I am watching an old episode of Doctor Who, with Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor. It’s called ‘Dalek’, for those who are interested. They’ve just appeared in an underground Vault in Utah and I was expecting to see shelves and shelves of microfilm! But no, it’s an alien museum, owned by the owner of the internet.

OK, now the Dalek has taken out the power for the whole of Utah. What will happen to the FHL???

Haha, I remember this episode, the Dalek can fly up stairs!

• No Related Post

I went to the funeral of a friend today.

We both used to work at the same company, many years ago. There were quite a few people at the funeral, enough to fill the chapel at the crematorium, and the majority all knew him from working at the same company. Large companies were more friendly places then.

A few of us used to have ‘Movie Lunches’, where we would have lunch together at a local Thai restaurant and talk about movies we had seen, among other things. Once we had all left the company and gone our separate ways, and the restaurant had closed down, we started going out for dinner instead, every few months.

More recently few of us had even been to see any movies, even on DVD. But we still get together, and we enjoy each others’ company. I missed the last dinner before Christmas, and I’m so sorry I did.

He was enthusiastic about everything he did. He travelled extensively around the world from an early age, and he loved music, and movies, and football (soccer), and cable TV, and many other things. He was so pleased to have a job when he could get one, and happy to travel when he didn’t.

I learned a lot about him that I hadn’t known before. He was travelling in the sixties, and had seen the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Who, live and in their prime. He had joined the circus but only stuck it out for one day, the work was too hard. He liked gridiron football. He had two sisters with the same straightforwardness that he had.

He had a daughter and a son, and it was wonderful to see them, and see what lovely people they have become.

He had had heart problems for years, and had rejected bypass surgery. He changed his diet completely and for a while it seemed to work. His heart problems had extended to other organs, but it was his very big heart that killed him.

Goodbye Trevor, and thank you. We will miss you.

• No Related Post

Week 5

Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, but the vast size of the network makes it an important genealogy tool. If you are looking for a specific book or publication, enter the identifying information into the WorldCat search box and see which libraries hold the item. You may even find that you can get the item through your library’s inter-library loan program. Don’t forget to search for some of your more unusual surnames and see what comes up. The goal is to play with WorldCat and examine its possibilities for your own research. If you’re already familiar with WorldCat, play with it again. The network and collection grow and change constantly. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with searching WorldCat for this exercise.

WorldCat is a catalogue of many, many libraries in the world. I’ve used it before and usually it has told me that the book I am looking for is in the State Library of NSW or the National Library of Australia. Unfortunately my genealogy society isn’t part of WorldCat, but one day that will change.

For the sake of this exercise I decided not to look for a book that I know of, but to find books that I didn’t know about. As Amy suggested, I’ve put in one of my unusual surnames – Whippy. David Whippy, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, arrived in Fiji in about 1822 and stayed there.

So I put “Whippy” in the WorldCat search, and waited. 70 results, including a dissertation about job satisfaction in Guam University. I narrowed it down by adding ‘Fiji’, and came up with 5 results, 2 of which were the same.

The most relevant item I found was a microfilm of a play written by Isobel Whippy:

The play concerns the first British Consul in Fiji, William Thomas Pritchard, who arrived in Levuka in September 1858 and was dismissed from his post in January 1863. It is based on a theory that the Consul lost his job because of a love affair with a young woman – possibly a part-European – who gave birth to two children by Pritchard, before he married her in the British Consulate in Levuka a few days afte his dismissal. The play is in two acts – the first covering the period from September 1858 to June 1859; the second from November 1859 to July 1862. There is an epilogue concerning the year 1864.

The microfilm was published by the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau in Canberra, which I happen to know is part of the Australian National University and who microfilm manuscripts related to Pacific history. The films are available in the State Library NSW, and I have accessed them there in the past.

WorldCat, however, told me that my nearest copy was at Yale University Library, New Haven, CT 06520 United States, at a distance of 10000 miles. If I selected the other, identical title, I could find it at the State Library of NSW, the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of Victoria.

