The Family Histories Podcast featuring Jill Ball

A few days ago, I discovered a new family history podcast. I’m a bit late coming to the The Family Histories Podcast as it’s now in it’s third season. I was drawn to check it out, when I saw on Twitter, that geniemate Jill, from Geniaus blog, was being interviewed on Episode 5 of Series 3. Her episode was named The Priest. I was quite interested to hear Jill’s story.

I really enjoyed hearing Jill talk about how she came to be hooked on family history and her experiences of researching her family history. Jill introduced us to her 3X great uncle, priest, Michael Harrington Ryan. I found his story and Jill’s experiences in researching his life, to be more than interesting.

I first came across Jill many years ago, on Twitter, and immediately was drawn to her Twitter account and her blog. Jill is an enormous supporter of bloggers. We have met a few times at conferences, and I’ve found her to be just as supportive in person. As a former librarian, Jill, like me, has a passion for books and we’ve swapped book recommendations many times over the years. During the podcast she talked about her reasons for blogging, and this caused me to think about my reasons for blogging, which I haven’t given much thought to lately. I suspect there could be a post coming up on the subject.

Jill’s mention of The Australian Joint Copying Project, reminded me that I had intended to use the site to search for my Australian family, but as yet hadn’t got around to it. This is now at the top of my ‘to do’ list.

At the end of the podcast, Jill was asked to talk about her brick wall. I’m always interested to hear about the brick walls of others, as I have plenty of my own and can identify with the difficulties they present. Jill’s brickwall was a story of thorough research and frustration, which most family historians can understand. I always listen to brickwall conversations carefully as there is usually something to learn. Selfishly, I also hope that the brick walls solved by others help me to solve my own brick walls.

Over the next few days, I plan go back to the start of season one and listen to all episodes of this most interesting podcast.

“The Family Histories Podcast aims to be a positive, conversational, fun show about family history and our family historians – the often unsung heroes tirelessly breathing life back into our collective social history. ” https://familyhistoriespodcast.com/

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