Posts

31 Things to do in August for National Family History Month

Image
  Goodness me!  There's only a couple of weeks to go before it is August and National Family History Month. Here's a list of 31 things you can do to celebrate National Family History Month in Australia and New Zealand. Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart Andrew Redfern Join us for the Opening Ceremony with speakers Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Andrew Redfern looking at the pros and cons of using Artificial Intelligence in researching your family history.  Please register and request the Zoom login details via this website's contact form, or Email jan@jansquire.com directly. Details will be sent 24 hours before the event. Check out the NFHM events calendar and book to attend an event. You can find the calendar here . Write a blog post with regard to the theme for NFHM - Secrets and Lies: using AI responsibly in family history research and handling sensitive material in research and publication. Read someone else's blog post and comment on it.  There's a great

Writing your family history

Image
Image by  Leandro De Carvalho  from  Pixabay   Let's talk about writing, shall we? I'm contributing to a Talking About session tomorrow morning run by QFHS.    The session description says the following: The best way to preserve your family history is to write about it. You could write a story for our journal; upload a document to Ancestry; a page on a website such as the Virtual War Memorial, My Primitive Methodists; an entry on Convict Records, Wikipedia and Wikitree; a media output (blog, podcast and YouTube); or a play for your grandchildren to act out. Have you ever looked for pictures of writing on something like Pixabay?  Most of them are images of disembodied people. The focus is on their hands or their torso.  Most are missing their heads.   The photo at the beginning of this post is rare.  We can see the author's head and he is even smiling.  Good for him.  Obviously, he didn't lie down in an ant's nest in that park - like I probably would. I live in Austr

Accentuate the Positive Geneameme 2022

Image
  Alex and her bestie Loani showing off the quilt made for Caspar's birthday 1. I was happy to go back to ... after a Covid absence Face-to-face conferences, meetings, and workshops. 2. In 2022 I was particularly proud of writing ... as many of my 52Ancestorsin52week blog posts as I could. 36 in total. 3. A new software package or web application I embraced was ... I kept going with PowerPoint in terms of presentations and was very brave and did a presentation at a SAG hangout in March.  I had lots of egg on my face in terms of working out the sound but the SAG convenors were just lovely and very encouraging.  Onwards and upwards.   I also set up a Mastodon account for both myself and QFHS late in the year.   I played with the MyHeritage DeepStory tool and the AI Time Machine™.   (see photos above) I never knew my maternal grandmother as she died before I was born.  Many people find DeepStory a bit creepy but I found that it engaged my adult children more than conventional tools. Y

#52Ancetorsin52weeks Wk36/52 Thomas Case 1818-1860

Image
Thomas Case Ahnentafel Number 54 Context for discovery: This biography was written as part of the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks exercise devised by Amy Johnson Crow.  You can join in too here. The theme for this week is Exploration. Amy says: Where did your ancestors explore? Who moved around a lot? You could also share records, libraries, or archives that you've explored in. Remember, there's no wrong way to interpret the theme! Feel free to post your links and stories in the comments. Thomas was my 3rd great-grandfather on my maternal side of the family. I am ashamed to say that I have written next to nil about the Case family on my blog. “Why is that?”, I wonder. I suspect it is because others had done quite a bit of research already and shared it with me, so I didn’t think any more needed to be done. When I check my vital records for him, I only have a marriage certificate so I think I will order the death certificate.  I have found a baptism on Ancestry which should be