On Wednesday, January 26th - myself and @mishjholman are setting you a challenge. We want as many people interested in genealogy to tell your genealogy story either in the form of a blog post, Facebook/Instagram post, Twitter thread or any form that you like!
We'd love to read about how you got into genealogy, your favourite discovery/part about genealogy and where do you hope to see the genealogy world/community/industry in the future? We hope to have all posts showing on social media throughout January 26th (so you can schedule them
for that date if you wish!) and then share it on social media with the hashtag #MyGenealogyStory or tag me on social media on the relevant platform:
We want this to allow everyone to tell their story and for everyone to strengthen their connections with the genealogy community or even make new ones! Who's joining in? 🙋🏻♂️
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• A poem from Katherine Zappone was apparently the driving force behind the Government investigating mother and baby homes (according to Leo Varadkar).
• The Seanad voted to not include 10 additional institutions in the research scope of the COI...
...which would've meant that institutions like Temple Hill (where my mum's half-sister was adopted from) and St. Clare's, Stamullen (where my mum was adopted from)
• The apparent win of giving adoptees unredacted basic information in *2022*, which has gone badly as...
[2/9]
...adoptees are still getting redactions on their information. Mum's still has redactions.
• Ex-Taoiseach Micheál Martin reflects that the State should've bought Bessborough, despite him once having the ability to do it.
• Still trying to find the Bessborough Missing.
At the beginning of her life, my mother was born in a mother & baby home with the third highest death rate in Ireland.
At 15 days old, my mother was sent in a taxi to an adoption home halfway up the country with her mother.
Her mother would visit her a few times by...
...working and earning money to buy stuff and visit her a few times before she could no longer bring herself to do it.
At 54 days old, my mum was put with her family who'd later adopt her.
She was raised in a family that always supported her to find her birth family.
At 25, my mum married my father - a detail the religious order who ran Bessborough, (a place she only spent two weeks of her life at) would note down on her file, despite no clear reason for how it got there.
[There was no marriage notice and Mum didn't know her original name]
I'm am giving (and continue) to give my all into @Project_Infant to turn it into a beacon for people wanting to:
a) learn more about the homes and their backstory
b) learn more about those who died
But recently I've felt vexed. Which is why I'm adding another small thing to NLB.
For those who aren't adopted, we are lucky as we can easily trace our family back to goodness knows when, you have to admit that.
But I want to use my skills to help those adopted through mother and baby homes, I want to help them trace their birth families.
So, if you were born in a mother and baby home and would like help finding your birth ancestral roots, I'd love to help. I don't charge whatsoever for this research. This is my way of giving back and helping survivors find who their ancestors are.
With yet more restrictions being imposed on how you can use Twitter, here are two ways you can still keep up to date with the #Genealogy community on Twitter.
A thread...
The first way (and this is not intended to be self-promotion) is my Twitter community. All sorts of genealogy blog posts, and dilemmas are here. I will work on bringing discussions into this as well. To join, go here: twitter.com/i/communities/…
Way number two (and the majority of this thread) will be using Twitter lists. They are not my favourite, but with the feeds being loopy - this might be the primary way I see things now.
To find the lists feature, if you're on your PC, see picture one, phone - picture two.
Hey #Genealogy Twitter, don't scroll past this yet!
So as time progresses, I've seen people wondering if Twitter does go down in a ball of fire or people leave, where to go?
One of these suggestions was Mastodon.
While it's been described as not an alternative to Twitter, it's very similar to how it operates. You can respond, boost (retweet) and favourite (like) tweets and even see all the hustle and bustle of Twitter.
There are also some improvements to Mastodon that aren't on Twitter.
One of these things is the character count in a post. You can have 500 characters in a post on M compared to 280 characters on T. Another thing is there are no ads or algorithm-suggested/popular tweets, who you follow is all that will appear in your timeline unless...
This tweet had gained a bit of traction, some people were sympathetic with Simon that this has happened (and especially in this way) and the BILE that others quote tweeted Simon’s tweet with is horrendous.
Guess any sort of human interaction has just gone out the window then?
But if there’s one thing that @SBkcrn has done is create and develop a wonderful feature for Twitter for its diverse communities to interact with one another.
And for that I’m grateful to him for allowing me access to the feature and create the Genealogy Twitter community.