I am again participating in this blog challenge. Below is my response.

Back in 2012 Jill Ball (aka Geniaus) decided to publish the first Accentuate the Positive Geneameme. Jill had seen several genies reflecting on their failures and wanted them to celebrate their successes. I said:

“You are a bunch of highly motivated people who have made great strides in the genealogy sphere. Let’s share the good news.”

For the 2025 challenge Jill has decided to move away from prompts that relate to particular situations and resources to a list focusing on our reactions to particular verbs as we reflect on our family history journey.

Jill encourages everyone to respond on social media or in a text document to the prompts from the list below  – please delete the statements that are not relevant to your situation.

Once you have done so please share your post’s link in a comment on her 2025 post https://geniaus.blogspot.com/2025/12/accentuate-positive-2025-geneameme.html or send your link or text document  via email to jillballau@gmail.com or via social media. She will, when she returns from the high seas in late January, compile a list of links to your contributions on her blog. 

Remember to Accentuate the Positive 

2025 Prompts

1.  I treasured – wow a hard one first up. So many things happened this year but I will nominate receiving a photo of my biological grandfather as a young man from a second cousin. A bonus was that there were other family members in the photograph including my biological great grandparents (all on Dad’s side of the family).

2.  I shared – my family history knowledge with an online group first set up during covid and which has continued ever since as the Zoom format allows sessions to be taped for playback. In 2025 our group worked our way through Thomas MacEntee’s Do Over Book (with his permission). https://genealogybargains.com/genealogy-do-over-start-here/ Two sessions a month, one recorded and one just the group asking questions or commenting or sharing their stories. Personally I benefitted from conducting the sessions because I focused on my own families and manage to progress a few family lines as well as tidy up my e-files, place names and online trees.

3.  I travelled – finally managed to get to Islandmagee in County Antrim, Northern Ireland and visited the grave of my GGG grandparents Stewart Heddles and Agnes Templeton. Also managed a trip down to Rathdrum in County Wicklow to visit the church where my Irish ancestors John Finn and Sarah Fegan married before emigrating to Queensland. Thanks to all the lovely volunteers who drove me around on my visit. It pays to be a member of the local family history society.

4.  I learnt – heaps – but perhaps most about AI and how it can help in so many ways with genealogy from full text searching in FamilySearch, to creating images, to reviewing drafts of my family histories looking for inconsistencies and so on. Andrew Redfern deserves a special mention here as his talks are so easy to understand that you can do similar prompts using your own ancestors.

5.  I changed – or tidied up to be more precise – my place names database in my genealogy software to be more consistent. Over the years I have had different styles eg Brisbane (but which country), or Brisbane, Queensland (where’s that) or Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. With all our DNA matches around the world I think it is more important now to include our country in our locations. We might know where we live but do people elsewhere in the world know.

6.  I received – lots of good feedback after my presentations at conferences, talks or workshops. It keeps me motivated and excited about giving talks. Plus it is always nice to know what else people want to learn about.

7.  I conquered – not totally, but I am making progress with my PhD on the incarcerated women of colonial Queensland. I passed confirmation back in February and most of my research on the 1750 women is done. Now I’m into writing their stories, doing the literature review and writing the introduction to the PhD. Hope to finish by end of 2027.

8.  I found – several new generations going back on Dad’s biological families thanks to my commitment to the Do Over project in 2025. See No. 2. Ancestry has more new indexed records for the counties as well as images for my parishes. Pushed back into the 1700s in Suffolk and Norfolk.

9.  I taught – mostly through my talks at various conferences, libraries and societies. Not as many talks as I usually do because I have cut back due to my PhD commitments. Still something I love doing, even given that my first public talk was back in 1981.

10. I cried – not really but I will confess that I was a bit teary looking at the famine memorial in Dublin. Also visited the famine cemetery at Rathdrum in Wicklow which is just a green field with a memorial to those who died in the workhouse. No individual tombstones. A bonus is that the workhouse registers are now online via the local council.

11. I was proud – I don’t like to think of myself as proud, after all, pride comes before a fall, so they say. But I submitted four conference proposals in 2025 and all four were accepted and I got to go to conferences in Townsville, Darwin and two in Brisbane. So good to know that my Ph D topic is of interest to acaademic historians as well as family historians. Also great opportunities to meet new people, network with old friends as well as learn about new resources.

12. I  read – so many books both for family history and for my PhD. There is quite a crossover and my genealogy knowledge is benefitting from some of the academic works I am reading. Never enough time. Finishing the year with Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s The Hop-Pickers Murders. Also kept my Library Thing up to date this year, deleting books weeded and given away as well as adding new books.

2025 was a good year for me in that I travelled a lot, participated in some amazing conferences, and shared my family history knowledge with people in Australia and around the world thanks to Zoom and Go To Webinar. I also managed to stay relatively healthy except for a few weeks after Broome when we had either covid or rsv. Thanks Jill for the prompts and the opportunity to participate again. I look forward to reading what others have written and learn or gain new ideas. Wishing everyone a great 2026 year of research.