By Shauna Hicks. GSQ has scheduled me for two guest blog posts a year. Every time my turn comes around, I struggle for a topic. What is going to interest other family historians? This time I’m going to write about something that I’m working on now with my own family history. And that’s trying to tell my own story. We spend lots of time researching our ancestors, but we also need to remember that in 100 years or so, someone … Continue reading
By Victoria MacGregor An old, yellowed, typewritten letter resurfaces and creates a context to wrap around a family tree and some photographs I’m always surprised, pleasantly of course, by who responds to the private family album invitations I send. There’s certainly no formula to it, no pattern, no particular demographic, but there’s always been an enthusiastic, almost giddy interaction by those who come back to me, those who leave comments and share stories, just seem to get it. A few … Continue reading
As family historians, we avidly search for details about our ancestors from records about their births, deaths and marriages, immigration documents, electoral rolls and census records etc, and then pad out the details of their lives using various other documents and newspaper articles. If we’re lucky there will be family tales passed down through the generations or someone may even have a collection of photos that they are willing to share. Hopefully … Continue reading
By Pauleen Cass. With the tsunami of genealogical data available online it’s tempting to just keep adding more and more facts and branches to your family tree. It’s also tempting to ignore the context of the data – to not look beyond the page you’ve landed on. Do you assess what you’re seeing, whether it’s a transcription or an image of the original document? All this data adds to what you know about your families but does it tell their … Continue reading
There were two things that my father told me about his father, John Charles (Jack) Wood, which intrigued me. One was that John Charles was born on a ship heading to India and the second was that Jack and his brother Percy, who later lived in Persia (Iran) and was a diplomat, wrote to each other in French. When I decided to go overseas in 1975, I tried to find Grandfather Wood’s birth certificate so that I could apply for … Continue reading
