Currys Downunder

My maiden name is Curry, I am descended from an Irish convict,  Patrick Curry, who was transported to the colony of New South Wales in 1825. In addition to collecting information on Paddy's descendants downunder I have gathered quite a few references to unrelated Currys.

Some Australian Currys 1970

Since joining The Surname Society recently I have registered a surname study for the Curry Surname in Australia. As I have never seriously undertaken a surname study before I am on my L plates, I have taken on board advice that has been shared in the Society's forums and information on the Guild of One-Name Studies site (I'm a member there too).

How will I go about this?

• I have opened a new project in my Family Historian software into which I have imported my Australian Currys. Several Society members already use  Family Historian for their Surname studies so there is much help available.
• I will add any new Curry references I fins to this project.
• I have set up a Wordpress blog through which I will share Curry stories, trivia and news as wll as reports on my research. This blog which is currently private will be launched early in 2015.
• I already have 8,000+ Curry references in an Excel spreadsheet. I am currently massaging this data so that I can use Colin's free XL to Ged utility to convert the data in the spreadsheet to a gedcom file that I can import into my Family Historian project.
• I will set up a few Google alerts that will hopefully retrieve some Curry news from the web. I will have to put some thoughts into crafting these so that I don't get lots of news about Indian cuisine.
• I will search the various databases at my disposal to find Currys.
• I will see what Mr Google can find for me on the web.
• I will promote my study on social media so that others will be aware of  the study. The hashtag will be #CurryAus and the URL of my blog will contain CurryAus.
• I will use Evernote as a tool to keep track of the blog and its posts.
• Apart from that I will just learn as I go.

If you have any Australian Currys in your tree or among your friends and neighbours I'd love to hear about them. 

Google Alerts - Hit and Miss?

On the recent episode of Geneabloggers BlogTalk Radio Dan Lynch discussed using Google Alerts to discover  pertinent new information relating to genealogy.

I am a great fan of Google alerts and have been using them for several years to find news to share with fellow genealogists via my blog, Twitter and lately Google+. I have a number of alerts for general and Australian  genealogy and android genealogy news plus alerts for the uncommon surnames in my tree.  Vanity causes me to have alerts for Geniaus, GeniMates and Jill Ball Genealogy.

A few of my alerts

From the options on offer I have selected All results for some alerts and Only the best results for others. I have been constantly underwhelmed by the number of alerts that arrive even for those alerts for which I have selected All results. I know that Geniaus is mentioned in blogs and on Twitter each day yet only on rare occasions do these mentions appear in my Google Alerts!

If you are not using Google Alerts I suggest that you should be but be aware that the results may not be as comprehensive as one might expect.

What has been your experience with Google Alerts?