My Mum organised a Family Tree day, with our Buring relatives, which coincided with Australia Day.  I printed out a big family tree chart for those who were present and I had my laptop with the whole tree on it handy for answering questions and displaying info and pictures!

My Aunty Jenny had albums full of photos and documents I hadn’t seen, they are a treasure trove which I will revisit and scan.  Amazing!!!

A big thank you to Kerry Farmer at Family History Research for nominating me for the Ancestor Approved Award!!  This award was created by Leslie Ann Ballou at Ancestors Live Here and asks two things of those who receive it:

1. They should write 10 surprising, humbling, or enlightening aspects of their research
2. Pass the award on to 10 other researchers whose family history blogs are doing their ancestors proud.

Here goes:

1. I’ve written about my 3x great grandmother, in this post Shipwreck Survivor Ellen Mary Chamberlain.  As the title says Ellen survived a shipwreck, the loss of her first husband, the death of three children, the death of her sister in a horrible accident, having eleven children and caring for five of her second husband’s children, going through insolvency with her second husband and more!!!  I have nothing to complain about.

2. I’ve been so blessed to find and meet several cousins and the surprising thing has been the amount we have in common although we had never met and lived in different states!!

3. A Tragic Story With A Happy Ending is about Linnea Percival who lost her first husband only eleven days after their wedding.

4. It’s humbling finding so many ancestors who were willing to go to war for their country.

5. I’ve heard about my first cousin (3 times removed) Leo Buring all my life but I didn’t know that his wife Ida Agatha Sobels’ nick name was Nay, that they named their property in an outer suburb of Sydney in New South Wales, Leonay and then the suburb was named Leonay.

6. Some libraries here in South Australia are terrific and some are terrible.  I don’t like being treated like a thief.  One library has their family history resources in locked glass cabinets and you have to ask for them to be opened each time you want to take something out or put something back.  I know that precious resources have been pinched from libraries but there has to be a better system than this.  In direct contrast another library has their resources out where everyone can access them.

7. The RootsWeb AUS SAGEN mailing list is wonderful.  The people go out of their way to help with queries and look ups.  Focusing on South Australia.

8. I’ve been quite surprised not to find any convicts amongst my ancestors so far.

9.  I never thought that I would enjoy visiting cemeteries so much or that I would feel a connection with the people I’m researching and the places they lived, here in Australia and the UK.  I’ve been surprised by my own tears too, shed for babies born too early, children dying too young and young men going off to war and not returning.

10.  Rev. Charles Tregear worked for many years in the field of Social Justice.  He established the South Melbourne Mission, worked for changes in liquor and gaming laws, served as a chaplain during World War One and was known as a distinguished social reformer!

I’m new to Genealogy blogs so I only know a few:

Shelley – Twigs Of Yore
Theresa – Tangled Trees
JM – Tracing My Roots

Lots of the people I wanted to nominate had already received this award.  Oh well I’ve failed at the challenge but I will keep looking for more genealogy blogs!!

I’m crocheting hats and blankets for babies and children, to send to Queensland as my part in helping with the flood relief.  I thought about it for quite some time.  Being in South Australia there is little I can do other than pray and donate cash but I’m an action person, I wanted to ‘do’ something so this is what I’ve come up with.  I continue to pray and I will donate cash as well as making the hats and blankets.  I may not have many blog posts during this time so that I can make as many items as possible to send to Queensland.

I’m on the Aus Sagen mailing list, a South Australian genealogy mailing list.  List member Di Cummings set us the task of sending in our five favourite web links related to genealogy.  Well what a treasure trove of interesting, diverse and helpful websites we’ve received.  This has been so helpful I thought I’d share some here:

Random Acts Of Genealogical Kindness
RAOGK is a global volunteer organization. With over 4000 volunteers in every U.S. state and many international locations, we have helped thousands of researchers. Our volunteers take time to do everything from looking up courthouse records to taking pictures of tombstones. All they ask in return is reimbursement for their expenses (never their time) and a thank you.

Most of the volunteers are in the US but there are some for Australia and South Australia particularly!  I think this is a great idea and wouldn’t mind using the service as well as volunteering myself some time.

Victorian Government Gazettes 1836 to 1997
This online archive of historic government gazettes provides access to over 160 years of official information published in and about Victoria. It contains images of every relevant page in the Victoria Government Gazette produced since 1836, as well as searchable indexes for each publication.

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this one:
Adelaide Photos By Townsend Duryea

Australian Medical Pioneers Index

London Lives

 

Scottish Archive Network Internet Access To The Written History Of Scotland
The project aims to revolutionise access to Scotland’s archives by providing a single electronic catalogue to the holdings of more than 50 Scottish archives.
To preserve fragile historical records and improve their accessibility SCAN digitises records on a huge scale.

By using the Lost Cousins service I wrote about in my last blog post I’m finding gaps in my research.  This has been a really helpful process to identify these gaps which I didn’t realise existed previously.  Now I can make a list of them and work on filling them in.  There are families who aren’t present in census’ I would expect them to be in and individuals too.

I’m working on being a bit more organised in my research this year which is hard for me but I want to do it.  I need to buy some plastic sleeves and some more drop in files for my archive box, well now that I think about it I might need more than one archive box also!!!  🙂  I thought that by creating my family tree online I would have less paper records etc but I don’t think so.