Researching Abroad - Upcoming Conference

For those of you who somehow don't know, August in Australia is Family History Month.  This year, along with all the other talks, events and sessions happening around the country, the wonderful people at Unlock the Past are holding a roadshow "Researching Abroad : Finding British Isles and European Ancestors".
Check out their website for the dates and details of the roadshow, which covers Brisbane, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth.

The two featured speakers are :

• Chris Paton - British Isles stream
  Professional genealogist, author, international speaker and writer of The GENES Blog concerning Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas

• Dirk Weissleder - German/European stream
  Coordinator of the German-Australian Genealogy Alliance and the International German Genealogical Partnership

I've booked my place at the Melbourne session and am looking forward to hearing these two wonderful speakers.  While I've had the pleasure of attending talks by Chris Paton before, this will be the first time I've heard Dirk Weissleder speak.  If you're attending the Melbourne session I hope to see you there!

Cemetery Day

In a recent post Alona of Lonetester declared June 18th to be Cemetery Day.  As I think this is a great idea (thanks Alona) I decided my goal for the day was to go through some of my records looking for gaps and see if I could track down the graves of some of my ancestors that had eluded me.  Using Billion Graves and Find a Grave as my starting points, and newspapers such as Trove and British Newspaper Archive, amongst others, I spent a lovely couple of hours tracking down graves and finding photos of family headstones.  It was quite surprising how many gaps I had in my tree and how many I was able to fill.

Headstone of my great-grandfather John Clark

So come on board with Cemetery Day and research an ancestor's grave site, visit a cemetery and take some photos, share the photos you have with your family - or start planning for Cemetery Day 2018.