There is however, a link to Related Identities, one of which was the Australian National University Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. There’s a timeline for the Bureau that goes back to 1830, which was rather startling until I realised that most of the works listed are about American whalers in the Pacific and such, and filmed by the PMB.

So the end result of my investigation is that I can almost always find what I need in the State Library of NSW, in Sydney where I live. Anything that this library doesn’t have will probably be in Canberra and probably available on inter-library loan, although I haven’t hit this situation yet.

David Whippy didn’t arrive on a whaler but the principle is the same, so I now have a list of resources I can check to find out more about the way of life and the history of Americans in the Pacific, if not about David Whippy directly. Most, if not all, available at the State Library of NSW.

Libraries Australia has  a combined catalogue of many libraries in Australia. I don’t know if all the same libraries are in both catalogues. The free version of this catalogue is within Trove.

I put Whippy in the Search field and got a whole heap of results:

As you can see, there’s a vast array of stuff which will take me some time to work through. Not all of it is relevant, but some of it is. For example, the third entry under Australian newspapers (1803-1954) is a page from the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1856 containing transcripts of correspondence about American activities in Fiji. In one of the letters, written by James Calvert, the Wesleyan missionary, Mr Whippy, my David Whippy, is mentioned a number of times as arbitrating with Mr. Calvert in a dispute between the natives and an American ship’s captain. I was then able to correct the transcription of the notoriously difficult newspaper print, and download a PDF of the page or the whole newspaper.

Further down the screen there are sections for Maps, Diaries and Letters, and Archived Websites. All sections can be opened and closed on this summary screen, or clicked on to give the full list of results.

Trove is relatively new, and having now played with it I can see it is vastly superior to WorldCat for my purposes. Australian catalogues are more likely to be useful to me in general to find a book I can borrow in an Australian library. Trove gives so much more than any library catalog that I would be unlikely to go anywhere else.

It also gave me more books than WorldCat did. On its list of 96 books, journals and magazines, etc, it gives the title Gone Native in Polynesia by Ian Christopher Campbell, a book I’ve been trying to get hold of for some time. This book has a whole chapter on David Whippy in Fiji. There are tabs for each State, and under NSW I can see that it’s available at the State Library of NSW and the University of Wollongong Library. There is also a link to show where I can buy a copy – in this case from Blackwell Online for 70 pounds or Amazon from US$79.00 to US$235.00. I won’t be buying a copy for my library, but I have a search in eBay just in case.

Isobel’s play is there, with the same results – State Library of NSW, and the reference number is given.

Really, I can’t see why I would use WorldCat on a day-to-day basis. Contributers to Trove include Project Gutenberg, so I might be able to download the book I want then and there.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 1
  Week 1 Go to your local public library branch. Make a note of the genealogy books in the collection that may help you gain research knowledge. Don’t forget to check the shelves in both the non-fict...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 3
  I'm a bit late starting on Amy's 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge, but late is better than never, so here goes. Week 3: Assess yourself! You’re great at researching everyone else’s history...
• Christmas Cheer in the Great Depression
  Here is a link to a remarkable story in the New York Times a few days ago about a suitcase found in the attic of the writer's mother and the story it contained. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/op...

Week 1

Go to your local public library branch. Make a note of the genealogy books in the collection that may help you gain research knowledge. Don’t forget to check the shelves in both the non-fiction section and the reference section. If you do not already have a library card, take the time to get one. If you have a genealogy blog, write about what you find in your library’s genealogy collection.`

I have been into Hornsby Library many times, and I have a library card, and it even has money on it for printing. Hornsby Library has a good family history section, with two microfilm readers/printers.

They don’t tend to keep up with later editions of important how-to books, and I find that my own are more up-to-date. They have a good local history collection, as you would expect.

