Last week I gave a workshop at the Society of Australian Genealogists Research Library for new Facebook users. There is a lot of interest in Facebook and how it can be used to connect with family and friends, but there is also a lot of concern about privacy.

The biggest issue is the default privacy settings that new users are automatically given. Facebook was designed by college students for college students, and the fact is that this age group are not as concerned with privacy as most of us have learned to be. Facebook has been much in the news lately because users can be too trusting with people they meet on Facebook, and .

To address these concerns Facebook has recently simplified the presentation of the privacy settings. What you see when you go in to the privacy settings [under Account in the top right corner] looks like this if you haven’t changed any of the settings:

This is a summary. When you click on Customize settings you can change all of these settings, in much more detail thank you can see here.

This is what my own settings look like:

There is some information that Everyone can see, and that’s that. Your name, your photo, your gender and your networks (which are optional) is always visible so that people can find you. Everything else is customisable, from Everyone to Only Me:

• Everyone
• Friends of Friends
• Just Friends
• Customizable – allows you to choose individual people, lists of people, or Only Me

Of course, there is a balance between what you don’t want people to know about you and what people need to be able to see so they know it’s you. I suspect this balance is different for everyone, depending on what you want from Facebook. If you want to get in contact with people you went to school with all those years ago then it helps them to find you if you put your high school and year of graduation in and make it visible to Everyone. If the very thought fills you with horror, then don’t enter it, or make access more restricted. Professional networking needs employment details, connecting with classmates needs your current school or university, and so on.

I think the problem some of us have with Facebook is that we don’t know enough about how to control it. Once you learn how to make the changes you want it can become an indispensable part of how you communicate with friends and family. I’m pleased to say that some of the students in my class last week have gone on to become confident, active members of Facebook.

Don’t be afraid of Facebook, take control!

• FaceBook advertising debrief
  The ad ran for 4 days in total, resulting in a credit card charge of US$20 and a doubling of the number of fans for the Society of Australian Genealogists page on Facebook. Now all I need to do is ...
• Adventures in FaceBook advertising next day followup
  My $5 limit was reached much more quickly last night, perhaps because more people are playing around on FaceBook on a Friday night. I think more money would be needed to make this more effective, as w...
• Adventures in FaceBook advertising
  I serve on the Council of the Society of Australian Genealogists and one of the issues we are facing, as do all similar societies, is how to attract new members in the digital age. I created a page...

The challenge this week is:

Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and then take the steps to accomplish it.

Haha, I thought. that one’s easy! My biggest challenge is finding the time to get everything done that I need to do. So I’ve decided, for the sake of this challenge, to narrow it down.

I don’t seem to find time to read any more. To just sit down with a book and read it. I used to do most of my reading on the train into the city, but these days I tend to do stuff on my netbook computer, which I’ve talked about before, or read research notes or minutes and notes for Council and committee meetings.

I used to always carry a book with me. Always. Now I don’t. If I think I’ll need something to read I might take a family history magazine or journal with me, but usually the netbook is enough to keep me occupied.

How do I read the books I need to read to further my research? There is so much I have to read:

• books on Australian history
• books on Fijian history
• books written by early settlers and sailors in Fiji (usually downloaded from Google Books as PDFs)
• books on how to find records for family history
• journals and magazine, which are arriving all the time
• fiction (we all need some down-time)

Last weekend, when I was walking past my local Borders bookstore, I saw the answer. The Kobo is Borders’ answer to Amazon’s Kindle. It’s an e-reader that is cheap ($199 Australian), light, easy to read, and small enough to take anywhere. It does nothing except read books, which is what I want. It reads PDFs as well as e-book formats.

Unfortunately I couldn’t buy one on the spot as they had run out, and were taking pre-orders. I said I’d think about it and went home. I thought about it so much that I rang and pre-ordered it from home. They told me it would be in on the 7th June, which is next Monday.

On Thursday (3rd June) I got a call to say they were in, and I could pick mine up! Woohoo!!! I did. I had a workshop to prepare so I didn’t really get to play with it until yesterday.

I’m already reading more than I ever did before. I’ve started on Dickens’ Great Expectations, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read before, although the story seems strangely familiar. I think that contemporary fiction counts as educational, don’t you? At least I’m not reading Harry Potter!

And I feel much better for it already. Reading is what was missing from my life.

The Kobo is a little slow to change pages, so I’ve already learned to press the button a little ahead so it’s there when I’m ready for the next page. I’m still looking around at what books I can put on there. It came with 100 books already, including Dickens and Jane Austen.

