Genealogy Notes 29 Aug - 4 Sep 2012 Sydney adventures

Well today is the eve of our last day in this house. In 24 hours the removalists will be here and we still have lots of things to do but I simply have to take time out to report on the Sydney trip and my two talks at the Society of Australian Genealogists. I simply love visiting Richmond Villa (the Society's home and where talks are presented) in The Rocks area which is so historic. As usual my two talks on church records and Victorian resources are on my website under the Resources tab, scroll down to Presentations and if you scroll all the way to the end of the page you will see some of my favourite Victorian links.

I had two new publications out last week and Unlock the Past tried to get copies to my Thursday talk but they arrived after most people had left but quite a few of Thursday's attendees also came on Saturday so I still managed to get a few sales on Finding ancestors in church records: a brief guide to resources ($15.00) and Trove: discover genealogy treasure in the National Library of Australia ($14.50), both available from Gould Genealogy & History along with my other publications.

I also had the opportunity to have lunch with Heather, SAG's very efficient Executive Officer and to brainstorm some of my ideas with her for National Family History Week 2013. Later that day I had another chat with Brad and crew from Ancestry.com.au (a major sponsor of NFHW in the past) about some of my new ideas for a revamped program now that I am the national co-ordinator. I also took the opportunity to ask various people what they liked or wanted to see during the week as well and all these ideas will find their way into my report to AFFHO (Australasian Federation of Family History Organisations) on ways to further highlight the week in future.

I missed a catch up with Ben and Cassie from Inside History Magazine as they were in the throes of getting their new website up and running. Plus there is a new issue due out and they've been busy with dispatch over the weekend. I hope my copy arrives before we leave on Thursday. I have to see the post office today and get our mail held until we have a forwarding address. Everyone keeps asking for one but we really don't have one - we don't even know what caravan park we will stay in once we get up to the Sunshine Coast. Thank goodness for email and mobile phones, how did they ever manage in the old days!

My travel plans in Sydney didn't go quite to schedule but when travelling you do need to be flexible so when I found I had a totally free day on Friday I took the opportunity to do a ferry trip round the harbour stopping off at Taronga Park Zoo and at Darling Harbour to see the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM). I always love visiting zoos and the Sky Safari Cable up to the top of the zoo gives one of the most amazing  views of Sydney not to mention looking down over the various animals as you go up.

I particularly wanted to see the Remembering Titanic 100 years memorial exhibition at the ANMM and it was really sad seeing all the names of those who died listed up on the wall. I found it fascinating to watch some of the outtakes from the James Cameron Titanic movie (was that really 1997, years going too fast for me) as it showed how they recreated the sinking and so on. Made me want to watch the movie again and I think I have seen all the other Titanic movies as well. None of my own ancestors were involved with a shipwreck but I have visited many memorials to shipwrecks especially on King Island (yes there is history there as well as all those yummy cheeses and lobsters).

After the Saturday talk at Richmond Villa I couldn't resist the lure of the arts and crafts at The Rocks market and spent a pleasant few hours in the Sydney sunshine looking at all sorts of wonderful things. The fact that I had to travel home by plane curbed my buying spree and also the fact that I didn't really have a home to go back to just yet!

Cleaning out the food cupboard (do I really have that many herbs and spices not to mention sauce bottles) and the fridge and freezer isn't going to get done unless I get a move on. The other half is tackling dismantling the BBQ and other similar type chores plus we have to move all the 'stuff '  we want to keep with us out to the caravan and the two cars today. Somehow I don't think it is all going to fit but it is hard to know what we might need over the next few months!

The Diary posts on our way north will probably be more like a travel log than a genealogy blog as I can't see myself getting to much genealogy in while driving the car! However I do have to review my talks for the Unlock the Past Queensland Coast roadshow in Sep/Oct (full dates, places and details here) so I'll have to find some time for that. Wish us luck with the removal tomorrow! Till next time.

