It’s Good News Week

Will you be going to Canberra?

I was excited to see the other day that the program for the 2015 Australasian Congress of Genealogy and Heraldry has been released. I already knew that my proposals for presentations had been accepted, but the cat is now officially out of the bag.

My topics probably won’t be a great surprise to regular readers of my blogs:

The marriage of local and family history: a bridge to the past. Use the combined skills of local and family history to draw past communities from the shadows.

From Dorfprozelten to Australia: how social media reunited the emigrants’ descendants across time. From cousin bait to match making: blogging isn’t just self-indulgence.

One of the memorial walls at the Australian War Memorial.

It’s exciting to see all the topics, and even more so, the presenters. My geneabuddies, Helen Smith, Kerry Farmer, Shauna Hicks and Carole Riley are among the speakers with topics ranging from migration schemes to land records. I’m also really looking forwarding to hear talks by Richard Reid, Perry McIntyre and Cheryl Mongan who are mates from Shamrock in the Bush conferences and Irish history gurus, and in Richard’s case also military experts.The icing on the cake is a bunch of speakers who I’ve never yet had the chance to hear present. What a treat it will all be!

I do hope I get to meet some more of my virtual friends in the nation’s capital, Canberra, between 26 and 30 March 2015. Just think of all the temptations – Congress, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library, the National Archives of Australia and all the museums and galleries. Time to start drawing up a running sheet for the “to do” list. Meanwhile I’ve got some homework to do.

Fun times ahead!