What names have you come across while researching your family tree? I have over 3000 people in my tree. I’m not listing names here to make fun of anyone but just to highlight some of the more unusual and interesting names I’ve found:

Elvira (f)
Vira (f)
Ethelbert (f)
Atalina (f)
Degna (f)
Hazor (m) a Biblical name
Tamar (f) another Biblical name
Euphemia (f)
Wendoline (f)
Octavius (m)
Ranald (m)

James Christmas Chinner was born on Christmas Day 1889 and also in my family tree is Roy William Anzac Clark born 3 Jan 1916.

I’ve been sorting all my music, ripping cds and backing everything up to my external hard drive and I found some old .wma files which I wanted to convert.

I installed Sound Converter from Synaptic and converted some .wmas to .ogg. The output was very choppy even after changing the bitrate, disappointing. The simple answer, for me, was to install the .mp3 encoder for Sound Converter and convert the .wma files to .mp3. The sound quality is great!

It would’ve been nice to have everything as .ogg but a mix of .ogg and .mp3 is okay too and I can happily play it all on my Android phone!!

A feature I use in Trove is the RSS feed for newspaper articles which have yet to be digitised. In the search that I did there are newspaper articles which contain the people I’m searching for but they haven’t been digitised yet. To receive notification of when they have been digitised I subscribe to the RSS feed.

To do this click on the small orange RSS symbol in the bottom right hand corner of the box relating to your article and this is what you will see if you use the Firefox web browser.

If you use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks click on subscribe now. If not copy the URL into your favourite feed reader (I use Thunderbird) and you will receive a notification when the article has been digitised.

I love this feature and am eagerly awaiting these notifications!

Leslie Thomas Wigley was my 1st cousin 3 times removed. He was born in Hotham East, Victoria, Australia on 24 Apr 1897. He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force – Australian Flying Corps on 1 Jan 1918 with his parents permission because he hadn’t yet turned 21.

The bulk of this information I’ve ascertained from his service records, including the above Birth Extract. Mapping Our Anzacs is a wonderful resource and a relatively quick way of finding ancestors who served in World War One. Here is Leslie’s record.

The letters contained in Leslie’s records give his home address and two of his work addresses.

This letter is dated 11 Mar 1927 so Leslie was working at Phillips Motors, 465 Mt Alexander Rd, Moonee Ponds then.

This one dated 20 Jan 1942 is written on his own business letterhead. Census records list Leslie as being a garage proprietor from 1932.

This last little letter is a sad one from Leslie’s second wife Dorothy to the Minister For The Army after Leslie’s death requesting full details of his military service. From this letter I got confirmation of Leslie’s second wife’s name, Dorothy, their home address is still 799 Mt Alexander Road, Moonee Ponds and that Leslie was cremated at Fawkner Crematorium.

In looking for Leslie’s information at Fawkner Crematorium I also found his first wife Effie Sanderson Wigley nee Moody as well as a number of other Wigleys.

I started looking for genealogy software for my mobile phone but most of the programs I came across are for the iPhone or iPad. Today I found the Mobile Genealogy site with a list of apps for the Android!!!

The first app I’m looking at is GedStar Pro. It’s a free app, I downloaded and installed it but I’ve run up against a barrier straight away. To use GedStar Pro I have to install their Windows software on my pc and convert my .gedcom file to Android format. There is a free trial of the Windows software for 28 days. My pc is dual boot Ubuntu Linux and Windows but I rarely use Windows on it. I don’t want to reboot just to mess around with GedStar Pro though. I also prefer to use FOSS where possible and to me it kind of defeats the purpose of a Linux phone with a Linux computer which means I don’t have to fudge around with it to try and get it to work it ‘just works’.

Next one is AGeneDB and I found that this app is no longer being developed.

Family Bee This one is $10 and there is no messing around with Windows software!! The official Family Bee website has the documentation too.

The directions were easy to follow to load my .gedcom file onto the phone and start viewing. So far it’s looking very good. I like the different tree views and the individual person view. I’ll write more about this later after I’ve used it a bit more.

I got some good results from Trove by searching for the family name and the name of the town they came from eg. Wigley Charters Towers. I found these four photos of Frederick Arthur Wigley during his WW2 service. They are in the public domain now so they can be freely published.