Flowers - Week 11: 52 Ancestors

 

Grevillea - one of many

A few years ago, after I retired from full-time work and became passionate about genealogy I undertook the UK based Family History Skills and Strategies (Intermediate) course with Pharos Tutoring.  I finished it in 2014 and almost immediately began the Diploma of Family History at the University of Tasmania.

I was particularly interested in the Pharos Tutors courses because although I was born in Australia to an Australian mother and an English father, all four of my biological grandparents were English from the south of England.

I loved both courses equally and I could undertake each of them online.

In 2010, my husband John and I sold our four-bedroom house in Western Sydney and moved into a three-bedroom unit in a retirement village nearby.  It is a large village and each complex is a cluster of units set in beautiful gardens. Most of the complexes are named after flowering plants, mostly Australian natives.  Our 49-unit complex is called Grevillea.

Grevilleas, of which there are many varieties and colours are found Australia wide.  They grow nicely in Australian gardens, as shrubs or groundcovers.

So it seemed natural to me to call my little hobby/business Grevillea Genealogy.  I have a website with a linked Google Blog, a Facebook page and an associated email address linked to my Gmail account.  I do not charge for labour - that's the hobby part.  I charge enough to cover my other costs such as database subscriptions.

I've been undertaking family history research since 2014 for friends and acquaintances, particularly residents in our retirement village.  The projects have been quite varied.  One resident wished to find the truth about their inlaws' tales of a coachbuilding business, another about what her English father did in World War 1 and yet another about whether two families with the same surname were connected.  Some were amazed to find convicts in their families, another was surprised that she was a distant cousin of one of our recent prime ministers.  Many simply wanted to extend their family trees back as far as they could, or to discover when their ancestors came to Australia.

I am not undertaking nearly as much research now since my husband, spinal cord injured since 1970,  has recently damaged his shoulder badly and is much less independent than he'd like to be.  A former amateur racing-car driver, he cannot drive at the moment.

So here I am, undertaking a blog challenge for Amy Johnson Crow's  Generations Cafe. To kickstart my weekly blogging challenge, I signed up with Stickk.com, a behaviour changing campaign.  It worked!  I had to report weekly whether I had uploaded a blog post and my husband had to verify it.  I linked it to an "anti-charity", an organisation for which I had no time.  My chosen "anti-charity" was the National Firearms Association.  It was one of a dozen choices, mostly American.  There was no way I wanted my money to go to the NRA.