....said presenter, Linda Bishop at her recent SAG presentation on Online Parish Clerks. Linda exhorted her audience to follow links because they might lead to some treasure.
When I was reading another genealogist's blog post the other day I recalled Linda's words. I was reading a long article that was devoid of links and I found this rather frustrating as I wanted to quickly find out more about the people, places and things the writer was discussing. The blogger in question was from across the seas and I was unfamiliar with some of the things he spoke of. Had he provided a few links in his long article I would have been easily able to get clarification or further infomation
Herein lies a lesson for we bloggers. Some of our readers do not share our experience or the background knowledge we have, our audience is international. It takes a litle effort to supply links from inside your blog posts but it will give your readers potential for a richer experience.
It also has the potential to grow your blog's audience as the website owners or bloggers that you link to will see your hyperlinks within their own traffic statistical reports and take a look back at your blog.
I am a Link addict because you just never know where the link might take you.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, this is one of the fundamentals of the Internet as the protocol used to show the info on a web site is HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is about the ability to put a bookmark link into the body of text, right at the point where it needs to be referenced and not make you wait till the end of the article to find the list of links.
So couple of years back I was working through a list of resources on cemeteries and other references.
http://www.ach.familyhistorysa.info/
I saw a link to Goldfields Diggers:
http://www.ach.familyhistorysa.info/golddiggers.html
The Gold Escorts were a very smart move by the South Australian Police Commissioner to provide a way for South Australian miners on the Victorian goldfields to get their gold back to their families in South Australia.
http://www.ach.familyhistorysa.info/gold.html
"Within a few days Tolmer and his men set out for Adelaide with 5,199 ounces worth £18,456/9/-"
and
"He not only delivered a quarter of a ton of gold to the vault in the Treasury, but he also brought 400 letters from gold diggers to their families."
Following the link I entered the family name, and other surnames, and found out that my Australian ancestor and others of the family and friends had gone to the goldfields and had some success.
"LOXTON Albert consigned 3 oz of gold to LOCKSTON Betsy which arrived by escort 2 on 5-5-1852. Note: Delivered to SHAKES Fanny.
[not recorded] consigned 35 oz 10 dwt of gold to LOXTON Albert which arrived by escort 3 on 6-7-1852. Note: Delivered to WHILENGBECK W."
I had never before heard about any gold digging in our early families and it seems that I not only found proof of this activity, I now had the suggestion that their first property at Tungkillo was paid for by their 'luck' at the fields.
This was a lucky link for me to follow as it opened up a whole new area of research into the activities of my ancestors.