The wonderful Jill Ball (aka GeniAus) invites all her fellow Genies once again to take part in her end of year GeneaMeme for 2020.
Its been a bit of a strange one this year, so it will be interesting to see how our research successes stacked up this year. If you would like to take part, copy and paste the questions below and fill in your answers. Post on your blog and send Jill a link …. she will correlate all the responses in a further blog post.
So here goes:
(Please delete the items that are not relevant to your situation.)
1. An elusive ancestor I found was My 6GG grandparents, James and Eliza Butcher….. and a further three generations below them – Finally GGfather Henry has some family!
2. A great newspaper article I found was an obituary for a female relative….its not often you find much written about the women but this one was an exception:
Mrs. S. E. Gwin
The fourth death in the Gwin family, since January, occurred on Tuesday, when Mrs. Sarah Elizabeth Gwin passed away at her home, in Cobden.
She was 86 years of age and was a remarkably capable woman. Despite her illness for the past few weeks, and the sorrow of losing heronly son, a daughter and daughter-in-law within a few weeks ofeach other, she was brave to the last.
She was born at Barrabool Hills,near Geelong. Her marriage to Mr. Daniel Gwin took place 65 years ago, at Christ Church, Geelong. They lived at Ballarat, before coming to Cobden, where they took up farming 58 years ago.
So dense was the bush, that a track had to be cut through to their block, which was the first to be bought, when the Jancourt property was subdivided.
In those days, there was no railway line to Cobden, and butter had to be taken to the Camperdown station for transport to Melbourne. The rough tracks made the journey anything but a pleasant one, and yet Mrs. Gwin often undertook it.
She carried the first load of butter from the Cobden factory to Camperdown in a spring cart.
Her husband, who died 26 years ago, was a shareholder of Cobden butter factory for some years, and also held shares in the WesternMurray Co-operative Bacon Co., Mrs. Gwin retaining both lots until her death.
She leaves three daughters Maude (Mrs. D. Savage, Cobden), Florence (Mrs. T. Reilly, Kennedy’s Creek) and May (Mrs. J. Lock,Tesbury). A son and three daughters predeceased her.
There are 19 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
The funeral to the Camperdown cemetery will leave her late residence, Lord Street, Cobden, today, (Thursday), at 1.30 p.m.
OBITUARY. (1940, August 1). Camperdown Chronicle (Vic. : 1877 – 1954), p. 5. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26542232
3. A geneajourney I planned but didn’t take was a research/holiday trip to New Zealand… I was really looking forward to exploring the area around Cambridge where my Dixon family lived and worked before they relocated to Australia.
4. I located an important record in the City of Melbourne’s digital archive – a job applications letter by my GGfather Robert in 1916. He got the job!
5. A newly found family member shared images of cousins not known to me.
6. A geneasurprise I received was a gift of access to a tree for a remote family connection with permission to use anything I wanted – a complete (unrelated) stranger offered this through Ancestry – such generosity!
7. My 2020 social media post that I was particularly proud of was ….. perhaps its one I still have to write? Blog posts have been thin on the ground this year – however this one from my blog Seeking Betty, seemed to generate interest: Misinformation, Correction & Hyperoble
8. I made a new genimate who has helped to facilitate our Zoom meetings and has handled some of our ‘correspondence’. Its great to have found someone who delights in being organised and who would help make the Zoom groups a really effective means of support and communication.
9. A new piece of technology or skill I mastered was hosting Zoom presentations – where I learned how to use the whiteboard function, to record and share power point presentations and generally create a brand new sharing platform for the UTAS Victoria group.
10. I joined Ancestorian.com – a purely genealogical social media platform similar to Facebook.
11. A genealogy education session or event from which I learnt something new was A series of DNA videos from Family History Fanatics – still working through them as I probe further into the whole DNA thing
12. A blog post that taught me something new was Dana Leeds explaining the Leeds chart methods …. this was well presented in simple (non expert) language that helped me make sense of my results.
13. A DNA discovery I made was none of the Stockfeld family have tested their DNA through Ancestry or posted their results to GedMatch 😦
14. I taught a genimate how to use Zoom and to present their research findings in a Powerpoint presentation.
15. A brick wall I demolished was not so much a Brick Wall, just not a path I had ventured down…. but I discovered a whole new line of the family lurking just around the corner and with that, connected with a 5th cousin in Adelaide for whom I could provide quite a deal more information than he had.
16. A great site I visited was the Carolyn Simpson Library ; also The University of New South Wales – Australians at War Film Archive – Amazing video interviews of everyday Australians’ experience of war.
17. A new genealogy/history book I enjoyed was …. oh how to choose? I’m up to 81 books read this year and so many of them have been corkers! Non-fiction: Cassandra Pybus: Truganini Journey through the Apocalypse; Narrative non-fiction: Carol Baxter: The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller (much better than Corey Head: The Lost Pilots – The Spectacular Rise and Scandalous Fall of Aviation’s Golden Couple); Historic Fiction: Meg and Tom Keneally: The Monsarrat Series, just to name a few.
18. Zoom gave me an opportunity to really connect with my fellow Victorian UTAS Alumni through weekly sessions. I’m writing autobiographical pieces, helping to expand the skill set of our participants through research presentations, providing learning opportunities that are truly interactive and responsive to the needs of the participants and generally using up all my bandwidth every month! At first I wondered about the effectiveness of what we had begun, but it became obvious just how important these sessions were to many of the participants and even with the lifting of restrictions, we will continue to interact this way.
19. I am excited for 2021 because there’s still so much to find out, to share and to explore. I’m crossing my fingers that a trip to Norfolk Island might be on the cards but I’m not holding my breath!
20. Another positive I would like to share is … how willingly people will step up to share, support, teach and facilitate in new and often complex environments. Genies are great people!
Test Patterns 