The July Ultimate Blog Challenge (UBC) is done and dusted for another year. August has arrived, and in my little corner of the world, August means windy weather. Cold and wet, windy weather. And this year, the August winds have brought with them a message of change.
UBC is designed to motivate bloggers to post a new blog on their website each day of the month. The July challenge was no different. Again, I fell short of the goal, but old habits die hard, and new habits are hard to establish. I tried. I failed. But I learned a lot in the process, and that’s what matters most.
Life Happens
My excuse is that life happens, and it is those life-happenings that are the canvas on which we create new blogs.
July came with no shortage of life-events, and now I have plenty of empty canvases, just waiting to be filled. But the winds of change are howling around me, screaming for me to abandon this site, for a while, in order to fill the blank spaces of my Family History blog site.
A domain name needs to reflect the theme of the website it belongs to. This website and blog, aptly named, is about me: my community, my travels, my thoughts, likes, dislikes, and my life in general. When I needed a more specific blog-site, I created Grandfather Berg.
My interest in family history centres predominantly around my paternal Grandfather, Alfred Berg, who started the Australian branch of the Berg Family, of which I am descended. Grandfather was born with a more Swedish name in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1877, than he died with in Bankstown, Australia, in 1959.
Because I like a challenge, my research is focussed on my Swedish side, and Grandfather deserves a website of his own because so little is known of his early life. I don’t speak Swedish, but I understand a few Swedish words that help isolate vital information from Swedish records.
When did Grandfather change his name? When and why did he leave Sweden? These questions remain unanswered but deserve my full attention.
My Ancestors
Grandfather isn’t my only ancestor worthy of a blog, so I created the Family History Vault to capture the stories of both sides of my family. And therein lies the change that the August winds are prompting.
I fell short of the required thirty-one blogs for the July Ultimate Blog Challenge, but I managed to increase the blog-width of this site in the process. Now it’s time to abandon these pages for a while, to add to the stories that are waiting to be told on my other sites.
When I am no longer a participant in the race we call ‘life’, future generations will hopefully find a foothold in their family history search, through the stories I have written. And maybe by researching my family in general, I might unearth vital information about Grandfather’s Swedish family.
I hope that future generations won’t have to work as hard to find their ancestor’s stories as the current generation has in finding theirs.
And that is why I will continue to research, write, and fill the pages of the Family History Vault with the stories of those who have gone before us.
