My interest in genealogy began in the 1970's when my cousin, Douglas Spalding, had our Spalding line traced by a research company.
He kindly gave a copy to my mother - I was rapt, I'd always loved reading history and this brought my past alive.
Luckily I sat both parents down there and then and got a list of all the relatives they could remember. Both parents have since passed away and I so miss being to be able pester then with my questions, they would patiently listen to my discoveries but didn't really understand why I wanted to "bother with that old stuff"
Being busy back then raising a young family, I put the hard work of research aside until the Australian Bicentennial was due in 1988 and I thought it would be nice to celebrate it by completing the tree.
I soon realised that family trees are never completed!
I've left information all over the net on forums and sites like World Connect at Rootsweb and over the years have written several web pages, the only remaining page is now at Rootsweb called
Rootsweb have since been taken over by Ancestry.com - at the moment the free pages are accessible to all, but the internet is not static so it's unknown how long that will last.
So I am back again to the question of what will stay and what will go, and what's easy to update.
How can I present research that will stay freely available to everyone and hopefully allow comments and interaction with other distant family members.
I don't want to pay for a web site provider or make use of the site provided by my ISP because these sites will disappear when I do (hopefully that won't happen til I 'finish' the tree!)
Web pages take time to write, alter and add new information. I originally taught myself enough html to create my first pages but don't want to have to re-learn everything again so I can cope with CSS.
I've kept a blog for several years now about my textile and craft work and really enjoy surfing the blogs of my contacts and seeing and talking to them about their work.
That was what gave me the idea of a genealogy blog - not an original idea I've since found, looking around the net lots of people have had the same thought.
Blogspot says they do not cancel blogs, they will remain forever - however long that is in WWW terms is anyone's guess, but here I am - and we'll see how it goes.
If you come across this in a search please add a comment, I'd like to hear from you, (especially if you think you are related)
