An interesting talk today by Gail Dever on social tools for genealogy. Gail asked if anyone had had success breaking down a brickwall with Blogging. The question period was pretty busy so did not add in my thoughts on the value of blogging with regard to breaking down brickwalls at the meeting but thought I would share it with my blog.
When I started my blog in November 2008, it was to become my corporate memory of working through the 2500 images that I had brought back from Salt Lake City. The first year was mostly on those images and what I learned from them with regard to individual lines of my ancestry. Because I entered into the world of genealogy quite late (2003), I came in with the computer age of genealogy. I have done the dusty microfilm bit but a great deal of my research has been online using the online databases and services like Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, Genes Reunited etc. I have bought a lot of records (microfiche and images) from registration offices/libraries/archives. I was comfortable with the idea of writing up my daily thoughts on these images in a blog although I had imagined that only I would ever look at it!
In that thought I was so wrong. Just a short time after discussing Elizabeth Siderfin (my 6x great grandmother) and the assignment of a maiden name to her by another researcher and my thoughts on that assignment (a book published on our family in 1912), I received a comment on the blog from another researcher who was looking at her Question family. Augustine Question (my, as it turned out, 7x great grandfather) had left his will mentioning his daughter Elizabeth Siderfin (her husband Robert) and Augustine named his grandchildren and those names were an absolute match with the known children of Robert and Elizabeth Siderfin. What a gift! I still marvel at that although have had more than 40 such comments over the past 9 years since then. Each one of them has opened the curtain a little or the comment has actually broken down the brick wall that existed.
Gail gave an excellent talk on Blogging, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Pinterest. I do have a membership in each of these individual services but tend to prefer blogging.
No comments:
Post a Comment