I’ve been nominated for the ONE LOVELY BLOG Award by the one and only lovely Debra Watkins of the A Pocket Full of Family Memories blog.

To Debra, firstly thankyou for reading my posts, and secondly for nominating me, I am really honoured with the Award – so thankyou. To everyone else, do yourself a favour and go visit Debra’s blog, there’s lots of good reading there! And you can read her One Lovely Blog Award post here.

Debra is one of my online friends. Although she lives in Australia (as I do), we live in different states, and as yet our paths haven’t crossed in person. But we have communicated a lot via social media – blogs, twitter etc. for the past couple of years.

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:

When I started this blog (Lonetester HQ), it was simply created so that I can have my own place to share my own  genealogy, as opposed to the genealogy blog posts I write for work (Genealogy & History News). So when I received advice from Shauna Hicks (who just happens to be one of Australia’s top genealogy experts) nominating my blog for a “Blog of the Year Award” I was simply blown away.

Shauna writes: “Lone Tester HQ, Alona Tester – for her family history through the alphabet challenge which inspired many to tell their family stories”.

What can I say, I am honoured to have been nominated for the Illuminating Blogger Award, and the fact that the nomination came from the person that I consider to be Australia’s No. 1 Geneablogger, Jill of the Geniaus blog fame just adds to the honour.

I was one of six nominations that she gave, and in her nomination Jill says: LoneTester HQ – Alona, is a young, enthusiastic blogger from South Australia who brought a youthful freshness to blogging. She deserves this nomination the effort she has put into setting up and curating the Family History through the Alphabet Challenge.