Accentuate the Positive 2023 – Genealogical Year in Review

The Accentuate the Positive Geneameme, created by GeniAus is something I really enjoy taking part in each year. It’s an awesome opportunity to reflect on the year past and what has been achieved. I find it helpful in channelling my thoughts for goals for the upcoming year as well!

I’ve been a little bit slower than usual in posting my responses this year. Just as with my activities on the genealogical front (including maintaining this blog!), the year was overtaken on the personal front – deaths in the family, illness, you name it! I’m very much hoping for a less eventful 2024. Accentuating the positive is more of a challenge than usual for 2023.

Anyway, here goes…

Let’s Accentuate the Positive!

1. On revisiting some old research I found … newspapers to be especially helpful in filling in the gaps in the stories – two of which I wrote about this year, the Millen Murder and the suicide of John Rigby. I am such a newspaper junkie, and I heartily recommend going back to old research and seeing if the newspapers can illuminate the stories of your ancestors.

2. In 2023 I hooked up with a new (to me) living cousin … none I’m afraid, quite the opposite. An old to me living cousin who I’d been in contact with for about 15 years and met on a trip to England suddenly passed away. But lest that be seen as an answer that doesn’t accentuate the positive, I will say that he added so much laughter to my life in those 15 years that I’m really glad we met.

No, really, positivity…!

3. I’m pleased I replaced a tool I had been using with  … Goldie May. Research logs are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious. Goldie May automates the process with one click and has saved me hours of manual labour. Another super-useful tool has been Cite-Builder. Source citations are so essential to our genealogical work but let’s be frank…so tedious (I’m sensing a pattern here!). Cite-Builder has also saved countless hours by allowing me to enter the information required into a template for each record type and generating the citation. Sometimes they need a little tweak, but still it’s been hugely labour-saving.

4. My sledgehammer did great work on this brick wall … finding the origins of William Townley and who his mother was. This came out of thinking I was disproving an Ancestry hint, which turned out to be valid even though it looked improbable! Building out the family and checking probate documents turned out to be the key.

5. I was pleased that I finally read … The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees. It had been on my bookshelf for years but I’d never got around to reading it.

Getting more sociable…

6. I enjoyed my geneajourney to … a behind-the-scenes tour at the Public Record Office of Victoria. When we go to the archives, we’re in the reading room, being served up documents from the mysterious depths ‘back there’. It was great to actually see ‘back there’. Nerdily delightful.

7. In 2023 I finally met … many of my fellow Genealogical Society of Victoria volunteers in real life. I really only got involved with helping to run the Midlands and East Anglia Discussion Group during the pandemic so our Volunteers’ get-together early in 2023 was the first time I’d met many many people in 3D!

8.I was the recipient of genearosity from … someone who is not a relation but who has been researching the lives of all the Parkhurst Prison juvenile offenders, one of whom was someone in my extended tree. He sent me everything he’d discovered, and I was able to add further details to help him in return. We ultimately found that three children from the same family had been sent to Australia as convicts!

9.  I am pleased that I am a member of … so many family history societies. I can’t choose just one, because they all provide so much value for the small amount of money it costs to be a member. Supporting the family history societies for the areas of your research helps to ensure that they can keep on going, and their resources and journals are invaluable to our research.

Getting some research done…

10. I made a new DNA discovery  … when I dug into a line where the documents made sense but there had been no DNA matches generated with any of my family members anywhere over many years. There’s a blog coming on this one so I shan’t say much more other than a revisiting of some mystery DNA matches provided the answer and corrected the line.

11.  An informative journal or newspaper article I found was … I found an excellent thesis online (do you check for theses about the people or places you’re researching? You can strike gold!). It gave a full and in-depth history with maps, photos and records of a rural area of Victoria where my client’s family went on their immigration. It opened up so much further research for me, and provided a great background.

12.  I enjoyed my wander around … cemetery. I didn’t actually get to do any cemetery wandering this year other than on a personal level, which was not enjoyable. That’s one to pick up again for fun this year I hope.

13. AI was a mystery to me but I learnt  … the value of using it for transcribing, summarising, extracting and tabulating those long handwritten documents like wills that are so essential to our research. Upcoming blog on this!

Giving…

14. The best value I got for my genealogy dollars was …  so hard to choose just one. I subscribe to all the major and several smaller genealogy websites for the areas I research. They all have their own strengths. I’d hate to do without any one of them.

15.  It felt good to contribute to  … the Midlands and East Anglia Group at the GSV. I love giving presentations, and as someone born in the Midlands, it’s nice to be able to share context with those who have the ancestry but have never been there.

16. I wrote … an article for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly on the importance of critically evaluating DNA matches from far-flung places as well as those closer to home.

 17. I got a thrill from opening someone’s eyes to the joy of genealogy … with a client who was so thrilled with what was being found that the original project got extended, extended, and extended until it filled most of my year. It’s now continuing with another family member’s branch into this year. It’s been thrilling to bring so much enthusiasm and joy to someone just by doing what I love to do!

Finally…

18. Another positive I would like to share is … no matter what hurdles get in the way, the research is always there to come back to when the time is right. And it’s therapeutic!