MyCanvas Guest Blog - A Beginner's Guide to Swedish Genealogy

Have Swedish family history and not sure how to get started? I share how to get started in this guest blog post for MyCanvas! Learn common Swedish genealogy words, and tricks to untangling Swedish family names.

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A Family Secret (or, How I Learned To Tread Carefully When Doing Certain Research)

I have a big family. If I count my parents, step-parents, half-brother and sister, my step-brothers and sister, their partners ( and their children) plus my grandparents then we're up to twenty-two people. Add cousins, uncles, second cousins and the like (and their children, partners, etc), and we're inching close to one hundred people. Most of my large extended family is on my father's side as my mother is an only child. Born in 1953 to Geoff and Anita Crawford, she didn't encounter a large family until she married my father. I've not asked her how she dealt with that, but knowing my mum, she took it in her stride, rolling her eyes at all the quirks that come with large families. Her parents also came from small families. My grandmother, Anita, was also an only child and my grandfather, Geoff, had one sister. She has cousins, who I never knew as they lived in Queensland as we in Victoria, but all in all - small family was the way of the Crawfords. In the 1...

Concerning Convicts

A much-loved go-to pseudo insult of Australians by the English is "convict" or, if they're feeling particularly nasty, "crim". I am here to declare once and for all - calling us "convict" is not insulting. In fact, we love it. No, really, we absolutely loooooooooove our collective convict heritage and, as a genealogist, there is nothing better than finding a convict in my family tree or the tree of someone for whom I am doing research. The BBC series Banished has rekindled an interest in the plight of convicts sent to Australia, a place which is often referred to in the series as a "godforsaken corner of the world". This is just unfair. Sure, they landed at Botany Bay (original name Stingray Harbour , but changed out of respect to Steve Irwin [1] ) but it's not the fault of Captain Arthur Phillip that he chose to land in what would become Sydney. Had he simply persevered further south, he would have been able to land in what would b...

So Who Do We Think We Are? The Future of Genealogy Events in the UK. Part 2

This is a continuation of my post Who Do We Think We Are? I fully expect some feathers to be ruffled by the following but also truly believe that without some harsh comments and discussions, true progress (in any field) cannot be made. I also want to preempt this all by underlining that the work of people and organisations in the previous WDYTYA? Live shows was really wonderful and everyone should be proud. Shows like WDYTYA? Live and RootsTech need to be "shows" (to an extent). The life-blood of such events is not those of us who are already in the industry. While it is a great opportunity for us to network and meet up with friends and colleagues, in order for it to be a success, there needs to be some "layman" bums on seats and so the appeal needs to be broad. What this means is that it needs to draw a crowd and how do you do that? By having fun and appealing things at the event. WDYTYA? Live attempted this by having "stars" from the show ap...

Census Sensibility

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