Taking up the provocative example of the new genweb co-ordinator for Rush
County, Sue Prifogle Otte, I seek to encourage a series of co-ordinator and
indecatu-l introductions, hoping to hear what sorts of people sit behind
the pages I've surfed in search of good examples.
My apparent displacement to the other side of the globe has raised
questions among a number of correspondents, and eyebrows among others. My
links to Decatur County became apparent early this year, when I discovered
the possibilities of long-distance genealogical excavation by web and was
able to identify Decatur as the home county of my unkown and, I'd thought,
unknowable Ballard grandfather, born in St Paul in 1856 (not 1859, as his
MO tombstone claims). With the aid of Decatur genweb lookups I quickly
pushed back a couple of generations and, finding the county page orphaned,
decided that distance need not prevent my adding a range of links and
materials. A couple of days in Indianapolis and Greensburg en route to a
conference in Europe in June established some useful contacts and broadened
my grasp on the extended family of Elijah Ballard, who trickled from WV to
the adjacent corners of Rush, Shelby and Decatur in the decade from 1823.
Mapping them has kept my detective instincts alive.
Why Australia? Born outside Chicago, I grew up near Boston and embarked
for an extended honeymoon and PhD research on decolonization in the most
remote part of Africa I could find, ex-French-Equatorial, then taught in
universities in Nigeria. When the Australian National University offered
research in Papua New Guinea I jumped, and eventually settled into teaching
and running the graduate program in political science in Canberra. Much of
my research since the mid-1980s has been focused on the development of AIDS
policies in Australia, with a chance to advise both here and in parts of
Africa, Asia and the Pacific. I retired from teaching a couple of years
ago, but have been engaged in a series of consultancies at the ANU while
based in the Graduate School. My sons have been infected by the
peripatetic nature of their upbringing: one does research on mining
companies and local communities in Irian Jaya while the other, a carpenter
and nurse, plans to work for Doctors without Borders overseas.
I can't offer the tantalizing library resources that Sue sets out, but can
recommend to other co-ordinators a few obscure web links to be found on the
Decatur page at
http://www.rootsweb.com/~indecatu/indecatu.html
Greetings from a late spring in Canberra.
Dr J A Ballard <john.ballard(a)anu.edu.au>
Graduate School, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
Tel +61 2 6249 5487 Fax +61 2 6249 4829