The microfilm and microfiche collection is much more useful to me. They have a large part of the Archive Research Kit developed by the Archives Office of NSW (as it was then, now State Records NSW), which includes:

• the Early Church Records collected by the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages from the churches once civil registration was introduced
• Colonial Secretary’s Correspondence from 1788 to 1825, covered by the online index at State Records NSW
• various convict records
• the Immigration Agents’ Lists
• lists of ships arriving
• [forgive the lack of proper citations, I'm writing this from memory on the train]

They also have the Tasmanian birth, death and marriage records up to 1899 on microfilm, which always surprised me until I realised that Tasmania is the only other state that has published theirs on microfilm.

They have a good collection of local newspapers on microfilm, although not full runs.

They also have the rate books and minutes of the local council on microfilm.

I must admit that I have never investigated the resources available on the computers at the library, as I usually have my own, or have used mine at home before I get there. I can also usually find what I’m looking for on the Hornsby Library catalogue online before I arrive.

www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au

28-44 George St (entrance in Hunter Lane)
Hornsby NSW 2077
0298476813

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 5 – WorldCat
  Week 5 Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, b...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 3
  I'm a bit late starting on Amy's 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge, but late is better than never, so here goes. Week 3: Assess yourself! You’re great at researching everyone else’s history...

I’m a bit late starting on Amy’s 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy Challenge, but late is better than never, so here goes.

Week 3:

Assess yourself! You’re great at researching everyone else’s history, but how much of your own have you recorded? Do an assessment of your personal records and timeline events to ensure your own life is as well-documented as that of your ancestors. If you have a genealogy blog, write about the status of your own research and steps you may take to fill gaps and document your own life.

What do I have to document my life?

I have my birth certificate, and my marriage certificate. Those are the essentials, I guess.

I have my two university degrees, and transcripts. And my counselling diploma.

I have old journals and diaries.

I have these blogs, and their backups on my computer.

I have masses of family photos, some of which have me in them. The early ones are classified and named as best I can. They are in albums and on my computer and backed up on an external hard drive.

I tell family stories to my nieces, including my own, but I’ve realised they probably don’t really know much about me. I can change that, I guess, or I can write more of it down.

Some of this would need an IT-literate person to dig up, like the blog backups.

If I think of more, or more likely when I think of more, I’ll add them later.

Next morning

I was lying awake last night thinking about this, and I realised I was thinking of the documents and photos that a future family historian might be happy to have. I thought of some more:

• my resume, detailing the jobs I’ve had and what I did in them
• copies of references, from the days when written references were normal
• a folder full of certificates of attendance and such at various courses, mostly in IT but there’s one on Thai Cooking
• various documents and search results relating to the house we currently own
• mortgage documents which a really keen family historian could wade through
• a Google Map, showing where I’ve lived through my life

But the other thing I was thinking was that I could have taken this a different way. Very little of all this wonderful detail is documented in my family tree software. I use TMG, which is more than capable of handling any and all of this stuff. All I have about me personally, though, is my birth, marriage, university degrees, and attendance at various family funerals.

It has never occurred to me to try to document my life as part of the whole family history I am trying to build, and that never really part of the plan.

One good reason to do it, though, is for the practice it gives. I know more about my life than anyone else’s, and the problems I will encounter and the procedures I will have to invent will be useful when I come to document the other members of my family.

So there it is. More work to do! I knew there was a reason I was hesitant to get started on these 52 Challenges!

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 5 – WorldCat
  Week 5 Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, b...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Week 1
  Week 1 Go to your local public library branch. Make a note of the genealogy books in the collection that may help you gain research knowledge. Don’t forget to check the shelves in both the non-fict...

It’s Australia Day, and I was inspired by Shelley’s blog to find out what happening on this day in my own family’s past.

Here are the highlights:

1616 – Eleanor Nicholas, my 9th great grandmother, was baptised in St Keverne, Cornwall.

1823 – Martha Miles, my 3rd great-grandmother, was baptised in the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Towcester, Northamptonshire. She married George Goode from Yardley Hastings, Northamptonshire and they migrated to New South Wales with their two young daughters.

