Yesterday was Day One of the Unlock the Past South Australian and Victorian Border history and genealogy Mount Gambier expo so it was a very big genealogy day. I will be writing up a review of the Expo at the end of Day 2 so I won't go into too much detail now. It will appear on my SHHE Genie Rambles blog.
The venue is a very large school basketball centre which is ideal as all the exhibitors have lots of room and there are even breakout tables on the side. So my first duty was to wander around all the exhibitors and it is a great mix of history, heritage and genealogy with lots of old photos, memorabilia and records and publications to search. The show bag has brochures from most of the exhibitors.
I had two talks during the day - first was my Asylums talk and second was my Google talk - both were well attended and I had lots of questions afterwards. I have another two talks on Day Two.
While I was doing a bit of Tweeting, I was given a handwriting query to solve. It was an entry in the NSW Coroner's Records available on Ancestry.com.au. I couldn't make it out from the photocopy the researcher had but as I have a personal subscription to Ancestry I logged on to see the original entry. It was a long entry of death and the words were all run together - I made out a few more of the words but one word was still elusive.
I asked a few of the other Unlock the Past team but we were all stumped. I then saved the image as a photo and increased the magnification beyond the 200% in Ancestry and that allowed me to easily see what the last word was. It is so easy once you know - the last phrase was 'severe temporary mental aberration' and it was 'temporary' which was the hardest part to decipher. It's always a buzz when you can help someone out.
I attended a few other talks and also did an interview with the local television but I don't think we made the 6pm news. At the end of the day there was a group dinner and an evening musical show with Brenton Manser and the Vanguard. As we didn't get back to the motel until late I didn't have time to write my usual daily blog of an expo. For Mount Gambier it will be a single blog completed after Day Two.
It is now Day Two and I am a little cold here trying to type this blog as the stadium has not yet warmed up. I'm sure today is going to be as good as yesterday. Stay tuned.
Friday 22 July 2011
Monday 18 July 2011
Genealogy notes 18 July 2011 Brick wall research
Thank goodness young ones like afternoon naps - so hard to do anything on a laptop when you are playing games, chasing rabbits round the yard or out shopping! Still it is an experience you wouldn't trade for anything.
In my down time I continued having a look at our friend's brick wall that I wrote about the other day. I wasn't sure what the New Zealand connection was but decided to try Papers Past as both the married name and the maiden name are relatively uncommon. Interestingly I picked up some references to her athletic achievements that were reprinted from Sydney papers. The surprise was one of the articles talking about her fiancée and how they were going to be married the following year. The article was from 1919 but she obviously didn't end up marrying him. I wonder why not? Instead she married a man 13 years older than her in 1923, the same year she had their only child.
I then tried TROVE for Australian newspapers but the only additional information came from a funeral notice for her brother who died in 1949 - she is listed as one of the mourners in the family notice. This is long after she is thought to have died - did her brothers and sisters just list her because they weren't sure where she was or did they know she was still alive but not with her husband and child?
I also had some success in both Ancestry and FindMyPast in that I found the young family leaving Australia in 1924 for London (her husband was born in Devon) and then I found them coming back in 1927 - without these indexes and digitised images online it wouldn't be possible to do searches like this. So now I know that they were still together in 1927 and in Australia.
I tried to find out a bit more about the husband and noted that he had enlisted for war service in 1939 although he was 53 and from the immigration records I knew he had been in the British Navy possibly during WWI but that needs more looking into. The National Archives of Australia has digitised the series Service Cards for Petty Officers and Men 1911-1970 and I was able to look at the record myself. He listed as his next of kin his wife and an address for her as well as another woman (a friend) and address for her. Did he know where his wife was or was that just a last known address for her? Was there no divorce? Lots of questions which I will have to talk over with our friends when we get back to Melbourne.
With brick walls it really is a matter of just trying to fill in the missing bits and pieces of information. I find that doing timelines for people can be useful as it readily shows all the available facts not only about the person you are looking for but also those around them. Sometimes if you investigate other family members you will find that elusive bit of information on the one you really seek.
