One of the highlights from Inside History magazine’s July/August 2013 edition was the list of “50 Genealogy Blogs You Need to Read”. From all the wonderful genealogy blogs that are out there, imagine my surprise in when I saw that my Lonetester HQ blog made it on to the list. Wowee!!

Penned by Australian blogger Jill Ball who authors the Geniaus blog, for the second year in a row Inside History magazine’s top “50 blogs that every genealogist needs to follow” includes libraries, archives, societies, personal and professional genealogists, speciality topics and organisation blogs from around the world.

Some of the criteria that was used to choose those on the list was:

I should start off by asking you two questions “do you have a heap of family photos either in albums or scanned and in folders on your computer?” and “do you have a wall that is in need of some redecorating?” Well I do have the photos, and I did have the wall. So I got to thinking, it seems silly not to display these gorgeous photos of our ancestors, and putting them in ‘tree’ format makes them fit into context, so the idea for my Family Tree Photo Wall was born!

If you already follow me on Facebook or on Google+ you will be familiar with my Family Tree Photo Wall as I have been putting up photos of the progress as I go, and have been getting wonderful feedback from people. Dick Eastman was one of those saw my pictures on Google+, and has since featured my Family Tree Photo Wall in a recent post of his titled The Ancestral Wall.

Are you using social media to your (genealogy) advantage? A few of you might be, but I reckon the majority of you aren’t, and I’m here to tell you just how you can be using Facebook for far more than keeping up with what your family and friends are doing.

These days there are literally hundreds of social media sites around, if you don’t believe me check out Wikipedia.

To get just a little what I want to cover are the big ones that fall under the title of ‘Social Media Networking’ – you know, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and I’ll throw in YouTube as well, because it is useful.

Diaries are a wonderful thing. They can tell you about day-to-day life, and people and places the diary writer interacted with. They can show emotion and they can have give personality to a name – depending on the writer of course. But diaries are a seriously great resource for historians.

Now I am fortunate that over the years quite a number of my family members have kept diaries, and even more so that many of these have survived, some dating back to the 1800s. In time I’ll take a look at some of these, but there is one particular one that I want to share with you today, and that is a snippet from the diary of William Beavis Randell who together with his wife and young family emigrated from Devon, England in 1837, and set up on land that became known as Gumeracha, in the Adelaide Hills.