A triple celebration and some.

The usual plus some housekeeping...

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Happy holidays! I felt I should start with that at least, right? This year has to be the year I have blogged the most, and I don’t know about you, but I feel like Ancestry needs its own kind of ‘Spotify Wrapped’. Which could include things like (but not limited to) “You spent ____ hours researching and building your family trees this year” or “You looked at ____ new record collections this year!”. I say that this year, I felt like I’ve done more research this year be it my own or mother and baby homes related or even client cases. Speaking of which, now that I’ve handed in all the assignments for this year and met the Christmas deadlines for client cases, I’m spending some time looking at my own family, which got me thinking. How many events (if any do) in your family tree happen on holidays (Christmas, Valentine’s etc…)

Me, a lot of stuff in my family happens in November and December. But I’ve got a good few relatives being born on Christmas Eve / Christmas Day. One marriage on St. Patrick’s Day but I don’t think I’ve got many others! Do you have any events in your family occurring on holidays? Let me know.

Now, I’m sure you are also aware of the Ancestry Pro Tools that are available in the U.S. at the moment and more recently, the AncestryDNA+ (I think that’s what it is called but as the DNA section of my Ancestry is currently having a full-on meltdown, I can’t check if that is its true name so apologies if I do happen to be incorrect…)

I had seen this image from a Facebook group and it seems what is given to users for free when you do a DNA test is getting a bit of a shakeup, it seems that one thing you do lose if you don’t have a subscription of some description is that you lose access to your shared matches. But, if you have a subscription of some description, this is included. But, you don’t get the Pro-Tools from Ancestry as part of a subscription from them either, which does not make sense to me. If you’re paying hundreds a year for the records, I thought that would’ve been included in it at the very least. I get they wanted to pose it as a separate optional subscription if you wanted to go for it, but still. Here’s a review of the tools from Doris Kenney if you would like to get an idea of what is part of the separate subscription. But, I do think I need to figure out if is it worth paying Ancestry the money for a subscription as for someone who is a full-time college student, it all adds up and it is pricy.

Now, here is where I would really appreciate your input in some shape or form. A few days ago, Substack issued a statement and it’s left me wondering what I should try to do next. Should I relocate this blog to another platform? I have built up many subscribers here (181 at present, which may not seem like much but to me who has put a lot of effort into my writing, I don’t want to lose all of that.) This would be platform number six if I did go for another platform. (Went from Google Blogger to Weebly to WordPress to Medium to here) But the issue is, this platform has everything I need but I don’t necessarily want to write a lot here if they want to give those kinds of voices a platform. But I also, just want to carve a home for myself in the blogging / podcast area and make it my little corner of “here’s where you can get away from all the madness”.

Lastly, I’ve updated my events calendar for 2024 with two events, one in January for the Surname Society and one in March for the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History. For more information on those, please visit here. If you are wanting to me to give a talk, get in touch and I’ll see what I can do.

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