Created by Julie Goucher, July 2019

Hello everyone, Happy December!

I have had a reasonably long break from posting, that said, I note that I have had a surge in followers, so if you are new here, thanks for joining me!

Why the break? Well this year has been quite busy – I have taught the usual amount of courses for Pharos, delivered 112 talks to various international audiences. All of these were virtual which is my preference these days. I have created a few new talks, retired a few talks and had a bit of a change on this site in how they appear.

The list of talks was becoming wieldy, I therefore updated the list of the talks on this site, with a full synopsis available as a downloaded file. Each talk is updated before it is given. I firmly believe that if I am asked to give a talk then that talk should be up to date with a fresh look, and a syllabus or handout is available for all talks. If genealogists attend a talk then they should get something from that talk, because time is something that each of us probably finds in short supply.

We managed a few breaks away this year, charging the batteries is important, as they say, a change is as good as a rest. One of those breaks away coincided with the #AllAboutThatPlace event and I was fortunate that while I listened to those talks, all freely given by genealogists and historians, my spouse was wandering about a river in the north east of England with a fishing rod – all the fish caught were returned to the river to live another day.

For reasons I cannot explain I thoroughly enjoyed the #AllAboutThatPlace event, more so than any other event in recent years. There were more than 130 short talks, all created in celebration of the Society of One-Place Studies 10th birthday, I was a founder member and still support the society, contributing three talks which can be viewed here (along with the handout). The associated Facebook Group that was set up for the event, generated lots of interesting discussion, debating and knowledge sharing. The group continues to receive posts and I recommend it.

Two other things I have been working on is my poor filing system, both paper and digital formats, and my pile of completed notebooks for the current year. My current notebook I began on 14 November is from my stash and I might have enough to last the rest of the year – more on both of those topics in the next day or so.