gathering dust

"WORE DUNGAREE SUIT AND BOWYANGS."  News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 - 1954) 26 May 1936: 3. Web. 3 Mar 2015 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article132204484> Yes I had to google it and then had a "huh, so that is what they are called" moment. Laurence Thomas Tulloch is my gg great grandfather on my maternal side. He arrived in Australia as crew on the City of Adelaide   in 1882.

My system works pretty well. Most of the time. But with the more information I collect on collateral lines and associated individuals it is getting a little unwieldy. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I like my system. But it needs rejigging and perhaps some compromising as to the creation of sub-folders. I'm not a fan of having too many sub-folders. This is my primary genealogy folder, the hold all if you will.  Files are organised into family lines - my maternal grandfather and grandmother, my paternal grandfather and grandmother, my other half's maternal and paternal lines - I use folder colorizer  as an immediate visual aid and an underscore to keep them at the top. The TBS file is kind of embarrasing, shorthand for To Be Sorted. The stuff I have been lazy about filing correctly. The Excel files are the lists of books from the State Library, and various uni and local libraries; and State Record NSW files that I want to follow up on my ...

One of the big topics in genealogy across the web this year has been the Genealogy do-over . While I am not participating, I have - like many others - decided that it is a good idea to do some general housekeeping and making sure that my research is up to snuff. I am generally pretty good at recording sources and such due to all those years in an academic environment so I am adding detail. Well attempting to. I keep running into a persistent problem. Genealogy Software .  It just doesn't do what I want and need it to. Whether this is a function of the adherence to the dinosaur that is GEDCOM or the direct familial relationship model of genealogy I don't know. But it frustrates the crap out of me. I know I am not the only one, Tony Procter over at Parallax View  and Louis Kessler of Behold Genealogy  have written some marvelous posts on the subject. So want is it exactly I want my genealogy software to do? I want it to look beyond familial relationships . I'm a big ...

Yes, yes, I am aware that it is now 16 days into 2015 but the truth is between finishing my Masters, getting the results - I passed of course - Christmas, New Year and the beginning of this week; I kind of just collapsed. In a heap. And did a whole lot of nothing. Well, if nothing is defined as eating too much, drinking too much and reading a whole lot of novels. But thanks to Janelle, over at Janelle's Family Tree Addiction , I was back into the swing of things by the 13th. You see Janelle was lovely enough to organise a day trip and tour of the State Records Office at Kingswood. So spurred into productivity I preordered 4 probate packs but didn't think about what further I might want to look at. One can only be so organised when one is still off in the land of novels and general laziness. The tour of the archives lasted about an hour and was a brilliant look at the masses of buildings, shelvings and infrastructure needed to house the State Archives and the Government Doc...

Um hello. Yes, it has been awhile, but my Masters project was submitted last week and suddenly my time is once again my own. Well except for job hunting and hausfrau-ing, the latter of which I am unbelievably terrible at.  It runs in the family ;) Of course now that I am ready to pick up my research again I have found myself in a bit of a pickle. My notes are in absolute chaos and I cannot remember exactly what it was I was working on. Not to mention the build up of untagged and unfiled documents and photos. And my favourite genealogy program; The Master Genealogist becoming obsolete. Where should one start?

The year has been creeping away from me. Not much genealogy has been done in the past few months as I have been head down and concentrating on my Master's but with recent contact from various relatives and a couple of weeks break I am enthusiastic and ready to dive in again

Last night I attended a 2 hour session on Writing Interesting Family Histories by Carol Baxter  at Hornsby Library. Carol is a fabulous speaker and the information she imparts is invaluable. Her intent is to encourage and help family historians break away from the habit of listing dry facts and dates and instead create engaging narratives, to write histories. I just wanted to hug her, because she encourages people to do all the things that, due to my history training, I am almost desperate for people to do: read widely, understand the context and properly cite your bloody sources! I know the gentleman sitting behind me will probably ignore the latter message [oh the snarky comments I could make about some of the overheard conversations and audience questions] but if even half the audience internalises these 3 things as the take home message, I shall be happy. So, what was my take home message? How to approach the happy medium in writing. I have spent so long in academia th...