Genealife in Lockdown: Learning and Researching #NFHM2021

August is Family History Month in Australia, and to celebrate, Alex from Family Tree Frog has come up with a blogging challenge that I cannot resist. The Challenge is to blog each week in August. Alex has chosen the theme, Genealife in Lockdown, as many of us in Australia are in lockdown at the moment, due to a resurgence of Covid-19. Alex has suggested that we could also post about the Olympics, or our own choice of theme.

I posted recently about Researching Your Family History During A Pandemic, so I will be going with my own choice for this challenge. My theme will be Learning and Researching. I plan to participate in a number of webinars during Family History Month, while also updating and adding to the research that I’ve done into the lives of my direct ancestors.

How My Genealife Began

I have been researching my family history for over 30 years. My obsession began, when I was asked by a friend, to help organise a family reunion for her family. I was amazed at the information she had collected over the years.

Immediately, I was keen to find out about my own family history, as I knew nothing at all about my father’s family. My father was orphaned at age 6, and I’m ashamed to say that I had never questioned my father about why, or how his parents died. When I found that they had died within just a few weeks of each other, and left 11 children behind, I felt devastated, but I was hooked, and wanted to know more about this branch of the family.

I’ve since, extended my research to all branches of my surprisingly large family. Along the way I’ve met many cousins, both close and distant, through this blog, and done collaborative research with other family researchers.

Shortly after I first started, I ordered a copy of Family Tree Maker software and a family friend gave me her set of Diggers CD, with indexes of births, deaths and marriages in Australia. I spent many happy hours finding family on those discs, generation by generation, as my friend told me I must do. The advice was to start with myself, and work backwards. I can remember my excitement as I entered names and dates into the software. At that time, as a beginner researcher, my only interest was names and dates. How far could I go back in time? That question was my entire focus.

It wasn’t long before I knew that I wanted to know more than names and dates. I wanted to know about how my ancestors lived. I soon realised that I had no idea how to find out this information. This was in the days before computers, so over the next few years, I attended courses, and gradually learned how to research in a way that ensured the information I had was correct and well sourced.

In these days, when much of the information that we want and need, is very quickly accessed online, I’m thankful that I was able to learn how to do family history research, the long and slow way. I feel this gives me a good understanding of the records that I’m able to find online. I have memories of spending hours in Genealogy and Family History Societies, viewing parish records on micro fiche. Nothing was instant in those days. We would have to order the fiche that we wished to view, and then wait patiently for weeks or even months for it to arrive. When it finally arrived, I had a two hour trip to Melbourne, where I would have booked an appointment for a few hours on micro fiche reader. What an exciting day that was!

August Genealife Plans

Once again, I’ve been enjoying learning more about family history research, from the many conferences and webinars, that have been made available, during the pandemic. Particularly I’ve been concentrating on Scottish research, as this was an area of struggle for me. I’m pleased now, to have decided to spend time, once again, on learning, during August. I plan to participate in webinars with a wider interest than just Scotland.

The ancestors who I intend to contentrate my research efforts on, have gaps in the information I have previously found. This is either due to them being a brick wall, or to my lack of time to chase up information. Watch out for my posts on the following during August:

Joseph Henry JONES

James McEWAN

Ernest Welfare WATERS

I’d love for you to follow along with my Learning and Researching, during the month of August. If you would like to, you can subscribe by email, so you don’t miss any Genealife in Lockdown posts.

Do you have any plans for Family History Month? I’d love to hear about them and promise to reply to all comments.

For more information about National Family History Month: National Family History Month Australasia – Family History Events in August 2021

For more information on this blogging challenge: Genealife in Lockdown – NFHM Blogging Challenge

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