Monday was mostly taken up with finalising my talks for Brisbane and Toowoomba in August. Whenever I visit Brisbane to see family, the local genealogy societies often ask me to give talks at their monthly meetings. This is always a good opportunity to catch up with old friends so if I can fit these meetings in, I do.
On Monday 15 August 2011 I will be speaking at the Southern Suburbs branch of the Genealogical Society of Queensland and I have known some of them for over 30 years which is quite amazing. The talk is on mining ancestors and most people in Queensland usually have one or more mining ancestors. As this is such a huge topic, the hardest part of doing this talk is keeping it to 45 minutes!
Since December 2010 I have been writing a monthly article on mining ancestors for Australian Family Tree Connections and the feedback has been really good. As well as helping people with their own research, the mining series has also put me in touch with a few of my own long lost cousins who have recognised photographs I used to illustrate the articles. Also one gentleman in a mining area where my great grandfather died even went to the remote cemetery and took photos for me. So it really does pay to advertise your family research.
The other talk I worked on was a revision of my Victorian ancestors talk which I last gave in May in Sydney for the Society of Australian Genealogists. The weekend I gave the talk was also the weekend that Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) changed its website but I still had to go with my existing slides as I had no idea what the new site looked like until the following Monday.
As well as updating the PROV slides, I also had to update the home pages of a few other sites to make them current again. It is amazing how often home pages change with new content or new looks or whatever. The Victorian talk is being given to the Queensland Family History Society at their Wednesday meeting on 17 August 2011. I am a founding member of that society (1979) so again I know quite a few of them although more recent members only know me from my periodic visits.
Preparing talks takes longer than people suspect (I think) so I didn't do too much more than check for any urgent or exciting emails and to check Twitter and Facebook similarly. I did look at all my Google+ invitations and realised that there was more than one person per invitation email so I ended up adding dozens of people to my circles, mostly other genealogists. I really need to get my head around using this for genealogy at least.
Tomorrow I hope to finalise my last Toowoomba talk and then it will be a review of all talks, print paper copies just in case something goes totally wrong with the technology and to back them up on two USB sticks. I try to be prepared for everything but there is always Murphy's Law!
I'm starting to get excited about all the talks and events in the remainder of July and August so check the list of events on my website and see if I will be visiting a place near you soon.
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