As part of my job (and for those that don’t know, I do work in a genealogy business), I have to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings in the genealogy world – yes I know life is tough eh! So that involves lots of reading blogs, emails, genie magazines etc. But honestly if you want to keep up with the latest genealogy news yourself, here’s my secret. Simply follow the newsbreakers. These are the people who blog about something 5 minutes after it’s been announced.

So if you’d like to keep “up with the genealogy news” here’s some of the “Newsbreakers” that I follow:

William Harry Green (1878-1915) was born at Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England and emigrated with his parents William and Fanny Green (nee Haycock)  and siblings Frank, Bert and Ida aboard the “Australasian” when he was 6 years old.

The family settled in Gumeracha, a small town in the Adelaide Hills, in South Australia with Will attending the Gumeracha Primary School for a time, before transferring to the Blumberg (now Birdwood) School, and completing his schooling in 1892 age 13.

Will married Anne Duthie in 1904 and at this time his occupation was listed as gardener at Gumeracha. The Green family lived at ”Springvale” at Gumeracha and were orchardists and beekeepers.

I have always said that learning never ends, and I’ve proved that to myself today  by recording and uploading my first ever video to YouTube.

Videoing isn’t something that I’d ever get into, but then again nor was blogging. Oh boy I was so wrong with that one ;P. Anyway Jill Ball from the Geniaus blog, has started hosting Hangouts on Air on Google+. This is essentially live “video chat”. I sat and watched the first one live (you can see it here on YouTube), without being an “on air’ participant, but wish to join in sometime.

So I’ve bought myself a headset, and have been playing with my webcam which I have never actually used until today, so I needed to get used to what a video might be like. So to try it all out, I thought I’d try recording something.

Sixty five letters … that’s is how many letters my grandma wrote to her husband while he was fighting overseas in WW2. How do I know this? Well, sadly I don’t have the letters, but I do have her diaries which lists the date of every letter she wrote to him over a period of 14 months.

During the past few months I’ve been slowly going through our family heirlooms. Photographing, documenting them, and preserving them etc., and I have recently made my way on to Evelyn Hannaford’s (nee Randell) diaries … (aka my maternal grandma). I must say our family is fortunate that she was a diarykeeper, as we have 49 diaries covering a 61 year period. I can’t say I’ve read many of them yet, but two of these years 1942 and 1943 are what have intrigued me, as in the back each, grandma noted the date of every letter she wrote to my grandpa while he was in the Middle East fighting in WW2.