April A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal

This is a month long challenge held in April with bloggers posting each day except Sundays using the twenty six letters of the alphabet. People choose a wide variety of topics so there is always plenty of interesting material to read.

In the past I have used various themes to complete this challenge. Some here on this blog, and some over on my other blog Carmel’s Corner.

2016 - Useful apps (some now very outdated, others no longer exist)

2017 - Life on the farm, remembering my childhood

2019 - My Mother’s handwritten recipes

2020 - Newspaper clippings about events in my husband’s ancestors lives

2021 - Resources of the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) through Trove

2025 - Events of each day in April from ancestors’ lives

This year I have chosen to focus on just one year in our lives. It was March 1979 when we left Australia to spend a year in Kashmir. We lived on both sides of disputed line of control. When we returned to Australia a year later, our goods were left on the wharf in Brisbane for three months. Most were ruined by rain, so very few damaged photos survived. I am grateful to friends who had a similar posting in a previous year for sharing a few photos.

The A to Z format forces a pattern of remembrance. Here, with my husband’s help, I’ll endeavour to reconstruct some experiences from that one year. Living in Kashmir: A Year of People, Places and Memories.

How will you leave memories of your life for your descendants?

This post first appeared on earlieryears.blogspot.com by CRGalvin

Accentuate the Positive 2025 Geneameme

AI generated image, random text added on iPad

Each year Jill Ball from her Geniaus blog prompts family historians to participate in the Accentuate the Positive Geneameme. 

2025 Prompts - my responses

I treasured all the wills I found through fulltext search on FamilySearch. They add so much to understanding the families and their relationships from the past.

I shared my new Galvin Gleanings blog with my husband's relatives. Delighted to have a couple of positive responses, particularly one from a younger generation. Like most family history, this is still a work in progress. 

I travelled to visit living family in both South Australia and New South Wales.

I learnt many new ways to present and enhance family stories using AI tools from both Carole McCulloch's Essential Genealogy and Denyse Allen of Chronicle Makers. 

 I changed my WeAre family archive from private to public to provide access to cousins on all sides of both my and my husband's families. The archive does automatically privatise living people but I checked the media files to make sure that photos of the living were appropriately tagged and made private too.

I received a photo of a recently established marker for a grandfather's grave from a first cousin. I also received two extensively researched, comprehensive academic level biographies of relatives from a second cousin. One about Nora McInerney of Riverton. Nora was a grandfather’s sister. The other one is entitled Sister Aloysius O’Leary and the Josephite Experience. Ellen O’Leary the subject of this treatise was the sister of great grandmother Hanora. I’m very grateful for these contributions.

I conquered most of my disorganized hard drive, getting rid of duplicate files and renaming photos. An ever ongoing project.

I found newly published articles in Trove about Pat O'Dea, one of my mother's brothers and his family. One of his sons responded that he had now learnt some things about his parents that were previously unknown to him. A brief profile now exists in our family archive.

I taught a range of classes for my local genealogy group; FamilySearch skills, FamilyTreeMaker, Sharing your Stories and Refresher Skills for volunteers.

I cried when the first of my six siblings, my beautiful sister Bernadette, died at the end of February.

Bernadette Honner (born Horgan) 1941 - 2025

I was pleased to reconnect with some first cousins, not seen since I was a child. Some at Bernadette's funeral and some more recently through digital means.

I read more than 100 books in the past year and thoroughly enjoyed the latest offering from Nathan Dylan Goodwin "The Hop-Picker Murders." His protagonist Morton is a forensic genealogist who uses sound genealogical methods to unravel mysteries. I continue to read many genealogy blogs through both Feedly and Substack.

This post first appeared on earlieryears.blogspot.com by CRGalvin

From County Clare to Pinkerton Plains

John O'Dea  1834 - 1922

An updated version of John O'Dea's life detailed with marriage and death certificates can be found on the family archive at 

https://app.weare.xyz/share/earlier-times/articles/69yrmhlo2ve5 

 This post first appeared on earlieryears.blogspot.com by CRGalvin