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.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Thursday, 22 September 2011
Genealogy notes 19-22 Sep 2011 Value of Blogging
There's a lot happening at the moment. After my Judge family breakthrough, see Diary for 15-18 Sep 2011, I have been changing online family trees and entering all my new correct data. I still have to do that with my personal database and of course, go through all my paper files. Still I'm glad I've finally found the real Elizabeth Judge even if she is technically Elizabeth Pollard.
I reviewed my talk Archives You Should Know But Perhaps Don't and updated Powerpoint slides where necessary in preparation for today's talk at the Genealogical Society of Victoria. I received nice feedback and it's good to see genealogists broaden their knowledge outside of the usual national/state archives thinking. Hopefully they will all be on their computers tonight looking at all the various sites. My website Resources page has a number of my talks and handouts with links so that people don't have to write so fast.
We finished up with a discussion about blogs (this was after a show of hands revealed hardly any hands)! I was stressing how good they are to find out what is happening and what other people are doing. Also how blogging your family stories can lead to distant relatives finding you. I gave my Maria Jeffers blog Letters Home My Irish Families example. The comments on that blog include responses from family members descended from the person mentioned in the letters. They had no idea the letters even existed! I hope GSV attendees at least look at some blogs and maybe even try out Blogger themselves. With luck they are reading this now!
I did another guest blog for MyHeritage and that should appear tomorrow and I watched Brad Argent from Ancestry on Mornings with Kerri-Anne on Channel 9 on Wednesday talking about famous Australian celebrities. But I forgot to watch Who Do You Think You Are that night - at 10pm it's a bit late for me. I'll have to get the DVD! It's the second series of the US version and Wikipedia has a nice summary of the WDYTYA US shows, both seasons.
The September e-newsletters I've read since last time include Ancestry, Lost Cousins, National Archives UK, Unlock the Past Crew, FindMyPast UK, and S&N Genealogy News. Sometimes I think I subscribe to too many e-newsletters but they are mostly free (except for my subscription sites) and I usually find something of interest in all of them. I like how you can click on links and follow up items of interest which you can't do if reading paper magazines (I know you can type in URLs but nothing beats instant link). I will confess I do speed read, skim, only look at the pictures etc unless it is specifically on an area of personal interest.
I reviewed my talk Archives You Should Know But Perhaps Don't and updated Powerpoint slides where necessary in preparation for today's talk at the Genealogical Society of Victoria. I received nice feedback and it's good to see genealogists broaden their knowledge outside of the usual national/state archives thinking. Hopefully they will all be on their computers tonight looking at all the various sites. My website Resources page has a number of my talks and handouts with links so that people don't have to write so fast.
We finished up with a discussion about blogs (this was after a show of hands revealed hardly any hands)! I was stressing how good they are to find out what is happening and what other people are doing. Also how blogging your family stories can lead to distant relatives finding you. I gave my Maria Jeffers blog Letters Home My Irish Families example. The comments on that blog include responses from family members descended from the person mentioned in the letters. They had no idea the letters even existed! I hope GSV attendees at least look at some blogs and maybe even try out Blogger themselves. With luck they are reading this now!
I did another guest blog for MyHeritage and that should appear tomorrow and I watched Brad Argent from Ancestry on Mornings with Kerri-Anne on Channel 9 on Wednesday talking about famous Australian celebrities. But I forgot to watch Who Do You Think You Are that night - at 10pm it's a bit late for me. I'll have to get the DVD! It's the second series of the US version and Wikipedia has a nice summary of the WDYTYA US shows, both seasons.
The September e-newsletters I've read since last time include Ancestry, Lost Cousins, National Archives UK, Unlock the Past Crew, FindMyPast UK, and S&N Genealogy News. Sometimes I think I subscribe to too many e-newsletters but they are mostly free (except for my subscription sites) and I usually find something of interest in all of them. I like how you can click on links and follow up items of interest which you can't do if reading paper magazines (I know you can type in URLs but nothing beats instant link). I will confess I do speed read, skim, only look at the pictures etc unless it is specifically on an area of personal interest.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Genealogy notes 15-18 September 2011 Red Herrings & Brickwalls
I have continued my tidy up of the study and it is so easy to get distracted. I am finding as I look through my family history files and research folders, I want to revisit the research as there is so much more now that is easily accessible online. TROVE is a fantastic resource for finding information on families in Australian newspapers. Of course once you are on TROVE it is not so easy to get off - it's so addictive and because you are turning up little nuggets on the family, why stop?
I've also gone through my Problems folder - questions I couldn't answer, families I couldn't find and so on. I dragged out my Elizabeth Judge question - I had a birth certificate in 1857, a marriage certificate in 1878 but couldn't find her on either the 1861 or 1871 census. I had looked many times, originally on microfilm but more recently in both Ancestry and FindMyPast.
Yesterday was the day I was going to solve it once and for all and I spent the better part of the day just doing that. I also proved my research of 34 years totally wrong and now I have to go back and clean everything up. Not only in my Legacy Family Tree database but also my online databases in Genes Reunited, Ancestry and My Heritage. It is going to take some time but at least now I know the real story. Intrigued - it's all in my Online Research, New Resources, Fresh Eyes.
The other thing I did yesterday was to get back into the 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History blogging series and Week 37 was Earliest Memories. I looked back on my first day of school and if you want to see me in my Grade One uniform click here. I find photographs terrific for helping to retrieve long forgotten memories.
As much as I would like to just sit here gazing outside and watching the birds, I have a family tree to clean up and as my other half points out, the house also needs a bit of a tidy up! He's gone off on his motorbike, so I can't ask him what housework needs doing - it all looks fine to me. So perhaps back to TROVE?
I've also gone through my Problems folder - questions I couldn't answer, families I couldn't find and so on. I dragged out my Elizabeth Judge question - I had a birth certificate in 1857, a marriage certificate in 1878 but couldn't find her on either the 1861 or 1871 census. I had looked many times, originally on microfilm but more recently in both Ancestry and FindMyPast.
Yesterday was the day I was going to solve it once and for all and I spent the better part of the day just doing that. I also proved my research of 34 years totally wrong and now I have to go back and clean everything up. Not only in my Legacy Family Tree database but also my online databases in Genes Reunited, Ancestry and My Heritage. It is going to take some time but at least now I know the real story. Intrigued - it's all in my Online Research, New Resources, Fresh Eyes.
The other thing I did yesterday was to get back into the 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History blogging series and Week 37 was Earliest Memories. I looked back on my first day of school and if you want to see me in my Grade One uniform click here. I find photographs terrific for helping to retrieve long forgotten memories.
As much as I would like to just sit here gazing outside and watching the birds, I have a family tree to clean up and as my other half points out, the house also needs a bit of a tidy up! He's gone off on his motorbike, so I can't ask him what housework needs doing - it all looks fine to me. So perhaps back to TROVE?
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