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!

Genealogy notes 1-11 Apr 2012 - Researching in Sydney

I must have blogged myself out during the AFFHO12 genealogy congress as it is now 11 days later but admittedly some of that time was out in the wilds of outback South Australia and Victoria with no phone or internet connection. After leaving Adelaide on the Sunday we headed up to Morgan on the Murray River (mainly for sentimental value as my partner used to travel there from Berri to catch the train to go to Adelaide). Just like the might paddlewheelers, the train no longer runs either but we visited the museum and he was able to point out all the old places for me in their photographic collection. I was surprised by all the houseboats there but lots of places along the Murray in South Australia have houseboats. Brought back memories of our houseboat holidays on the Clyde River when we lived in Canberra!

Another surprise was all the carp in the Murray and we did our bit to get rid of quite a few. In some places baby carp are so think you can just scoop them up in a net! I do like sitting on the river bank, fishing rod in hand watching all the bird life and the peace and quiet is amazing - not like living in Melbourne. From Morgan we went on up through Berri and had a look at Martin's Bend which is another idyllic spot on the Murray. Then we thought we should head for home and travelled down the Calder, stopping at Ouyen the home of Australia's best vanilla slice. Obviously with a title like that, we had to stop at the Mallee Bakery and test it out. It was good but next time we will only get one between us, I think we overdosed on vanilla slice!

The next day we were travelling through Bendigo and decided we didn't really want to go home (grey nomads can do that sort of thing) so we rang friends in Yarrawonga and of course, they said come on over! So we again headed north to the Murray and spent a couple of days with them before going home to spend a quiet Easter. I had a lovely time doing some research and catching up on emails and blogs.

I even managed to do my Overview of AFFHO12 heraldry and genealogy congress which summarised the whole event and supplemented my daily blogs in this Diary. I was only home four days and then  I was heading out to the airport to go to Sydney. Originally I was going to be giving a family history workshop for the Royal Australian Historical Society but it was too close to Easter I suspect, and with poor numbers they cancelled it. But I have lots of friends in Sydney and I've always wanted to just spend a week here doing genealogy research so that's what I'm doing.

I've got visits lined up for the State Library of NSW and the Mitchell Library and of course a visit to the Society of Australian Genealogists is also a must. I'm also able to attend a strategic planning meeting of the Australian Society of Archivists which will be great as I haven't seen a lot of my archival colleagues since I retired in 2009. But tomorrow I'm excited to be going to Randwick Library to hear Paul O'Keefe talk about The Girl Who Loved Ned Kelly. I've spoken to Paul on the phone but haven't met him before so it's a great opportunity. Cassie from Inside History magazine is also meeting me tomorrow for coffee, so a big day out!

I'm also hoping to use this week in Sydney to totally catch up on all my emails and blogs as I seem to have been travelling since last October and there are lots of e-newsletters I've stockpiled. With no family here to distract me it should almost be like genealogy heaven. I'm looking forward to it!

Genealogy notes 31 March 2012 - Day 4 of AFFHO Congress

The 2012 AFFHO Congress is over and the last four days have gone incredibly quick. An update on yesterday's blog - I forgot to mention that the conference dinner was sponsored by NSW BDMs although they didn't present any papers at the Congress. A representative whose name escapes me now did do a very short speech which prompted a few tweets to 'bring back the wildcard'. Other sponsors I've chatted to over the last few days not previously mentioned include Ancestry, Openbook Howden Design and Print, Abbott Printers and Stationers, State Records South Australia, State Library South Australia and the Adelaide office of the National Archives of Australia. A full list of Congress sponsors is here.

I collected my very weighty conference proceedings first up and I hate to think how many trees were cut down! It's good to get the other papers as with four concurrent sessions you miss so much. I haven't had a chance to look through it yet but the weight was noticeable in my handbag all day!