Genealogy notes 14-16 April 2012 - Researching in Sydney

It's a very wet start to the day in Sydney so I'm catching up with the Diary while I hope the rain stops soon. The Australian Society of Archivists meeting on Saturday didn't quite go to schedule and I ended up missing my visit to Richmond Villa the home of the Society of Australian Genealogists. However it was good to catch up with many long time archival colleagues at the meeting and during the lunch break, there was an opportunity to dash out and see some of The Rocks famous weekend market.

Afterwards quite a few of us went to the Fortune of War hotel  which was established in 1828 and is reputedly Sydney's oldest pub. It's also where a former NSW State Archivist gave me my first ever glass of Guinness and I've never looked back! Sydney has some fantastic old pubs and on a former visit we did an historic pub crawl which was fascinating and we've also done the ghost tour!

Then I had dinner at Circular Quay with my bridesmaid from 1983 and amazingly we both recognised each other and had a great night catching up with all the news as we haven't seen each other in over ten years. It was so much fun we will be having dinner again tonight.

Sunday was a slow day, a leisurely walk around the city streets near my hotel, reading the Sunday newspaper in Hyde Park and then I spent the afternoon doing some TROVE digitised newspaper searching and preparing myself for the big research trip to the Mitchell Library and the genealogy section of the State Library NSW. When I walked out of the hotel Monday morning I couldn't believe the traffic noise and I thought Melbourne was bad but then I don't go into the city often these days. Perhaps after the quiet of the weekend it just seemed louder!

Anyway to get to the Library I had to walk through both sections of Hyde Park and it was unbelievable how the trees manage to cut down on the traffic noise. Also explains why so many people walk through there on their way to work plus you don't have the car fumes so full on. The tricky bit for me was that this space is also shared with cyclists who do ring their bells but for people who don't hear to well and aren't watching out for cyclists on footpaths, it makes for an interesting time at intersections.

I haven't been to the Mitchell Library (the Australiana section of the State Library NSW) since the early 1990s when I was doing my Society of Australian Genealogists Diploma. It has to be one of Australia's most beautiful libraries and the atmosphere almost makes you feel scholarly. The catalogue is online but only for items since 1992 so there are lots of card drawers with interesting indexes and these were what I mainly wanted to look through for my early research on Sydney. I was pleased to see old genealogy friend Aileen there and in the cafeteria at lunch time with Perry, I ran into my old archival colleague Paul.

I also spent time in the genealogy section of the State Library NSW finally looking at some microfilms I've been wanting to look at. It's not that they aren't in Melbourne, it's more the fact that I never seemed to find time to do it in Melbourne (or perhaps I don't stay there often enough?). I hadn't realised they had an online guide to convicts which is another reason why we should look closely at websites before we do our genealogy research trips. One of my other joys is browsing the shelf as you never know what you will find and I had some success just pulling out books and looking up the indexes. That's something we miss when we only do research online.

The walk back through Hyde Park was equally good and as I had been sitting for most of the day, I kept walking up Oxford Street for a while before returning to the hotel for the evening. The evening weather was all about how wet Sydney was going to be for the next few days and sure enough, I woke up this morning to the sound of heavy rain on the skylights. Walking over to the Kent Street library of the Society of Australian Genealogists is going to be interesting but I have an umbrella and perhaps later this morning the rain won't be quite so heavy. I haven't been to the 'new' library and it should be good. Stay tuned.

Genealogy notes 12-13 Apr 2012 - historical Sydney

My partner and I have a saying - 'we always end up where we were meant to be' and this usually runs true to where ever we are travelling to, eating out or stopping for the night or whatever as we usually free wheel with no fixed plans. Sometimes fixed plans, if we have them, do change and that happened to me this week and instead of running a genealogy workshop I ended up being able to attend one of the best family history talks I've been to in quite a while. I'm talking about Paul O'Keefe's talk on The Girl Who Loved Ned Kelly and as two of my Geneablogger friends have already written about it I will simply say I totally agree with both their blogs - Geniaus Spine Tingling Stuff and Sharn Exceptional Talk by Paul O'Keefe . Paul will be heading to Victoria later this year so I hope to catch one of his talks again.