The PDF part is still a bit of a challenge, though. I downloaded two PDF books to experiment. They are:

• Smythe’s Ten Months in the Fiji Islands, 1864
• Fanning’s Voyages to the South Seas, 1838

I’ve had success finding ancestors, or potential ancestors, in these sorts of accounts, so I’ve got to keep reading them. Printing and reading takes way too much paper and toner, and I tend not to read them on the laptop, although of course I search them for surnames and places as best I can.

So far reading these PDFs has not been a success. An e-book flows so that no matter what font size you select, the text flows to fit the page. PDFs don’t do this, so there’s a lot of scrolling involved which is too disruptive, even in these old books where the pages are actually quite small. Apparently they are looking at software changes to allow this, but in the meantime scrolling is slow.

So that’s the challenge I need to resolve next, and this is what I’m doing to resolve it:

• I’m experimenting with zooming in and changing the orientation to landscape, but it’s still slow to get down the page.

• I’ll experiment with the different page sizes of different documents

• I’ll look at different formats. Perhaps these books are downloadable as e-books rather than PDFs?

• I’ll be experimenting with Descent, the journal of the Society of Australian Genealogists, which was published from the beginning of the Society in PDF form. That will save me having to decide before I leave the house which one I’m up to. If I can resolve the PDF issue!

Wish me luck!

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 22 – Find-a-Grave
  I nearly dismissed this week's challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves. I was wrong. I searched the FAQ for 'internat...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 19 – military records
  I don't have any military ancestors, unless you include Fijians from the time before Christianity ended tribal warfare. So when the National Archives of Australia put digitised World War I Service rec...
• 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...
• 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 nearly dismissed this week’s challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves.

I was wrong.

I searched the FAQ for ‘international’ to see if it covered countries other than USA, as I couldn’t easily find this information on the homepage, and found that some fixes had been done to clean up the list of countries, including Australia. Woohoo!

So I did a search for my usual test surname – Eason – and restricted the country to Australia. Eason is uncommon enough that I don’t get thousands of results, and not so uncommon that I don’t get any at all.

Much to my surprise the list of results included John Eason, buried in an unmarked grave in Condobolin. I was a bit surprised, as I have a copy of his NSW death registration and a photo of his headstone in Blayney.

Entry for John Eason, buried in Condobolin in 1933, from Find a Grave

Clicking on the link to Condobolin Lawn Cemetery gives this information:

There are approximately 1000 unmarked graves in the general cemetery.

“I visited the undertaker, the council, the ladies club, the local Anglican and Catholic churches, the local court house and the local historical association, asking what records they had. I tried the local newspaper; they have their back issues to about 1906 on film but they weren’t big on obituaries. They don’t have a monumental mason in Condo.”

In compiling the list, reference was made to the NSW indexes of births, deaths and marriages and to military records for further information. The images may be viewed and downloaded from the list of all inscriptions for this cemetery.

I’m impressed that someone has gone to the trouble of deducing that the reported approximately 1000 unmarked burials in Condobolin Lawn Cemetery must include John Eason, whose death was registered in Condobolin. Unfortunately it is dangerous to make these sorts of assumptions. John was in Condobolin with his daughter when he died, and was apparently transferred to Blayney to be buried with his wife Lily, who predeceased him by three years.

Headstone of Lily and John Eason, Blayney Presbyterian Cemetery. Photo taken by the author, Dec 2008.

The website allows corrections to be sent to the contributor, and I have now done so.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t dismiss a website just because you assume it is American. It may have gone international.
2. Don’t assume that the contents of websites where information has been voluntarily entered is correct.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 19 – military records
  I don't have any military ancestors, unless you include Fijians from the time before Christianity ended tribal warfare. So when the National Archives of Australia put digitised World War I Service rec...
• 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...
• 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 don’t have any military ancestors, unless you include Fijians from the time before Christianity ended tribal warfare. So when the National Archives of Australia put digitised World War I Service records online a couple of years ago I went looking for the siblings of my direct ancestors who were born in the years that would have made them eligible for military service.

I found four, three of whom didn’t return from France.

Ernest Harold Goode (1885-1917), of Millthorpe, NSW, second son of William Goode and Elizabeth Grace Pascoe. Killed in action in France 25th February 1917.

George Harold Goode (1887-1918), of Millthorpe, NSW, third son third of William Goode and Elizabeth Grace Pascoe. Killed in action in France 2nd June 1918.