Now to the last day's sessions. As usual the day started with a plenary session - Stephen Young on Descendancy Research - When You Can't Climb Up Your Family Tree, Branch Out. Stephen is a good speaker and I enjoyed the talk which was well illustrated with his own family history examples. But his message could have been delivered in five minutes and is really something that most of us do anyway, although I know I'm not as lucky in contacting distant family members and finding treasure troves of photos and documents. I guess what I'm coming to is that this shouldn't have been a plenary session and that seemed to be the general feeling of those I talked to at morning tea time.

The next session I went to was Mike Murray's Ten Top Tips for Finding Your 'hard to find' UK ancestors on the Internet and while I already do a lot of the things Mike mentioned, I still managed to pick up a few tips on using the big subscription databases such as Ancestry and FindMyPast. Mike is a good speaker and his ten points were covered well in the time period.

Then it was the trek back to the exhibition area for morning tea and the trek back afterwards - I found this good because at some conferences if everything is close together you can find yourself sitting for most of the day without a chance to walk and stretch out. Almost like enforced exercise to walk off those delicious chocolate cookies!

This next session I was really torn between Roger Kershaw talking about the National Archives UK and David Holman's Source for Mr Goose and Mrs Gander: Overview of UK Repositories (and I wondered if David's should have been a plenary session as others had the same dilemma). Anyway I ended up at Roger's session where he took us through the website explaining various features and outlining changes and future plans. It was most useful as I often get a bit lost on the site but his delivery style is very dry and a few more jokes/humour wouldn't go astray.

At 1.00pm Geniaus organised  a photo session for all Congress geneabloggers so you can see what A Social Media Mob looks like with our beads and put faces to names. Over the next few days/weeks we should get lots of blog reports to read as most haven't had the time to do it during the Congress and Geniaus is coordinating this. Stay tuned!

After lunch there was the final plenary and this was Dan Poffenberger talking about FamilySearch 2012 and Beyond and again this plenary fell into my category of product promotion by a sponsor (and why FamilySearch had more plenary sessions than the principal sponsor FindMyPast made me ponder). Dan is an entertaining speaker and his walk through the FamilySearch website was informative but I would have liked to see more time spent on some of the features like the Learning resources and the wiki.

For the very last session of the Congress I took the final opportunity to listen to Colleen Fitzpatrick talk about another one of her cases - The Curious Case of James/Jake/Smithers/Gray and I will never think of my family history as complicated again. My problems are simple compared to others! As usual Colleen was entertaining and it would be great to work on cases like that.

Then it was raffle draw time and there were some very excited winners. Kerry Farmer from the National Institute for Genealogical Studies gave a brief blurb on NIGS which is more in keeping with my idea of sponsorship promotions at conferences (also similar to the brief speech from NSW BDMs at the congress dinner). Although I guess it depends on what organisers offer to potential sponsors in the congress sponsorship package and it is always a vexed question at archive and library conferences I've attended over the years.

David Holman as Chair of the Federation of Family History Societies had one more role to play and that was to hand out the annual awards to Australasian winners. In the Best Websites Awards the overall winner was the New Zealand Society of Genealogists, with NZSG taking out first, and the Genealogical Society of Queensland second and Genealogical Society of Victoria third in the Overseas websites category. The overall winner of the Elizabeth Simpson Award for best family history journal went to Ancestor and the Genealogical Society of Victoria. Very exciting that New Zealand and Victoria took out the overall winners awards and well done to all the others.

Thanking the Adelaide organising committee was next and I think they did a very good job of organising a smoothly run congress with very few hiccups that I could see. As usual I will do a conference overview blog and my overall thoughts will be in that after I've done some more pondering.

The final task was the handover to the Canberra 2015 Congress and the Convenor gave a few highlights on the venues which include the National Convention Centre, the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House, all former haunts of mine so I've definitely put it into the calendar.

Now it's time for me to pack up here at the hotel, move back into the caravan and head off to Berri, South Australia Max's home town (although he was born in Port Lincoln). From there we will travel back along the Murray River and should be home in time for Easter. It's been a great few days and I will be sad not to see all my congress friends today. Safe travels home everyone!