As regular readers of my blog know, I have taken part in a few online courses since I retired.

The first one was run by the University of Tasmania and was titled Introduction to Family History. As you can tell I love genealogy and tracing my family tree. I knew the co-ordinator of the course and thought I might learn some new things about researching correctly especially referencing, citations and new sources or repositories to use. I created a page on my blog with all the sources mentioned by students in the group I was part of during this course.

I have since been asked to help moderate the same course – both times with beginner groups. This might be because I tend to enjoy writing step by step instructions which I know a lot of beginners to both online learning and family history need during the course. It can be tough learning the set up at a University as well as using a computer efficiently and also doing the reading and listening involved in the actual family history side of the course.

I am now thinking I might need to look at my sources page from this course and split it further into smaller sections.

I then took part in a course with Future Learn. Monash University was running a course on World War I – looking at stories of participants through videos created by students at the University. To see my posts on this course, check out the category linked here. I created one post just listing links of places to visit when researching a World War I soldier or nurse.

I am presently enrolled in another course at the University of Tasmania where they are putting together a Diploma of Family History – 8 topics being offered. I didn’t complete the Writing your Family History course but intend to do it at some future time.

But I am doing the Convict Ancestors course. With 8 convicts in the family so far and, luckily, all in Tasmania I felt this was a great chance to find out more places to search for records on my convicts. I have researched well most of their lives in Tasmania – at least the birth, death marriage side of their families, but would love to find out more about their life pre-transportation to VDL. I will be putting together some resource pages on convicts as well throughout this course.

Part of the course is transcribing documents and writing a story about your convict using the software at Our Family Past. I have decided to use one of my convicts I know little about – even her name might be wrong as she was convicted under another name as well. Isabella WATKINS(ON) who was the wife of Francis COLGRAVE in Evandale.

Readers: Have you decided yet who you will be researching? Why choose that person?