On Saturday 8 October 2022, Graham Walter, a regular tutor at the Society of Genealogists, will be giving a one-hour talk, Staying Safe Online: Using Password Managers. Protecting yourself and your personal data in our online world is as important today as it ever was. To provide that protection, you need to use unique passwords that are long, strong, and difficult for someone else to guess, yet still accessible to you where and when you need them. Graham will look at some of the techniques to achieve a good amount of safety, and explore the best apps to use with phones, tablets, and all forms of computers. Online research is invaluable for today’s family historians and, as a specialist in using technology in genealogy and a professional member of the British Computer Society, Graham is well-placed to give up-to-date guidance. He volunteers with the Society’s Educational Outreach programme as one of the Census Detectives and is a familiar face at many family history fairs and conferences.
The talk has been inspired by Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). annual appreciation of the world’s first computer programmer and internet pioneer. that occurs annually in October.
Each year, Ada Lovelace Day takes place on the second Tuesday in October – an arbitrarily chosen date aimed to be convenient for as many people as possible. Ada was born in 1815 on 10 December, a date regarded by organisers as being too close to Christmas. Her parents were the leading Romantic poet, Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron 1788-1824), and his learned wife, Annabella Byron (Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron; née Milbanke; 1792–1860). Baptised Augusta Ada Byron, she was the poet’s only legitimate child. Her mother left Lord Byron when Ada was only a few months old. She did not get to know her father before his death when she was just 8 years old.
Fearful that her daughter would inherit what she saw as her husband’s madness, Lady Byron instructed the child be taught mathematics and science (logic), rather than poetry. Ada suffered from illness regularly as a child, and spent many of her rest periods studying. At the age of 18, she was introduced by her tutor Mary Somerville (1780-1872) to the mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) – ‘the father of computers’ – with whom she collaborated on his early prototype Analytical Machine. This was one of the earliest computers. Based on her work on the machine, Ada is regarded by many as being the world’s first computer programmer. Lovelace also had the foresight to see how the Analytical Engine could be used to could create music and art. In 1843, she published what is described as the world’s first computer algorithm to generate Bernoulli numbers for the Analytical Engine. This was a complete algorithm, as opposed to Babbage’s earlier fragments.
Two years after meeting Babbage, Ada married William King (later William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace, FRS (1805 –1893). When King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada became Countess of Lovelace. Sadly, Ada Lovelace died on 27 November 1852 at just 36 years old from uterine cancer. Her foresight and achievements in the early years of computing were unrecognized for more than a century.
Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) has sought to make amends for that early lack of recognition. The day was founded in 2009 and aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM.
Unsurprisingly for a day named in honour of an early computing pioneer, many Ada Lovelace Day 2022 events will be held online with blogging, Twittering and Facebooking. To participate, look out for the hashtag #ALD21 on Twitter or Facebook.
Sources
- Finding Ada, official website of Ada Lovelace Day
- Wikipedia entry of Ada Lovelace, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Please contact us for more information