Hello everyone,

I have done a lot of thinking about this blog (especially after being nudged for payment for this coming year) and what I want to achieve with it. Originally, I had wanted to bring in a lot of different friends to do a collaboration, but things get more complicated when there are too many different ideas. Then I thought of joining in the 52 Ancestors 52 Weeks but soon started thinking about the privacy of living descendants who were closer generation wise than I am to the people involved. Back to the drawing board. Now, thanks to watching a number of presentations from THE Genealogy Show, I’ve some new ideas I would love to run with to see how it goes.

I really enjoyed watching M. Diane Rogers‘ presentation A 12 Week Genealogy Year? which has put things into a better focus for me. I’m always skipping off in my Alice shoes down rabbit holes instead of focusing like I used to do in university. Now I have an idea of what I want to focus on over the next 12 weeks while throwing in other small dips into other parts of my research trying to gain new skills or at least attempt to learn new practices.

I’m not a professional genealogist. I am an enthusiastic family historian that really needs to start sharing the best stories with my family rather than hording them all like Smaug the dragon from J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world. My focus now is to start looking at the information I’ve gathered, what I still need to gather and how to present it to my family in a way that they’ll actually be interested. That’s going to be the hardest bit! I always pulled my marks up at university in the final exam rather than through my essays.

Over the next 12 weeks, I’m going to be researching the life of Robert Carey. He was a private in the 42nd Regiment of Foot during the Napoleonic Wars. He’s always been the character in my tree I’ve been most drawn to and I feel it’s time that I start pulling all I have on him to present to his descendants around the world.

“Around the world?!” I hear you cry.

Yes, through years of looking into his family I’ve been in touch with various cousins thanks to the wonders of DNA from all around the world. I really want them to know his story which was never passed down in any family lore to us, how he left Ireland, fought at key battles and finally settled in Scotland. I feel he is such an interesting part of our heritage that needs to be rediscovered.

Many thanks to M. Diane Rogers for her presentation! Hopefully I can make it through to the 12 week mark and have something written in time to share with my family for Christmas! As I work through my 12 week journey, I plan on writing up a few blogs to keep myself held accountable rather than starting and veering off in a different direction (this happens to me all the time). I know I’ve two more characters in my tree I want to look into next, so hopefully they will be the next two projects. One might only be a mini project but we shall see!

Thank you all for reading!