Genealogy notes 15-18 November 2011 Auckland Bound

The last few days have been frantic trying to finalise everything I needed to do before leaving for Auckland today. The bills got paid, the rubbish taken out, my talks finalised and my suitcase under the required kilos. It was some relief that I said down in the Qantas Lounge for a latte and French pastries. The flight was a little delayed and we finally arrived at our hotel in Auckland just after 7.00pm having left home at 8.00am.

Tomorrow I am speaking at the first of the onshore seminars associated with the Unlock the Past history and genealogy cruise which has a Scottish and Irish theme. Auckland City Libraries is the host venue for the seminar  and speakers include Chris Paton, Rosemary Kopittke and myself with Seonaid Lewis giving a tour of the Central Auckland Research Centre. It will be good to catch up with my Auckland friends and I also hope to do a spot of research if time permits.

Sunday is a free day and if the weather is nice, we hope to have a ferry ride around Auckland Harbour, something we haven’t done before. On Monday we make our way down to the Harbour again to board the Volendam for our 14 day cruise around New Zealand, back to Burnie in Tasmania before crossing Bass Strait for Melbourne and finally finishing up in Sydney.  Along the way I hope to blog and tweets all the things I learn at all the genealogy sessions, not to mention some of the fun stuff that happens on board cruise ships including the food and entertainment.

I haven’t managed to do much else over the last few days but I did do another guest blog for MyHeritage and it was good to mention the KIVA Genealogists for Families project. This is all about helping other families and individuals with small loans for their businesses (usually $25) and then this is repaid over time. In some ways it is the gift that keeps on giving as I usually just reinvest in another project. Deciding who to support is a key part of it and I described my choices in my 27-29 October diary blog.

I’m looking forward to sharing my ‘cruise news’ with everyone but getting access to the Internet may be tricky (or just expensive) – my hotel room actually gives me free Internet for an hour each day so while in Auckland I should get a few tweets and blogs out. Although you can’t join me physically, I hope that some of you will follow my doings over the next two weeks in what should be a Scottish Irish genealogy extravaganza!

Genealogy notes 6-14 November 2011 To Pambula & Back

Once you get behind, it is always so hard to catch up again. Various domestic issues continue to unsettle my usually organised work space and complicating it even more was our recent trip to Pambula, New South Wales for the Bega Valley Genealogy Society annual seminar. That took three days and for the most part we were without mobile phone/internet coverage which means backlogs in emails, online newsletters, phone calls and so on. Still, as I said in my review of the seminar, I always love doing these regional genealogy events.

As well as the online backlog, my printed reading pile seems to have mushroomed in my absence and I am still struggling to get past the first few pages of the latest issue of Inside History - one of my favourite genealogy magazines! It's not helping that I am in the grip of the dreaded Melbourne hayfever (itchy watery eyes and when my partner said this morning, 'your eyes look a bit puffy', he was being generous as I could hardly see out of them). It's also hard to type when you have to stop every few seconds to mop your eyes!

After today, I only have three days to finalise everything I need to finalise before we leave for Auckland on Friday. I'm speaking at the Auckland Library genealogy seminar on Saturday with Chris Paton as a preliminary event prior to the Unlock the Past history and genealogy cruise next week. It's all very exciting at this late stage but I am still trying to finalise all my presentations (15) and then there's the hairdresser (I wasn't going to bother but said partner also asked this morning was I going to do anything about the grey hair) so that's happening tomorrow now.

I have my to do list and the focus is on what is critical pre cruise but we don't get back till 5 December, 20 days before Christmas and only 12 days before we head off to Brisbane in our new car and caravan and neither of us have towed a caravan before. A huge learning curve ahead but it will be fun and we'll be passing through Lightning Ridge (Black Opal country) where one of my gg grandmother's spent some time. But for now, it's back to finishing my cruise presentations and thinking about what to wear and pack. Just as well I like travelling!

Genealogy notes 30 Oct - 5 Nov 2011 Birthdays & Anniversaries

I've been offline for a few days for a variety of reasons. The first week of November is always a big week for me, with all sorts of memories swirling around me. Firstly it's my birthday week and I'm a child of Guy Fawkes - some of my earliest memories are of helping my father build a bonfire in our backyard and creating a Guy Fawkes out of straw and old clothes. Those were also the days when everyone could buy firecrackers at the local store. So those early birthdays were fun, if a little dangerous given our backyard backed onto a bush area.

In their wisdom the Queensland government decided to move Guy Fawkes night from November to June from 1967 so that there was less chance of fires and eventually the sale of firecrackers was prohibited to individuals in 1971 because of injuries.

Birthdays were never the same for me as a child but as I grew up I discovered the Melbourne Cup (first Tuesday of November) and every so often it would actually fall on my birthday. While living in Brisbane and Canberra I would try and take the day off work and book into a Melbourne Cup Day lunch and enjoy the whole day, even if it wasn't on my real birthday. Of course now that I am living in Melbourne, Cup Day is a public holiday and my birthday tends to stretch out for the whole week.

But not only is it memories of birthdays past that occupies my mind during the first week of November. It is also memories of family members lost during this week. On my 16th birthday I lost one of my favourite uncles and my grandmother died on my birthday in 1994 - she had never wanted to leave her own home, or move into a nursing home so in some ways it was 'good' that she died while playing the pokies. Another reason why I have a little flutter and gamble that week is because it was what she loved. Four days of the week she managed to get herself onto the pensioner bus (and that wasn't easy with a walking stick) and down to the NSW pokie clubs because it was an outing, she was with friends and she liked to play (but never seemed to lose?). Why NSW? Queensland didn't have pokies when she started this 'hobby'.

I won't list all the family deaths in the first week of November, but I was reminded of  'the trend' when I lost another two family members this week. One was an avid family historian and had done lots of research and died too young and the other was one that had probably lived too long. But when he could, he also enjoyed getting out and playing the pokies, having a flutter on the horses and most times when I was in Brisbane I would take him along to the Casino for a few hours of 'the good old times'.

Oddly enough two of Australia's most famous genealogists also died in my birthday week. Nick Vine Hall died on 31 October 2006 but his funeral service was not held until 9 November 2006. I first met Nick in the late 1970s when he was Director of the Society of Australian Genealogists and our paths continuously crossed over the years/decades and I have fond memories of him and I sitting on the grassy area outside the State Library of Victoria eating take away Chinese for lunch while discussing genealogy and how to raise the profile of the Australian census amongst other things. We even tossed around ideas of projects we might work on when I retired from the public service but sadly that wasn't to be as Nick died too soon aged only 62 years.

The other Australian genealogist was Janet Reakes who died on 9 November 2002 at the far too young age of 50 years. I had worked with Janet at a number of genealogy events while I was employed at Queensland State Archives and later the John Oxley Library. I particularly liked going to her Australia Day weekend genealogy expos in Hervey Bay.

It's great that these two Australian genealogists continue to be remembered by the genealogy community. The Australian Federation of Family History Organisations (AFFHO) maintains the annual Nick Vine Hall Award to promote family history society journals and newsletters and Australian Family Tree Connections (AFTC) maintains the Janet Reakes Memorial Award which is an annual essay competition open to everyone.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has a birthday that coincides with close deaths in the family. There's also Christmas, New Year, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day and so on. There's always good memories along with the sad ones and I suspect that what is most important is to capture those memories so that we don't forget as time continues it's march ever onwards.