Convict records & more talks for 2015 - Genealogy Notes 10-17 Oct 2015

Famous last words from last week were that I had no more genealogy talks for the year. A last minute opportunity presented itself to speak in Rockhampton at the Central Queensland Family History Association. I will be giving three talks at an afternoon seminar which will be full on but I hope their members enjoy it. As I haven't been to Rockhampton since the early 90s I will also enjoy being back up that way.

Another report on the In Time and Place Conference is from Helen Smith, also one of the presenters at the conference. Read Helen's review here. It seems that everyone wants a repeat Queensland conference so I hope the History Queensland people take all the positive feedback on board.

Max and I in our convict gear on Norfolk Island

Week 41 Convict Records continues my personal genealogy blog challenge 52 Weeks of Genealogical Records in 2015. Writing that brought back great memories of our two trips to Norfolk Island and it really is good to visit where your ancestors once lived. Attending the reenactment of the convicts leaving when the First Settlement closed was really quite moving. It was easy to see why they would not have wanted to leave such an island paradise.

Max carrying all his worldly goods down to the rowboats

The only trouble with doing a weekly blog challenge is that the weeks seem to go faster!

One of my favourite resources is the Ryerson Index and they have just celebrated a milestone. Every death notice published in the Sydney Morning Herald since 1831 is now included in the Index. A total of 1,861,095 which is an amazing effort from the volunteers. They have also been indexing funeral notices and over 200,000 of those are also in the index from the Sydney Morning Herald. Well done everybody who has worked on the project over the last 17 years.

Of course the Ryerson Index now covers all states and territories but remember to check the coverage as not all newspaper titles are included and not all date ranges for each title.

Findmypast Fridays are always exciting with the release of new records and last week it was another 22 newspaper titles and more Staffordshire, Kent and Durham records. Another search for a great uncle involved in a serious crime in Staffordshire revealed more newspaper accounts with gruesome details. The Friday blog post is well worth checking out and it is every Friday. The week before it was England and Wales electoral registers from 1832 to 1932 which is really helpful trying to trace elusive ancestors between census if they were on the rolls.

MyHeritage announced that they had added about 46 million Swedish household records from 1880-1920 with images, that are now available, indexed and searchable online for the first time ever on MyHeritage Super Search. I don't have Swedish myself but that is a staggering number of new records. Their blog post has more about it here.

Another site adding lots of new records all the time is Deceased Online which is the central database for UK burials and cremations. They have 8 million records for London and 5 million records for Lancashire not to mention heaps of records for elsewhere. I keep up to date with the new additions by subscribing to the free enewsletter which is the easiest way to learn what's new.

It also means I receive lots of these free enewsletters but if something is not of direct interest to my own family history, then it is just a quick hit of the delete button. If it is relevant then I have the choice to either dive straight in or park it for a rainy day when I have more time. Keeping up with everything is the hardest part I find.

This coming week will be preparing my talks for Rockhampton, finalising my blog post and article for the December issue of Going In-Depth and working on the church records course for the National Institute for Genealogical Studies.In between I will be putting in some laps in the pool to help restrengthen my arm, keep up with the gardening (amazing how weeds always live and plants die when it doesn't rain) and enjoying our beautiful spring weather. 

Genealogy notes 24-29 Jan 2014 - podcasts & blogs!

It is not quite a week since the last Diary but I am now in travel mode! Tomorrow I am heading to Canberra for a National Archives of Australia advisory committee meeting for the centenary of World War One then back to Bribie for the weekend before heading off to Sydney on Tuesday for the Unlock the Past genealogy cruise. There will be another Diary on Monday 3 February then every few days while on the cruise as lots of genealogy stuff will be happening!

On 27 January, Marian Pierre-Louis released the genealogy professional podcast interview she did with me earlier in the month. You can read about it and hear it here. It was a first for me to be interviewed by someone in the USA but we managed to find a time that suited us both!

Week 4 Memorial Cards is my blog post in my 52 Weeks of Genealogical Records in 2014 blog challenge on my website and I am really glad that I set myself the challenge. Already I have discovered new information by revisiting some of my older research and seeing what is new, especially online. I am also pleased that a few of my blogging friends are taking up the challenge some weeks if the topic interests them and they have the time.

There are so many good bloggers out there now, you could spend all your time reading and being inspired by others. If you are new to blogging, then Geneabloggers is a great place to find a blog in your area - look under Genealogy Blog Roll in the top menu.

It was great to see that the Claim a Convict website was re-established and it is a remarkable tribute to Lesley Eubel who sadly died earlier this month. Lesley was the original creator of the site and it was taken down when she became ill in late 2013. It is now more interactive so if you have not visited the site for a while, take a look! There are also some great resources and links to other convict sites.

While in Canberra I will be dropping off my speaker acceptance form to the AFFHO Congress 2015 'Generations Meeting Across Time'committee. I have been asked to give two talks at the Congress and it seems ages since the call for papers. A close read of the agreement states that the papers are due by 30 November 2014 (so that they can be published in the Congress proceedings) and that is not that far away! Before we know it we will all be gathering in Canberra in March 2015 for yet another terrific AFFHO Congress. I hope everyone has it in their calendars!

My first talk for Moreton Bay Region Libraries is on Monday at the Albany Creek Library. It is looking at online newspapers for genealogy research and is the first of seven talks over the next two months. I am looking forward to seeing all the libraries in the Moreton Region and hopefully I will even know a few faces in the audience! All the dates and places of my talks are on the Services and Events page of my website. Moreton have a Your History Our History program and there are some great genealogy talks coming up all over the region.

I also finished going through the final proofs of yet another research guide with Unlock the Past. That means I will have two new guides out in February but UTP also has a number of other titles they are releasing at the same time. No doubt there will be some for sale on the cruise and also on the MacEntee/Paton roadshow around Australia but you can also check the ever growing list of titles online here. Actually I just surprised myself - there are 39 titles here already without all the new titles. Given that UTP only started up in 2009 and that my first research guide was also their first UTP publication in 2010, that is a lot of publishing in just a few years!

Finally, I have also been busy scanning photos and documents, naming, tagging and filing which all takes more time than you think. Plus it is a bit boring but essential. I need more rainy days or less interesting distractions! Happy researching until next time.

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!