Happy New Year. My wish is that 2026 does not go as fast as 2025. More time out to enjoy the things I like - reading, researching and relaxing. My 3Rs!
Apps
As some of you may know, I have been exploring SubStack as a way of recording my family stories or my genealogy thoughts or whatever. Still getting the hang of it, but there are some very interesting people to follow on SubStack. Lots of genealogy motivation. And it may even benefit your research. For example good friend Alex Daw (Family Tree Frog) is on SubStack and wrote a post on one of her ancestors. He was the brother in law of one of the incarcerated women in colonial Queensland in my PhD case studies. How amazing and as I always say, it is a small world. Find me here.
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| Irish famine memorial Dublin 2025 |
Jill Ball's Accentuate the Positive geneameme for 2025 has had us bloggers putting fingers to keyboards over the last couple of weeks. I always like reading about what other researchers have been doing and their success stories.
Read my contribution here.
Books
Updated Library Thing and deleted all the books I have donated to societies or given away. Added the new ones from the last few months.
Not sure that downsizing is working too well - still have close to 700 books and that's not counting fiction.
Have just finished reading Nathan Dylan Goodwin's latest book The Hop-Picker Murders. It is the 11th book in his series on genetic genealogist Morton Farrier.
I will do a short review but I always find it hard to write about a book without giving away plot details. So more thought needed.
Resources
For example this link will show you all new records under Section 9 for the Public Record Office Victoria. A lot of the records have come out of 75 year closed access including children's courts, asylums, divorce and so on. There is also the story of Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Australia in 1951.
Watched a webinar on using the Virtual Treasury of Ireland via the Association of Professional Genealogists. Not the easiest to search, no wildcards or Boolean but keyword followed by filters got me to census statistics for Ballygannon and Glasnarget townlands in County Wicklow. These give population figures and number of households from 1841 to 1881 for the two townlands my Finn and Fagan families emigrated from in 1882. Great background context and also learnt that the railway was completed in 1861.
Talks
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| Mum's ethnicity via MyHeritage |
It was an interesting experiment and useful for sorting out some of Mum's DNA matches. My paper research reveals she was pure English but her ethnicity shows more than England.
Register here for free and find out what I discover.
Webinars
Spent some time selecting my webinar registrations from the fantastic program organised by Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
I seem to have selected a lot of topics with initials eg DNA and AI!
What's coming up
Mustn't forget that I am still doing my Ph D thesis on incarcerated women in colonial Queensland. I have done a lot of the research into the individual women and now into more serious writing and literature reviews and statistics. It is a lot of work but I am also learning some new skills in research, writing and technology. Definitely not bored.
Looking forward to when societies return from the Christmas/New Year break. Attending meetings in person or visiting society libraries and catching up with friends is all part of the family history world.
Wishing everyone a fantastic genealogy year in 2026. Until next time, Shauna
