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