I was also privileged to see behind the scenes of Inside History magazine and talk to Cassie and Ben and their other staff. The magazine always comes out on time and has great articles but sometimes we don't appreciate (or comprehend) all the hard work that actually goes into getting a magazine from raw material to glossy end product so it was great to have that insight. Their despatch area was even more tidy than my study at home so they are obviously very organised people (or I need to get more organised)!

Then it was back into the city for me and another walk around my hotel - I'm starting to get my bearings on this part of Sydney. I'm at what is now called the EconoLodge and also the Schwartz Brewery Hotel but was formerly the Macquarie Hotel and it is a really interesting old building and has been a hotel since at least 1888. It has some amazing stained glass windows and pressed lead (or tin) ceilings, not to mention wooden staircases with lots of steps (which I keep calling exercise) up to my room at the top. Amazingly I have three skylights so I can lie there and look up at the moon and the stars! The wooden floor boards creak alarmingly and I wonder if anyone below can hear me walking around but carpet would spoil the ambience of the room.

After an early night I was up bright and early as I wanted to get some more sight seeing in. First up I went to the ANZAC War Memorial in Hyde Park and after walking up all the steps to the top floor, I finally found the exhibition area on the ground floor. There's not a lot of signage and if you enter by the wrong entrance you go round in circles until you finally see the sign. It's not as big an area as I was expecting but it was interesting and there were two areas where you could watch old movie footage which I always find fascinating.

Then it was a walk through beautiful Hyde Park, I really love those trees and it is an eye catching fountain with lots of tourists posing for photos in front of it. My destination was the Hyde Park Convict Barracks Museum now a World Heritage site. Although I've been there many times it has been some years so I wasn't surprised to see a lot of change especially with new interactive displays in the Convict Sydney exhibition. These are designed to engage school children (although I found myself lifting up panels to see what was underneath too)!

I found the lower floor was the most changed from my previous visits. However, I still bravely climbed all the stairs up to the second and third floors, bearing in mind that it was the top floor where they housed the old and infirm women when the building was used as an asylum after its convict days. It must have been really hard for them, not to mention cold in winter. There was also an exhibition area on the Irish Orphan Girls which I found quite poignant and I always find the sight of the room full of hammocks where the convicts slept a sad experience as they really had no privacy or space of their own.

Another change for me was that some of the court buildings surrounding the barracks are now also open for inspection so I checked them out as well. It was such a beautiful autumn day that I couldn't resist having a latte and panini sitting out in the courtyard watching all the tourists visiting the Barracks. It's amazing how quickly a day can disappear but perhaps I shouldn't have had that second latte.

I wandered back to my hotel room and made a determined assault on all the genealogy e-newsletters I have not read over the last few months and as usual I created yet another long list of things I should do/look at. I also went over the e-newsletters from the Australian Society of Archivists as I'm going to the strategic planning meeting being held tomorrow at State Records NSW in the historic Rocks area. After the meeting I'm going up to the Society of Australian Genealogists premises at Richmond Villa to collect my new (again) membership package so that I can do some research at their main library in Kent Street next week.

Then it's a walk back through the Rocks area to Circular Quay where I am meeting and having dinner with my bridesmaid (from my second and only formal wedding) who I haven't seen in what must be over ten years. It seems like only yesterday (but it was 1983) that she helped me pick out a wedding dress and bridesmaid dress that we both felt we could live with. A lot of water has gone under our respective bridges but it will be good to catch up and I'm expecting a late night!

I've got nothing planned for Sunday so perhaps just another catch up on my emails and newsletters and planning my research objectives for next week. It's nice not to have deadlines for a change!