Koalas and Kangaroos!

Randy Seaver author of the well-known genealogy blog, Genea-Musings, recently posed the topics of “Your Other Hobbies or Interests” for his “Saturday Night Genealogy Fun” weekly blog post, and it has spurred me to get writing again. So just what are my other hobbies and interests? Reading is one, and I’m a collector of various things, there’s no doubt about that. One of those is my 19 Crimes collection of corks and wine bottles, that is still growing slowly. But other than that … not so much of a hobby, but more of a passion, is keeping an eye on the local wildlife in my area. So my answer is … koalas and kangaroos. I live in the Adelaide Hills area of South Australia, and am incredibly fortunate to have koalas and kangaroos come and visit regularly. So regularly, that I can identify them, and have named many of them. So let me introduce you to my girl koala Boomer, and a few of my regulars …   So what started with me going out for a walk and photographing the wildlife I saw along the way and putting some pictures on on Facebook for my friends, has resulted in my koalas and kangaroos totally having fans. They suggested I should make a calendar from all my koala pics, so I did this and made a 2020 calendar which went well, and Boomer and her friends made it to many corners of the world. So recently I’ve been busy working on my 2021 calendar, and now Boomer has her own Facebook page as well. So it’s been keeping me busy, combine that with creating a proper separate website and there is absolutely no genealogy time at present. Everyone has their ‘happy place’...

Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge: N is for … Never-Ending New Stuff and New Jersey...

As has happened numerous times throughout the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge, I’ve changed my mind of what to write about after already starting this post. So for this N post I’d like to say that N is for NEVER-ENDING NEW STUFF We all know that the internet is an absolute wealth of information with new websites and new records being added online daily. Seriously the rate of growth is overwhelming. So how do we keep up with what new online that interests us? And by that I’m meaning anything genealogy or genealogy-related, but you knew that didn’t you … just checking!! Well there are several ways, so let me share those with you … Firstly you can keep up to date with what’s new on the big websites (arranged alphabetically: WEBSITES Ancestry.com.au – To check our the latest additions to the Ancestry website look for the Search button on their top bar, the scroll down to Card Catalogue.  That will bring u a listing of collections on the Ancestry.com.au website sorted by popularity. You can change this to sort by Newest, and on the lefthand sidebar you can choose to click off the “filter to show only records from Australia”and it will then give you all the latest records on any Ancestry site. Note: this also applies to Ancestry.co.uk and Ancestry.com. Cyndi’s List – Cyndi’s List is a directory of websites, not records, but I feel it is important to keep up with what websites are new too … so to view her newly added sites, she has a button titles “Browse New Links” and from there you can check the links added each day for the past month of so. FamilySearch – To view what’s new...