Pen to paper
Recent events and an important reminder!
So, with RootsTech 2024 behind us (and RootsTech 2025 already in the works!), it only went to show me how much I miss out in terms of being there in the moment because college is always calling! I will have to catch up… in between all of my presentations.
Speaking of which, I seem to have presentations coming out of my ears! One for a college assignment, another for a whistlestop tour of Irish genealogy sources I am presenting for my class and finally, one for the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History - this one is about Irish Civil Registration. [link to it is in the highlighted text above] It’s free to register so if you want to join in and learn about civil registration in Ireland.
But, as to why I called this ‘Pen to paper’? While I am working on the civil registration presentation, I was looking to add a spot of colour. So, with that in mind, I created this, family tree diagram of my grandfather and his parents and siblings.
Now, if you join the presentation, you’ll find out why I did this. I had a photo of almost everyone in the diagram, but when it came to my grandaunt Mary Ellen, I didn’t have a photo. For me, I’m perhaps the most disorganised when it comes to actually organising everything but I just named each photo for each person accordingly so I had a nice system going.
There was no file for a Mary Ellen or an Evelyn, so at this point, I’m turning my emails, and pictures archive upside down and can’t think of where I put it. But, you’d never guess where I found the copy. Turns out, during the lockdown in 2020 — I had started a project. To write up my family history so my family could read about the research I had done about our ancestors. I had written the histories of eight people, one of whom was Mary Ellen.
So the moral of the story is to write up your family history! It could be the reason you can retrieve something that you might have misplaced. [Assuming you don’t already do something of the sort…]