The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball team, I believe). The Exhibition Hall was a transformed basketball court, with carpet laid over the shiny wooden floor, and was swarming with visitors and exhibitors.

There were two streams of talks and my biggest regret was that I didn’t get to see any of them. I was kept very busy, helping out with registrations at the beginning of both days, and helping people with their research the rest of the time. There were lots of interesting questions and even though I couldn’t always find answers immediately for them we always managed to find somewhere else they could look. It’s important to remember that not everything is available online!

For more photos go to my photo album in Facebook, and for a full rundown of all the talks see Shauna’s blog.

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My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media sites that can help family historians to communicate, share and collaborate with other family historians and with their own families.

It covers new ways to communicate such as Sykpe and SecondLife; social networking sites such as Facebook and GenealogyWise; blogs and microblogs such as Twitter; sites for sharing family trees such as Ancestry and MyHeritage; sites for sharing photos and videos such as Flickr and YouTube; and community information sites such as wikis and social bookmarking.It explains in some detail how to get started with Facebook and blogging.

Contents:
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What is Social Media?
- The Internet
- Self-publishing
- Social media
3. Why use it?
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
4. Communication
- Chat
- Mailing Lists and Forums
- Social Networking
- Blogs
- Microblogging
- Virtual Worlds
5. Sharing
- Family Trees
- Photographs
- Videos
- Social Cataloguing
6. Collaboration
- Wikis
- Social Bookmarking
- Documents
- Questions and Answers
7. Dangers
- Risks
- Some Simple Rules
8. What Are You Waiting For?
Appendix 1. How to Get Started with Facebook
- Sign Up For Faebook
- Using Facebook
Appendix 2. How to Get Started with Blogging
- Find a Host
- Create an Account
- Name Your Blog
- Set Security
- Create your Profile
- Select a Design
- Start Writing!
- More Advanced Blogging
Glossary
Index

You can buy it from Gould Genealogy, and I hope you do!

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I have previously written about beginning my DNA adventures with a test with 23andMe, a company that focuses more on the health aspects of genetics than the genealogical aspects. They had an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I didn’t!

When I got up this morning there was an email to say that my genetic profile was ready. I had to go out and so couldn’t give this interesting news the attention that it deserved, until now. I’d like to write down my impressions as I go through the results.

The menu is split into three headings:

• My Health
• My Ancestry
• Sharing and Community

The first thing I did before I left the house this morning was look for my mtDNA haplotype under My Ancestry. This is the one that sorts  you into migration groups from 10-50,000 years ago. Mine is X2b:

According to 23andMe haplogroup X2 is mostly found in southern Europe, Central Asia, and North America, with a few scattered populations in places like the Orkney Islands in Scotland. It is relatively rare in most of the populations in which it is found.

It’s nice to think that my haplogroup is relatively rare. We all like to think of ourselves as a bit special! I can trace my direct female line back five generations to Agnes Allan, who married William Stewart in Paisley, Scotland, in 1827, and died before William remarried and took his family to Auckland, New Zealand in 1842. So perhaps she was descended from the people who ended up in Orkney.

Other headings under My Ancestry are:

• Relative Finder, which won’t have results for another week or so. Disappointing!
• Paternal Line which is no good to me since I am not male and the paternal line can only be traced by the Y chromosome, which women do not have.
• Ancestry Painting, which makes no sense to me at the moment. It has a diagram of some chromosomes and a key that shows different colours meaning different things if the chromosomes show those colours. My chromosomes show no colours, only grey bits, and apparently “Gray segments indicate regions where 23andMe’s genotyping chip has no markers.”
• Global Similarity shows your similarity to groups of people from around the world. Check it out:

I am slightly more similar to the people of Oceania than to any of the Europeans. Apparently Oceania includes the people of Australia (ie, Aboriginals), New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand, but the sample only includes those from New Guinea. The sample dates from January 2008, which is a bit disappointing.

There is the opportunity to see the graph for others who have shared their profile with you, and those I can see have predominantly Northern Europeans and very little Oceania. That makes sense. Most of us in Australia, aside from the Aboriginal people, come from Europe.

My father, however, is a part-European Fijian. The Fijians are Melanesian, with some Polynesian where they associated with people from Tonga and other islands. So this result makes some sense.

When I have some time I will delve into these results in more detail to work out how they arrive at the conclusions they have.

Under the heading Sharing and Community are the tools for comparing your genes with those of relatives. So far I have shared my profile with two people, and I have no similarities with either of them. I will look at this category in more detail when it has something to show me.

The first heading, which I have left until last, is My Health. First up is Disease Risk.

The results for Parkinson’s Disease are locked, so that they can explain what the results mean, and don’t mean, before you see them. I think that’s a good idea. I have a scientific background and know that the percentages they are talking about are very small, but others may be unnecessarily concerned.