1840 – James Pascoe, baby brother of my 3rd great-grandfather Henry Pascoe of St Keverne, Cornwall, was baptised. He died unmarried  when he was only 31.

1865 – Grace Pascoe nee Oates, my 3rd great-grandmother, her daughter Bessie, and her mother Elizabeth Oates nee Williams arrived in Sydney on the Hornet from Plymouth as assisted immigrants, eventually joining their brothers and sons in the Millthorpe area of New South Wales. Eleanor Nicholas was her 4th great-grandmother.

2008 – dear Uncle Ray passed away after a long illness.

For all but the last one there was no ‘Australia’, let alone Australia Day.

To find out how I got the list out of my family tree software, see this blog.

• When is a substandard photo a great photo?
  I've recently updated my Facebook photo from the Christmas version to my normal one. The normal one is taken from an unusual angle, and it's a bit fuzzy. I love it, though, because of the photographer...
• My family tree
  Carole's Family Tree I have been researching my family tree for a few years now, and there is always more information to find, more names to research, more relatives to talk to. My Australian famil...
• A visit to Fiji in 1832
  On the 15th May 1831 the barque Peru from Salem, Massachussetts arrived in the Fiji Islands to look for beche-de-mer, turtle shell, and other trade goods. The Captain, John H. Eagleston, wrote a log w...
• Be a good ancestor
  In my previous post I mentioned the concept of the "good ancestor" and I think it deserves a bit more explanation. When I first saw the term I was thinking, as a genealogist, about all the things w...
• Building communities in times of economic crisis
  I've been reading about how people are coping with the Great Recession. Here in Australia things are not as bad - so far the fear is worse than the reality. In the United States and other countries th...

I’ve recently updated my Facebook photo from the Christmas version to my normal one. The normal one is taken from an unusual angle, and it’s a bit fuzzy. I love it, though, because of the photographer and the circumstances in which it was taken.

My niece turned 13 early last year, and for her birthday her parents had approved a mobile phone. This is no ordinary 13-year-old – she looks after her things amid the chaos of living in a small house full of teenage girls. So the day this photo was taken I took her shopping to buy her the Aunty Carole present,  and we looked for her mobile at the same time.

In the end the mobile she wanted was more expensive than her parents had approved, but with my contribution would work out. We called her Dad, he said yes, and we bought the phone and went home with it.

The battery had a bit of charge, and she started playing with the camera. She took this photo of me as I was leaving – the car keys are in my hand.

So every time I see this photo it reminds me of her, and what a good day we had that day. It’s not a great photo as a portrait of me, but I love it. She’s taller than me, as you can see.

Memories

So it’s the memories associated with the photo that make it special. I used to find this when I would edit the enormous numbers of prints from an overseas holiday. We used to go to exotic places with wildlife (and we will again one day), and we’d come home with dozens of rolls of film. When the photos were developed I’d sort through them and choose the best to put in an album. [This is like a history lesson, we don't do this any more!]

Sometimes it was hard to choose the right photo, because the memories attached to the photo outweighed the objective interest of the photo itself. The first lion we spotted in Africa resulted in a photo of a small blob in a large expanse of yellow grass, which could just as easily have been a bush. Anyone looking at the photo would not give it a second glance, but for me it brings back the excitement of the day, with everyone leaning out that side of the truck trying to decide what it was, and realising it was a lion! The first iceberg on the way to the Antarctic peninsula is equally unspectacular. So the photos are in the albums even though they mean nothing, and may be uninterpretable, to anyone else.

Family history

Perhaps this is a by-product of the Camera Age, where we all take way too many photos and keep them all. Or the Tourist Age. I was recently subjected to the digital photos of a nephew’s trip to Egypt, all 1050 of them. Overseas trips are particularly susceptible to this. After I had chosen the photos and put them in the album I would check with my husband to see if I’d left any out that he has particular memories of – a shot re remembers trying to take of a leopard, or whatever, that had no significance for me.