Tomorrow is a kindy day so hoping for a bit more genealogy time but then it would also be good to get out and see some of Adelaide as well. It's hard being a tourist too, so many things I want to do and see!
In my down time I continued having a look at our friend's brick wall that I wrote about the other day. I wasn't sure what the New Zealand connection was but decided to try Papers Past as both the married name and the maiden name are relatively uncommon. Interestingly I picked up some references to her athletic achievements that were reprinted from Sydney papers. The surprise was one of the articles talking about her fiancée and how they were going to be married the following year. The article was from 1919 but she obviously didn't end up marrying him. I wonder why not? Instead she married a man 13 years older than her in 1923, the same year she had their only child.
I then tried TROVE for Australian newspapers but the only additional information came from a funeral notice for her brother who died in 1949 - she is listed as one of the mourners in the family notice. This is long after she is thought to have died - did her brothers and sisters just list her because they weren't sure where she was or did they know she was still alive but not with her husband and child?
I also had some success in both Ancestry and FindMyPast in that I found the young family leaving Australia in 1924 for London (her husband was born in Devon) and then I found them coming back in 1927 - without these indexes and digitised images online it wouldn't be possible to do searches like this. So now I know that they were still together in 1927 and in Australia.
I tried to find out a bit more about the husband and noted that he had enlisted for war service in 1939 although he was 53 and from the immigration records I knew he had been in the British Navy possibly during WWI but that needs more looking into. The National Archives of Australia has digitised the series Service Cards for Petty Officers and Men 1911-1970 and I was able to look at the record myself. He listed as his next of kin his wife and an address for her as well as another woman (a friend) and address for her. Did he know where his wife was or was that just a last known address for her? Was there no divorce? Lots of questions which I will have to talk over with our friends when we get back to Melbourne.
With brick walls it really is a matter of just trying to fill in the missing bits and pieces of information. I find that doing timelines for people can be useful as it readily shows all the available facts not only about the person you are looking for but also those around them. Sometimes if you investigate other family members you will find that elusive bit of information on the one you really seek.
Tomorrow is a kindy day so hoping for a bit more genealogy time but then it would also be good to get out and see some of Adelaide as well. It's hard being a tourist too, so many things I want to do and see!
Sunday 17 July 2011
Genealogy notes 17 July 2011
Sunday was a family day and we don't get many of them as we live away from all our families. However, as we are visiting Adelaide we managed to have brunch with one son and then the rest of the day with another son and his family. Grandchildren seem to grow up very quickly even though we were only here last May!
However eventually they go to bed and I managed to check emails, tweets and Google+ before heading to bed myself. Some of my favourite e-newsletters arrived including UK Lost Cousins, Queensland Family History Society's Snippets and National Archives of Australia's Your Memento.
It was good to see a comment on my Summer blog post for 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History but I also saw that there were two posts on it in Google+ because I also posted notice of the blog there. I'm not sure that, from a recordkeeping perspective, that it is good to have comments on a blog separated - my archival instincts say that all comments should be together so that in the future you can see what the response was. But now that I am thinking about it, people often comment via Twitter and Facebook so perhaps it is a bit muddled anyway. Need to think about that a bit more.
Not sure how much genealogy I'll get to do over the next few days while staying with family - probably more taking photos and videos to capture living family members I suspect, but then that all becomes part of the family history too!
However eventually they go to bed and I managed to check emails, tweets and Google+ before heading to bed myself. Some of my favourite e-newsletters arrived including UK Lost Cousins, Queensland Family History Society's Snippets and National Archives of Australia's Your Memento.
It was good to see a comment on my Summer blog post for 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History but I also saw that there were two posts on it in Google+ because I also posted notice of the blog there. I'm not sure that, from a recordkeeping perspective, that it is good to have comments on a blog separated - my archival instincts say that all comments should be together so that in the future you can see what the response was. But now that I am thinking about it, people often comment via Twitter and Facebook so perhaps it is a bit muddled anyway. Need to think about that a bit more.
Not sure how much genealogy I'll get to do over the next few days while staying with family - probably more taking photos and videos to capture living family members I suspect, but then that all becomes part of the family history too!
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