this is a me too post, back to writing a paper or two...

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