The Tree of Me

Yesterday I spoke about Trove at the Coffs Harbour District Family History Society's monthly workshop.  This was my second presentation to this group. My topic last year was on Google. My main aim for this presentation was to show why is it important to register with Trove, why tagging is brilliant and the benefits for whole community if we correct the OCR text. Before I started I needed to gauge what the audience knew about Trove so I asked the following questions? Who hasn't heard of Trove? Who has heard of Trove but never been to the website? Who has registered with Trove? What has made corrections to text? Who has added tags to articles? Who hasn't printed and saved? Who has used Trove but have not found anything useful or interesting?  There were a couple who hadn't heard of Trove. Less than one half of the 40 people in the room had registered with Trove, fewer had made corrections and added tags. Others were not aware that you could save and ...

This morning I went to the Reunion for Mac site and discovered that Reunion 10 was released during the past week. Of course, all other plans for today have gone out the window. I have been using Reunion for a long, long time since I changed over from PAF (probably since 1985 or 1986). I tend to be a person who stays loyal to one product. Hence the reason why I have only ever owned an Apple computer, buy Fountain tomato sauce and Colgate toothpaste. There are many new features to Reunion 10. Immediately I can see a couple of great improvements. Reunion now integrates with Google maps. This was one of the reasons I have dabbled with TNG over the past 12 months but I haven't really had enough time to play with TNG to get the most out of it. Perhaps I may leave it now and concentrate on Reunion now that it has this feature. Will need to investigate putting this on the web instead. It is now much easier to merge source information. At one stage I was lazy entering date and onl...

Yesterday, my copy of Inside History magazine arrived. I sat myself down and forgot to start getting tea. This is always the case when it arrives. I always need to set aside some time to peruse the latest edition and this one was no exception. I was quite surprised when I began reading an article titled Entering the blogosphere by Jill Ball, aka Geniaus . In the article she mentioned 50 blogs which are worth following. These blogs included institutional, society, personal, international and organisation blogs. Amongst the personal blogs there was a recommendation to read and subscribe to this blog. I was quite pleased that I actually follow most of the blogs that Jill mentioned. The remaining few have been added to my blog reader, Feedly . Like Jill, I enjoy reading blog posts and more often than not I can find posts that are relevant in some way to my families, posts that make me wish I had more time to devote to my passion, posts that give me clues to help me in my personal researc...

I have previously written two blog posts about Elizabeth Flynn which can be read here and here . Elizabeth was a young girl who went missing in 1861 near Cooma. I have just received an email with more of the puzzle revealed. This answer has been sitting on my bookshelf for more than 10 years. The email gave reference to "in those days..." Numeralla-Countegany-Peak View and surrounding areas which was compiled by the Numeralla and District Community History Group. I have had this book for many years but have only read some sections - obviously not the significant one which pertains to Elizabeth Flynn. Like all research, it answers some of my questions but it raises further issues to be investigated. The following extract is from p. 66 of the publication and was written by a J.W. Evans. George Scott an Englishman came to the Kydra area around 1911. One evening at the home of Mr and Mrs P O'Neill, George was invited in for afternoon tea and while having his 'cup...