The other results are displayed in a long list, with the increased risk first, followed by decreased risk and then typical risk. The ones on the top of my list are no more than double the very low average incidence, which is heartening. I can then click on each one to find out more. Here are some of my ‘typical risks’:

Where the results show a red and green arrow there are multiple markers associated with the condition, and I may have one or more of them.

It would be easy, I imagine, to use these results as an excuse to do nothing. If I see a graph that shows my risk of heart attack is greater than average I might resign myself to the fact and keep living on fatty foods and no exercise (which I don’t – it’s hypothetical). Or I could make some changes to counteract the predisposition in my genes.

Each item on the list also gives a ‘confidence rating’, the stars, based on the number of studies that have been done and the number of participants in the studies.

I have a slightly higher risk of developing asthma, based on one of three markers for which studies have been done. The studies are listed and described, with the type of population and numbers of subjects described. I actually do suffer from asthma.

Carrier status to certain conditions has a similar layout. I’ll have a good look at that later.

Drug response will also take some time to digest. I am likely to be a fast metaboliser of caffeine, which I gave up some years ago, and I have typical results for most other items on the list.

Traits looks interesting. I don’t have the muscle performance of a world-class sprinter, nor am I resistant to malaria or HIV/AIDS. I am likely to have brown eyes (correct) and to have straighter hair (correct, despite my father having frizzy black hair).

That’s enough for now. It will take some time to go into this more thoroughly. My initial reaction is positive, and I’m glad I spent the $99.

Image courtesy of Chris Harvey at Dreamstime.

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Today is Follow An Archive day on Twitter. Twitter users around the world are tweeting about their favourite archives, and archives around the world are tweeting about themselves, using the hashtag #followanarchive.

I’ve learned about a lot of archives I didn’t know about, and a lot that I did know about but didn’t know they used Twitter. Here are a couple of examples:

@BaselineLPMA  NSW Land and Property Management Authority Heritage Information

website at http://www.baseline.nsw.gov.au, which pulls together the information of most interest to historians and genealogists.

@naagovau National Archives of Australia

website at http://www.naa.gov.au. The National Archives started only their Twitter account today and had 100 followers by the end of the day!

@followanarchive Follow An Archive

website at http://followanarchive.blogspot.com/ which lists all the archives taking part.

I’ve been following this on and off all day, and it has been so much fun learning about new archives (new to me, anyway) and seeing what they are all up to. It’s after 11pm here in Sydney now, so no more Twittering for me. The Americans are just waking up so it will keep getting better!

Have a look: http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23followanarchive

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  The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball tea...
• Social Media for Family Historians
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• Another genealogy community website – Sirius Genealogy 2.0
  Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part: Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation fro...

Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part:

Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation from a simple blog, into a complete online community for Amateur & Professional Genealogists. The old blog has been shut down and a new membership site has been launched and is publicly available. Membership is FREE! In addition to the general community atmosphere, SG2 has developed numerous Google Gadgets, Web Tools and other services to assist genealogists in their mission. Many more eliciting tools are on their way!

http://www.siriusgenealogy.com

New or Improved Features:

• Live Support via Chat (just look for the icon in the upper right corner of the site)
• Articles, Article and more Articles (Member contributions encouraged).
• Headline News: Links to related news stories from around the world.
• Message Forums: Read what members are saying.
• Speaker Bureau: A place to find speakers for your next genealogy or history related event.
• Events Calendar: A place to find conferences and educational opportunities.
• File Library: Forms, genealogies and more.
• Word Of The Day: A new genealogy related word to challenge you each day!
• Abbreviation Of The Day: A new abbreviation to challenge you each day!
• Web Tools: Cousin calculators, age calculators, Soundex calculators and more.
• Google Gadgets for iGoogle and your web pages.
• Social Activity Monitors: See what genealogists are posting on twitter.
• Marketplace: Look for a growing number of products for this area.

Member Only Features

• Contributions: Get your articles, stories, events and speaker profiles posted.
• Comment and Rate: Comment and Rate just about any page in the site.
• Shoutouts: Post your quick genealogical thoughts to the entire community!
• My Account: A place to manage your membership.
• Message Forums: Meet, greet, share ideas and success stories in the forums!

So, we hope to see you in our new community. Please sure to stop in at the forums to tell us what you would like to see in the future.

I went in to have a look, and there’s a lot to see. Some of the options I clicked on needed me to sign in, so I signed in using my Facebook account and created a profile.

My “Home State or Provence” [sic] is ‘Non-US’, which tells me what I most need to know about the site. It is USA-centric. At least Non-US is at the top of the drop-down list, rather than at the bottom as it usually is.

