There's a lot happening at the moment. After my Judge family breakthrough, see Diary for 15-18 Sep 2011, I have been changing online family trees and entering all my new correct data. I still have to do that with my personal database and of course, go through all my paper files. Still I'm glad I've finally found the real Elizabeth Judge even if she is technically Elizabeth Pollard.
I reviewed my talk Archives You Should Know But Perhaps Don't and updated Powerpoint slides where necessary in preparation for today's talk at the Genealogical Society of Victoria. I received nice feedback and it's good to see genealogists broaden their knowledge outside of the usual national/state archives thinking. Hopefully they will all be on their computers tonight looking at all the various sites. My website Resources page has a number of my talks and handouts with links so that people don't have to write so fast.
We finished up with a discussion about blogs (this was after a show of hands revealed hardly any hands)! I was stressing how good they are to find out what is happening and what other people are doing. Also how blogging your family stories can lead to distant relatives finding you. I gave my Maria Jeffers blog Letters Home My Irish Families example. The comments on that blog include responses from family members descended from the person mentioned in the letters. They had no idea the letters even existed! I hope GSV attendees at least look at some blogs and maybe even try out Blogger themselves. With luck they are reading this now!
I did another guest blog for MyHeritage and that should appear tomorrow and I watched Brad Argent from Ancestry on Mornings with Kerri-Anne on Channel 9 on Wednesday talking about famous Australian celebrities. But I forgot to watch Who Do You Think You Are that night - at 10pm it's a bit late for me. I'll have to get the DVD! It's the second series of the US version and Wikipedia has a nice summary of the WDYTYA US shows, both seasons.
The September e-newsletters I've read since last time include Ancestry, Lost Cousins, National Archives UK, Unlock the Past Crew, FindMyPast UK, and S&N Genealogy News. Sometimes I think I subscribe to too many e-newsletters but they are mostly free (except for my subscription sites) and I usually find something of interest in all of them. I like how you can click on links and follow up items of interest which you can't do if reading paper magazines (I know you can type in URLs but nothing beats instant link). I will confess I do speed read, skim, only look at the pictures etc unless it is specifically on an area of personal interest.
Sounds like you've been busy!
ReplyDeleteI've been blogging my family history research since the beginning of this year. I find it gives me a good reason to seek out the stories about my ancestors and not just find out where and when they were born and died.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, new relatives have contacted me through it, and recently I printed it out and gave to my non-computer-literate elderly relatives to read - they loved it!
I'd definitely encourage anyone doing family history research to blog it.