Douglas James Stewart (1899-1918), of Holbrook, NSW, eldest son of James Simpson Stewart and Annie Lawson. Killed in action in France, 10th August, 1918.

Eric Eason (1894-1976), of Blayney, NSW, eldest son of John Eason and Lily Adelaide Grace Goode. Discharged 4th September 1919 on disembarkation in Sydney. Hid mother Lily Eason, nee Goode, was the eldest sister of Ernest and George Goode.

I have started to examine one of these files in more detail. Douglas James Stewart was my grandmother’s first cousin. He was born and raised in Holbrook, which is near Albury in southern New South Wales. He was just barely 18 when he joined the Australian Expeditionary Force in Sydney on Sunday, 18th February, 1918. My mother says she was told that he looked older than he was, and the women of the town used to give him white feathers, calling him a coward. He joined up as soon as he could:

NAA: Base Records Office Australian Imperial Force; B2455, First Australian Imperial Force Personnel Dossiers. 1914-1920; 3013311, Stewart Douglas James : SERN 3718

Both parents had to sign the form as he was under 21 years.

The whole file is 61 pages, and although some pages are certified copies of other pages, most are original records. There is the correspondence the AIF Office received from his father James Simpson Stewart requesting further details about his son’s death, requesting a photograph of the grave, and enquiring about medals. Copies of replies from the Office are there, as is an inventory of the personal effects sent to the next of kin.

It’s very sad. I never knew Douglas James Stewart, nor did my mother, and I’ve never even seen a photograph of him. It’s sad that he has been reduced to pieces of paper in an old file, but it’s brilliant that he can be remembered now that the pieces of paper are available for me to view at home on my computer.

Lest we forget.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 22 – Find-a-Grave
  I nearly dismissed this week's challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves. I was wrong. I searched the FAQ for 'internat...
• 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...
• 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...

For those of us with French ancestors here is a blog that focuses on research in France. It has articles, links to websites, book recommendations, and everything you need to get over your first dismay when you discover that your ancestor came from France.

Anne Morddel has been writing this blog for a year now, and to celebrate her first anniversary she is giving away a copy of her five-page checklist of research you can do on your own before you need to contact a professional in France, called Preparing to Research an Ancestor in France.

To obtain a copy you need to send her an email. You can find her email address here.

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The day started off well – I had some ideas about how to continue with a client’s research that I had restarted yesterday, and I had the points in mind I needed to add to the report after yesterday’s fruitless search for convict records.

But when I actually sat down at my desk to do it…. nothing. I waffled around with email and volunteer tasks and other things. No good.

Here are my tips for when this happens to you:

• Start the clock. I have a program that tracks my time on specific tasks, and sometimes it is enough to just start the clock for that task. It’s like making a commitment.
• Put some music on. Not the radio, with talking, and not music that you would feel compelled to concentrate on. It has to be background music, or favourite music that you know well.
• Move. Take the laptop and the paperwork and sit somewhere else. Sometimes the distraction at your desk is enough to put you off. Pick up only what you need and sit at the dining table, or out on the deck.
• Start with a smaller task. Instead of jumping straight in to the report-writing, do something that’s related but not quite so involved. Something quick you can knock off easily. Like a blog post!
• Walk. If it’s a concentration problem you may need to go for a quick walk around the block. Sometimes I walk up and down the stairs 5 or 6 times. Gets the heart rate going!

You may need to do all of these things, but you will get it done!

• Procrastination station
  It's a windy Sunday afternoon, too windy to be outside, so I have no excuse to not be finishing my ProGen assignment. So what am I doing? I'm playing with the Society of Australian Genealogists websit...
• More about positive emotions
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• For your pleasure
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• How to age well
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• Are you a maximizer or a satisficer?
  One thing you can say without fear of contradiction about the modern world is that we have more choice than ever before. Choice about careers; lifestyles; which city or suburb to live in; which house ...

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!

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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 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 22 – Find-a-Grave
  I nearly dismissed this week's challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves. I was wrong. I searched the FAQ for 'internat...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 19 – military records
  I don't have any military ancestors, unless you include Fijians from the time before Christianity ended tribal warfare. So when the National Archives of Australia put digitised World War I Service rec...
• 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...

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 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 22 – Find-a-Grave
  I nearly dismissed this week's challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves. I was wrong. I searched the FAQ for 'internat...
• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 19 – military records
  I don't have any military ancestors, unless you include Fijians from the time before Christianity ended tribal warfare. So when the National Archives of Australia put digitised World War I Service rec...
• 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...