Genealogy notes 23-28 Sep Business and trade union records

Last Sunday I gave two talks to the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies here in Melbourne. Both talks highlighted how much is not online (based on my book It's Not All Online: A Guide to Genealogy Sources Offline) and as usual the feedback was along the lines of they 'had never thought to look there'. Two of my favourite websites are the Guide to Australian Business Records and the Australian Trade Union Archives. Although most of these types of records are not online, you can use the online catalogues to identify information that might be relevant to your own family history.

I have a few reviews to do at present (even an e-book and digital scrapbooking software so there's two new experiences) which means I have been doing a fair bit of reading this week. Given Melbourne is having a return to cold, wet and windy weather that hasn't been a bad thing. The hard part comes writing up the reviews, although they are all subjects that I am personally interested in. Stay tuned.

The other thing that has kept me busy is scanning family photos and relooking at some of my older research. By using TROVE and in particular the digitised newspapers I can now add more details to my original research. It is so easy to find stories or family notices doing simple keyword searches especially if you have dates and places. Of course once I find relevant entries, I then have to correct the OCR text and I usually add a tag (person's name or place) so that others can then find it even more easily.

When I took an early photo of my parents out of its frame (originally from my grandmother's place after she died) I found another photo behind it of a woman and child, but of course no names or date. The woman has a slight resemblance to my grandmother but I have no idea who it might be. I will take the photo up to Mum's at Christmas and hope she may know who it is.

We continue to declutter our house and make preparations to sell and move further north where it is warm. Although now there is talk we may just live in a caravan for a while before we decide where to buy. That all sounds nice but I can't see where all my family history files are going to live, not to mention my books and other memorabilia. While I am slowly digitising my research of the last 34 years it won't be finished by the end of the year. I can't see myself leaving it in a storage shed somewhere or even in a shipping container. All I can hope is that we will finally agree on where to settle on our next trip up and down the Queensland/New South Wales coast!! Christmas/New Year is going to be interesting.