Welcome to our first Newsletter for 2003. The last couple of months have been a rather hectic for me, but things have started to quiten down a bit now. My brother had to go into hospital for an operation and as he was my mother's carer, we had to find emergency respite care for her. She is 87 and requires constant care and attention. I was able to find respite care for a few weeks and then thankfully found her long term hostel care. I am afraid that my brother will not be able to resume being her carer, and because of her condition she will now be in hostel type accomadation. She has settled in OK which is a big relief to us all. She has lived in Wothaggi, a country city in Victoria for over 20 years now and does not want to return to live in Melbourne. It takes me about 1 1/2 hours to drive down to where is which I do weekly.
I recently became moderator of 2 more Genealogy Groups. One is another Australian Genealogy Group and the other is an English Group. The Australian one is australiangeniesonline and the English one is called englishgenes. I became moderator of these groups mainly because I had written to Yahoo about them a few times in the last 6 months. There moderators had not been sighted since June of 1999 for the English one and since June 2001 for australiangeniesonline. The English one went through a porn attack in 2000 which resulted in a few members leaving. I think that there were a few from this group left as well. I will be renaming englishgenes to UK_Genealogical_Researchers as I have looked through all of its messages and some do refer to research in the UK. The name change hopefully will give it a new lease on life. I will post the URL in the Group for all to see later.
With respect to australiangeniesonline I am currently seeing is I can find out what happened to genie_from_oz the founder of australiangeniesonline. She mentioned she had something that would keep her away for a little while but that was in June or July of 2000. I have already posted a query on the only Rootsweb Mailing List I could see her posting to in Australia. If anyone in our group has any information on her could the please contact me. If I hear nothing in a month or so, I will canvas the members on that group to see what they would like to do.
If anyone has any Resources that they are willing to use to help memberso of the group could the please contact me so that I can add them to our Resources Page. Also if anyone wants me to link there HomePage on our HomePage could the do like wise.
I will be working on a few new initiatives for this group and the UK one over the next month or so. Hopefully they will meet with members approval. If anyone has any ideas on anything they would like to see introduced let me know.
Has anyone got anything they would like to contribute in a future Newsletter. If so contact me and I will discuss it with you. This could be an interesting bit of Family History or something similar.
Thats it for this Newsletter.
Alan