Looking through old family albums, then, may not be the time-consuming process it is for more recent ones, but the same principle applies. Before you flick past to the next page, looking for a face you recognise, think about the photo you are looking at.

Why that building? Or that tree? What could it’s significance have been? Who took it? Is the format different from all the others, an indication that someone else’s camera was involved?  Do the same people, or buildings, or even trees, keep turning up? Is it just a blob in the grass?

• Sometimes photos appear in the most unlikely places!
  I've been in the country for Christmas. My mother lives in Orange and a lot of us converged on her house for a few days. She grew up in Blayney and her father and his parents and grandparents all live...
• Australia Day family history events
  It's Australia Day, and I was inspired by Shelley's blog to find out what happening on this day in my own family's past. Here are the highlights: 1616 - Eleanor Nicholas, my 9th great grandmother,...
• The best DVD of all – home movies
  It is startling to watch old movies of yourself. I've been watching some old movies taken by my uncle that he has recently had transferred to DVD for us. My uncle has always been an early-adopter -...
• My family tree
  Carole's Family Tree I have been researching my family tree for a few years now, and there is always more information to find, more names to research, more relatives to talk to. My Australian famil...
• Be a good ancestor
  In my previous post I mentioned the concept of the "good ancestor" and I think it deserves a bit more explanation. When I first saw the term I was thinking, as a genealogist, about all the things w...

Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and I’ve been playing with it ever since.

So far I’m just installing the software I need and downloading and installing updates, and the battery has lasted very well. The keyboard feels solid and the major keys are much the same size as on my standalone keyboard, although of course all the other keys are in different places – another keyboard to get used to. The touch pad is much the same size as on my 15in laptop.

It works well and quickly, even though I wasn’t able to upgrade the RAM to 2GB as the salesperson advised me. I’ve seen forums where a lot of people have upgraded theirs successfully, and I might consider that later when I really start using it.

I am expecting to use it when I go into the city or out to the archives, and for my birthday last year I got a mobile broadband … thingy (whatever the thing is called). My old mini is a HP 2133. The battery lasts less than 2 hours, and with Vista it’s very slow to get going – both reasons to leave it at home. If I use it on the train on the way into the city I have to take the power cable to charge it again for the ride home, especially if I actually use it while I’m in the city. I bought it too soon – at the time there was very little around, and what there was was small and made from flimsy-looking plastic.

It’s so small and convenient that I’ll probably use it around the house as well. The fate of the HP is yet to be decided.

• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...
• Growing need for powerboards
  I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I've run out of power points. Again. How is this possible? Let's count them. My office at the moment has...
• Data Backup Day
  I am in the midst of a website crisis. I run my blogs, including this one, and my business website using Wordpress. They are all easy to back up, and all are easy to upgrade Wordpress except for the b...

I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part:

You must read and follow all set-up and usage instructions in the provided manuals and Instruction Manual for Safety and Comfort. If you fail to do so, this product will not function properly and you may lose data or suffer other damage. EVEN IF YOU DO SO, TOSHIBA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OR WARRANTY THAT THIS PRODUCT WILL FUNCTION PROPERLY IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. [Upper case in original]

Thanks, Toshiba, that’s very comforting.

• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...
• Growing need for powerboards
  I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I've run out of power points. Again. How is this possible? Let's count them. My office at the moment has...
• Data Backup Day
  I am in the midst of a website crisis. I run my blogs, including this one, and my business website using Wordpress. They are all easy to back up, and all are easy to upgrade Wordpress except for the b...

It is startling to watch old movies of yourself. I’ve been watching some old movies taken by my uncle that he has recently had transferred to DVD for us.

My uncle has always been an early-adopter – cameras, movie cameras, colour TV, video player, computer, he was always first by a long way. I can remember one of the first videos he bought was Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty, and the way I remember it it cost him something like $50, and that must have been many years ago, when I was a teenager.

