Archive for the “Personal” Category

I am a recent convert to Facebook. It’s a web application that I thought was used by teenagers but it seems I was wrong because when I asked my teenage nieces they didn’t know what I was talking about. They use MySpace.

Facebook seems to be used by young adults and older adults. It’s a networking site for keeping in contact with people and letting them know how you are and what you are doing. Your contacts are called friends and they have to agree to be your friend, so it keeps the spam out.

It’s a lot of fun, there are so many applications that you and your friends can play with. For example I use an application called “Where I’ve Been” - I can click on the countries I’ve been to on a map of the world and they turn blue. I can turn the countries I want to visit green. Others can see where I’ve been if I let them and I can see where they’ve been. I thought I was well-travelled but seeing it laid on a map like that I can see I have a long way to go. I’m ready!

There are genealogy applications too. One has been written by FamilyLink, the people who give us World Vital Records, called “We’re Related”. This is what they say about it:

….share basic family information with anybody you choose.
With this app you can:
- Find your relatives on Facebook
- Keep up with your family
- Build your family tree
- Share news and photos with your family

In the future we hope to allow you to share memories about ancestors with your family, compare your family tree with your friends on Facebook to see if you are related, and to search for your ancestors through the application.

Some of my friends are now my relatives. I can upload a gedcom to share with my relatives but I haven’t managed to do this yet. It expects my name in the gedcom file to be the same as my name in Facebook and it isn’t because I didn’t use my middle name in Facebook.

There are others which I haven’t tried yet but I plan to. One is FamilyBuilder. To quote them directly:

Familybuilder is a free fun tool for:

* Finding your relatives.
* Building your family tree.
* Preserving your family history.
* Scrapbooking the lives of you and your family.
* Remembering loved ones.
* Staying in touch with your family.

I’ve installed this and I’ll see how it goes.

There are others but these two seem to be the most popular. They are not full family tree applications. That’s not what Facebook is about. They allow communication and sharing of information between relatives. News, baby photos, funerals, research discoveries - you can share them all at once.

Try it. It’s quite addictive, and many of the applications are worth playing with.

A post from Ancestry.com about how little Americans in general know about their family history has surprised me. In summary, the results are:

• Most 18- to 34–years-old Americans (83%) are interested in learning their family history. For older age groups the percentages were increasingly smaller.
• Half of Americans know the name of only one or none of their great-grandparents.
• One in five Americans don’t know what either of their grandfathers do or did for a living.
• One in five Americans don’t know where their family lived before they came to America.
• Four out of five Americans say they are interested in learning more about their family history, and yet half have never tried.

Source: Survey Reveals Americans’ Surprising Lack of Family Knowledge, 24-7 Family History Circle, Ancestry.com, 7 Dec 2007.

I wonder what the results of such a survey would be in Australia? I suspect they would be much the same. I think the biggest surprise for me is the number of young people interested in their family history. That four out of five under-35s are interested in knowing more about their ancestors came as a bit of a shock. After all, these are not the people you see in family history societies and libraries.

How can we share what we know about our family history with the younger members of our own families? How can we make it interesting for them?

I don’t think kids will be interested if we show them the things that we get excited about - certificates and mentions of our ancestors in newspapers and the like. They like stories. I tell my nieces stories about individuals - about their great-great-grandmother Margaret who went from Scotland to New Zealand with her family when she was four years old to settle in the new town of Auckland, and went on to marry a man who had kids already by a first marriage and died when he was only 46, leaving her with her own kids and his too. And I ask them to imagine what it must have been like for her, as a four-year-old, to travel on a sailing ship for months to the other side of the world and live in what must have looked like a wild west town - dirt streets and horses and all.

Kids need to be involved, and all of this age group are much more accepting of new technology. Not just accepting, but expecting! They expect the internet to work like we expect the phone to work. Put it to use!

• You could get them to create a family tree on Ancestry or FindMyPast or GenesReunited or one of the many other websites available for this purpose.
• You can show them what is available on the web and how it can help build up a picture of the ancestor in question.
• You can give them copies of photos of their ancestors and get them to upload them and link them to their family tree.
• They could then print out a chart of their ancestors, complete with photos. They might be inspired to hunt for missing ones!
• You could put them in touch with distant cousins and show them how they are related.

The possibilities are endless. Young adults could also be more involved by handling the web side, copying photos and hunting out more information.

And what about you? Do you know what your grandfathers did, or still do, for a living?

Do you know where your family (or families) lived before they came to Australia?

Do you know the names of your great-grandparents? Especially on the female side?

Do you know which of your younger relatives might be interested in the work you are doing in your own family history?

There is so much to learn, and so little time. The younger we start, the more time we will have, and the more we can build and what has been done before. It’s not just a hobby for the retired!

I’m typing this on my laptop as I’m watching the election coverage on the ABC.

I must admit that when I saw in Ancestry that they had released some Australian electoral rolls it never occurred to me that perhaps they timed the release to coincide with our federal elections! I guess I don’t associate Americans with knowledge about Australia - after all, the site talks about counties rather than states and electorates.

This is not to take anything away from their achievement. I am really looking forward to other rolls becoming available in the next few weeks (as I hope they will be!).

What is interesting me in watching the coverage is the names of the electorates and their continuity from the last century and the one before. Instead of just watching my own electorate, which has already been called, my ears prick up when I see the electorates my ancestors lived in as well.

Are the seats Liberal or Nationals or Labor or still undecided?

How close is the vote?

What were they when my ancestor was alive?

How close was the vote in my ancestors’ time?

How much has changed since then?

What were the parties’ names then?

What did my ancestor vote? Were they swinging voters?

How excited were my female ancestors when they got the vote?

How were campaigns conducted in those days?

What was the radio coverage like?

Were there the multitude of fringe parties in the Senate that there are now?

All interesting questions.

I’m sure there are many others. Some of them I can almost answer myself. I remember when the Senate voting form was much smaller than the tablecloth it is now. No TV, and certainly no graphics with almost vote-by-vote counts. More restrained newspapers without lots of photographs. No cartoons in the newspapers either! And they didn’t talk about “aspirational”seats and “battler” seats.