30 x 30 challenge!

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Ashcombe gardens and maze

Janine Adams from Organize Your Family History challenges genealogists to do this regularly, and boy do I need this! 

Basically - to quote Janine - 

you commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research/organizing/whatever for 30 days in a row (i.e. the month of November). The “rules” of this challenge are very fluid. For example, you could decide that, for you, 30 minutes daily translates into 15 hours of activity over the course of the month. 

So I'm going to try and do this for the next 30 days.  Wish me luck! What am I going to do? Well for a start - organize all the photos I took in Melbourne last month.

What photos? Let's step back a bit and I will put this in context.  






Last month, I finally made it to Melbourne - something I'd been planning all year. I had to postpone it once - originally scheduled for May, but all my nearest and dearest in Melbourne were going overseas then so we rescheduled to October.

My primary goal was to catch up with my youngest offspring and make sure he was doing okay.  Why was I worried??? He is doing just fine.  I am delighted to see him so settled and doing well in his new career as an apprentice cabinet-maker. 

I was also hoping to catch up with a dear friend - let's call her a chosen sister or BFF - we've known each other since she was born. Our parents were very close friends, and our fathers went to university together.  Deborah and I spent a couple of nights together and had some fun time being "girls" and shopping (mostly window) in Marvellous Melbourne. We may have consumed gelato, and her husband is a fabulous cook and a wine boffin to boot, so it was an all-round delicious time.  I may have purchased some shoes.

purchased from Watt's Shoe Store at Carlton


I hadn't planned to do family history at all, but on my last day, I was at a bit of a loose end with no friends to play with, so I went to the State Library of Victoria.  I had a vague plan of what I was looking for - which I found - but what I found wasn't really connected to my ancestors, so then I just had a "play" with the catalogue with the aid of very helpful and lovely staff, and my "browsing" items on the shelf produced great results.

Earlier that week I had asked my son to take me to the Mornington Peninsula to find a place called Tootgarook, where my ancestors taught for a bit in the 1870s - I have blogged about them before here.  Without wishing to be rude, Tootgarook wasn't very exciting. Thankfully, Cas took me to a spectacular sculpture park at Pt Leo and we also went to Ashcombe Gardens, where we had some fun in mazes.  Family History research can be a bit of a maze can't it?


Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama

Ashcombe maze and gardens


Anyway - back to SLV.  I wanted to look up some local histories of where my ancestors taught.  I also found a centenary history of education in Victoria - what a gold mine that was! All the books I needed were in the Dome.  How exciting to be sitting in the dome doing research.  My mobile phone was working overtime, taking lots of photos of pages. My task now is to print those photos, read as much of the books as I can, and add the information to my ancestors' biographies.

The Dome at State Library of Victoria


So my plans over the next 30 days are to:

- organize photos from my Melbourne trip

- blog a bit - I so miss blogging

- watch genealogy videos

- enter data into Family Historian

- keep playing with Weare.xyz

How's your family history going? Do you want to join us on the 30x30 challenge? What's your biggest bugbear with your family history at the moment? 


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