He took colour photos of us when we were young before anyone else had a colour camera, and he had progressed to taking video in time for my twenty first.

At Christmas my Mum gave me two DVDs to copy of movies my uncle had taken over the years, and today I’ve been watching them. They go back to at least 1950, when my Mum was not yet a teenager and living in a big house on the edge of Blayney. There’s kids playing with dogs and puppies, cats and kittens, and eating lollipops. There’s my uncles working on the farm – on the tractor, ploughing, sowing, and harvesting. People are playing tennis on the court behind the house. There’s a snowball fight. I think snow was rare in that area. It’s a shame the film could only be taken outside – I’d love to see what the house was like inside!

Then there are weddings – of my aunt, and later of my cousins. Twenty-first birthdays, a trip to the zoo, visits to Sydney, and lots of people getting into their cars to drive away. My grandparent’s wedding anniversaries are there – the 50th and the 60th. There’s a family reunion that I remember going to with my boyfriend at the time – I was 16. There was a visit to the Blayney Cemetery afterwards which I could have sworn I didn’t join but there I am, with the boyfriend, walking along the graves. There was also a visit to the old house in Blayney, with Uncle pointing out which sheds were there before and the hill where the snowball fight took place.

There are kids playing in my cousins’ backyard pool, kids playing under the hose at Gran’s, and kids opening Christmas presents on the front verandah at home, watched by parents and grandparents. There are lots of occasions where people are sitting and eating, or lining up at the buffet  table to stock up, or bringing more food out. All that food, all prepared by mothers and aunties and Gran, and later my older cousins. It was normal to ‘bring a plate’ in those days. There are speeches, at 21sts and weddings, with the ubiquitous bottle of tomato sauce on the table in front of the wedding party.

There are awful fashions, in clothes and hair – men in bellbottoms and wide collars and long hair, women who should have known better in short dresses. I am particularly horrified by my first pair of glasses at 10 – they were big black frames and after a very short time I stopped wearing them outside; and a particularly dreadful outfit consisting of a yellow Tommy Tshirt, an orange hand-knitted vest (originally made for my uncle) and jeans, and an awful haircut that can really only be described as a mullet.

There were lots of cars. My uncle was always interested in cars, and his preoccupation shows. Big cars, with bench seats that could fit three adults in the front and three or four kids in the back. No need for a van to move the family in those days!

I don’t remember attending many of these events. I don’t remember being at that cousin’s 21st, but there I am, sitting down eating. I don’t remember visiting the Blayney Cemetery with the family after the Oates Family Reunion. I don’t remember visiting my uncles’s place in Sydney with my family and Mum’s boyfriend. I guess we all have selective memories.

It is interesting to see how people reacted in those days to having a camera pointed at them, and the persistence of my uncle when they wanted him to stop. Kids were unselfconscious and kept going about their business, but adults were a bit freaked out. My uncle visited us from Sydney only every few months, and it was only at such times that we were subjected to the paparazzi treatment. Not like today, when every mobile phone has a video camera and kids put the results on Facebook or YouTube.

Of course, we were all a lot thinner then. And smaller. My little brothers have grown up and gone on with their separate lives. My beautiful sister has had kids and worries of her own. Gran and Pop have passed on, as has one of my uncles. My first boyfriend married someone else, as did I. The cousins I’ve seen married today mostly divorced and remarried.

These DVDs are priceless, and I will watch them again and again, probably changing my memories of those events in the process.

• When is a substandard photo a great photo?
  I've recently updated my Facebook photo from the Christmas version to my normal one. The normal one is taken from an unusual angle, and it's a bit fuzzy. I love it, though, because of the photographer...
• Sometimes photos appear in the most unlikely places!
  I've been in the country for Christmas. My mother lives in Orange and a lot of us converged on her house for a few days. She grew up in Blayney and her father and his parents and grandparents all live...
• Carole at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe
  ...