Get planning

Welcome to my October newsletter & hello to my new subcribers.

This is a busy time of year for me: I’ve plenty of extra curricular work in the form of teaching and lectures to societies, so it takes a lot of planning. Luckily, I love making lists and scheduling things in advance. I use a weekly tear-off sheet to plot my work schedule & just bought myself a new one. Yes, I realise this is another way to indulge my fancy stationery habit! I’m showing you a blank one to protect the privacy of my clients. I’ll often just write a person’s name as shorthand for doing the next phase of their project. How do you plan your time?

I’m back teaching in Malahide Community School the past 3 weeks. It’s always fun to engage with a new group who is eager to learn how to research their family history.

Rootstech is back on my calendar for March 2025 after I had 3 successful solo talk submissions & a group one. My topics will include newspaper obituaries, the Virtual Treasury & a talk I’m calling “Everything you wanted to ask about Irish research but were afraid to”. With fellow professional genies, Ciara Chivers and Morag Peers, we’ll be delivering a webinar on the links between Irish and Scottish research/family history.

Before that though, I’ll be giving a talk closer to home. Some of you may know of my involvement with the Malahide Historical Society. This year we’ve been running a project with local primary schools to get children to engage with their own family history. I’ll be giving a lecture on the project on Tuesday 8th October.

With all of this work, there’s often limited time to continue my own family research but I’ve snuch a bit in recently on my big brick wall. Take a read of my efforts to pin down my elusive great-great grandparents, Thomas Reilly & Elizabeth Murphy.

Did you know that Nathan Dylan Goodwin has a new book out? I really love his Venator series which features a Salt Lake City team involved in solving cold case crimes using investigative genetic genealogy. As this is the third book in the series, there are certain through plots which might make it difficult to get all the nuance if you haven’t read the previous installments but the story is standalone & I really enjoyed it, hoovering it up over last weekend. Having now visited SLC, I realised that I’ve actually walked by and peered into the building where the fictional team have their office! Even if you never want to solve cold case crimes, these books provide a good template of the methodology involved, much of which can be applied to regular genealogy. So I’m counting reading this book as Continuous Professional Development!

Before I go, a quick reminder that the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa’s conference is online at the end of this month. There’s a great line-up of talks on Ireland including one from yours truly & an expert Q&A on DNA matters afterwards. Hope to see you there.