I can see that this kind of thing might be useful. It seems to me that I have too many sites to keep track of as it is without adding another one that is unlikely to contain anything of immediate interest to an Australian.

I wish them all the best, whoever ‘they’ are.

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Carole’s Family Tree

I have been researching my family tree for a few years now, and there is always more information to find, more names to research, more relatives to talk to. My Australian family surnames are Eason, Irwin, Ewin, and Bell from Northern Ireland; Goode, Miles, Oates and Pascoe from England; and Stewart, Thomson and Simpson from Scotland. My Fijian surnames are Riley, Andrews, Whippy, O’Connor, Brown and Simpson.

My family tree is not complete – it may never be complete. It’s here so that you can contact me if you see anything that looks relevant to you or you if would like to add something to it.

Click here to enter my family tree.

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I’ve been part of the 1st ProGen Study Group for nearly 18 months now. Each month we study a chapter or two of the book and do an assignment which is submitted to others in the group for review.

Assignment 16 was the toughest yet – we had to write a proof argument for some part of our family history where the answer required some deductive reasoning. I chose two cases from my own family and started writing each one. The Irish/Australian Eason case seemed too complex for a first attempt, so I chose the other one, on my Fijian Riley side.

Big mistake. You’ve probably already seen it. I didn’t. I’m in Australia, and the records I need are not. I have some, but I need more. So I don’t have enough evidence for the case I was trying to make, and it turned out not to be a ‘proof’ at all.

By the time I realised this I decided it was too late to go back and start again with the other one, so I kept going. My assignment got later and later, and I still didn’t have enough. I’ve almost finished transcribing a ship’s log from 1831-2 and I have two more to go. I’ve searched the Fiji Times from 1869 onwards, which is far too late to be relevant but I had to try!

I handed it in, so to speak, today – non-standard citations, unclear argument and all. I’m over it.

When the frustration has worn off some I’ll post my findings here.

• Unlock The Past Expo Victoria
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An announcement from World Vital Records:

World Vital Records is announcing the addition of the largest number of records to be released in a single day since the site launched in 2006.

To commemorate this milestone, for the first time World Vital Records is offering FREE PUBLIC ACCESS to its entire online collection beginning August 11 through August 13, 2009. This is a perfect opportunity to participate in this incredible promotion.

This is a great opportunity to have a look around at the Australian content in this site, mostly, but not only, provided by Archive CD Books Australia.

Just click on the link below!

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Another quote from Star Trek Voyager. They’ve found a space ship from way back in the past. The rest of the crew are all envious of the ones who get to go and have a look at it, because it’s a direct look at the past. Explorers are historians, and I guess historians are explorers.

The pilot died but recorded a message first, and that was what he said. He hoped his Dad would get the message, but no, it was Seven-Of-Nine, who has discovered empathy with people from the past that she didn’t know personally.

• Unlock The Past Expo Victoria
  The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball tea...
• Social Media for Family Historians
  My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media site...
• My DNA results have arrived!
  I have previously written about beginning my DNA adventures with a test with 23andMe, a company that focuses more on the health aspects of genetics than the genealogical aspects. They had an offer I c...
• Follow an archive day on Twitter
  Today is Follow An Archive day on Twitter. Twitter users around the world are tweeting about their favourite archives, and archives around the world are tweeting about themselves, using the hashtag #f...
• Another genealogy community website – Sirius Genealogy 2.0
  Yesterday I received an email about a new website called Sirius Genealogy 2.0. The email said, in part: Sirius Genealogy 2.0 (SG2) is pleased to announce that we have completed our transformation fro...

I just watched an old episode of Star Trek Voyager about genealogy. Star Trek Voyager was a spin-off series of Star Trek, the old series made in the 60s about “space, the final frontier”.

In the episode I watched (Episode 23, Season 5) Captain Janeway (a sort of Katherine Hepburn) was looking into the story of the ancestor who had inspired her to become a Star Fleet captain. As it turned out, the story wasn’t what she was told, and she was disappointed. She decided that the photograph her crew had found (nice to be able to get your crew working on your family history) had no place on her desk after all.

So her crew threw a surprise party for her and called it Ancestor Day, where we celebrate the lives of our ancestors and ponder their significance to us. Even if what she believed turned out not to be true, it still inspired her at the time.

I think it’s a good idea!

• Unlock The Past Expo Victoria
  The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball tea...
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• My DNA results have arrived!
  I have previously written about beginning my DNA adventures with a test with 23andMe, a company that focuses more on the health aspects of genetics than the genealogical aspects. They had an offer I c...
• Follow an archive day on Twitter
  Today is Follow An Archive day on Twitter. Twitter users around the world are tweeting about their favourite archives, and archives around the world are tweeting about themselves, using the hashtag #f...
• Another genealogy community website – Sirius Genealogy 2.0
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