The Tree of Me

For at least 20 years I have always know that my great great grandmother, Sarah Jane Merchant nee Hooton was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of Tenterfield cemetery. I had never bothered to look for her specific resting place. Two weeks ago, I went to Tenterfield for a few days and decided to take some photos for Billion Graves. Instead of looking for family headstones in a methodical way I wandered around to the headstones I knew well. I took lots of photos and was content. Later I thought I should really check out other more distant family members in the cemetery. I searched my Reunion database for those who had died in Tenterfield. I already had the burial places noted so copied them down and went back for a more ordered search. Included on my list was Sarah Jane. Imagine my surprise when I compared her location to other family members. There she was, between her two eldest children, James Joseph Merchant and Harriet Baker. Joe Merchant died i...

Recently I have been scanning some photographs that my father had in his possession. Although I know what the following one is, I was wondering if any of my readers would like to take a guess. I'll post the answer in a couple of weeks.

This post is a thank you to Geniaus and her blog Genimates . I was profiled on this blog in March 2011.  Earlier this year I was contacted by a Glock (Uralla) relative of my husbands. I was overseas at the time and promised to make contact when I returned. It turns out that this gentleman was going on holidays and would speak to me upon his return. He said he was coming to Coffs Harbour for his holiday which is actually where I live. To cut a long story short we arranged to meet and swapped some information. I asked him how he had found me and was shown the copy of my information on Genimates. So thank you Jill for Genimates.

A few weeks ago I was one of 5 lucky competition winners on Inside History's Facebook page. All I had to do was tell them about the best e-resource at the State Library. What did I win? A lifetime subscription to the iPad version of Inside History magazine. Here is my simple answer.   An e-resource is an electronic resource which could include databases, books, journals and newspapers in an electronic  format. The NSW State Library has many of these available for those unable to visit in person. The best e-resource at the NSW State Library is always the one that I am currently using. So at the moment the best e-resource is the 19th century British Newspaper collection. I should also mention that previously I have won a copy of In Her Own Words - The Writings of Elizabeth Macquarie . To win that I wrote about my favourite woman in my family research. So if you want to win one of their regular prizes, log onto Facebook, like Inside History and look for their competi...

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...