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!

Genealogy notes 30 Mar 2012 - Day 3 of the AFFHO Congress

Surprisingly after a great night, I'm up bright (not quite) and early and writing this at 5.15am with a strong cup of tea beside me. As I said yesterday it is so full on I haven't been keeping up with my emails or Twitter/Facebook messages nor have I had time to find/read any blogs written by other attendees. We have a group photo at 1.00pm today so I'll be able to write down names and then follow them up as I do like reading what others say about conferences.

Now for a round up of Day 3. The two plenary sessions today were both by AFFHO 2012 congress sponsors and I wrote about my thoughts on this in Day 1 and from discussions with various people yesterday and last night, I am not alone. First up was John Kitzmiller on FamilySearch Content Strategy and this was disappointing on a number of fronts. He finished his presentation twenty minutes early (almost unheard of for a keynote presentation) and then stood there chatting to fill in the time. Personally I think we should have all just had a longer morning tea.

There was no reason for the presentation to be so short - although he was giving this talk in Australia, there was no mention of what FamilySearch has done, is doing or will do in Australasia which is a real shame as there is some great material on the horizon. The other disappointing area for me was in his final slide he mentioned a number of terrific things and managed to do so in under thirty seconds. He should have given more information and he would have left the audience revved up instead of incredibly flat. I have read articles on their mass digitisation of microfilm program and the statistics are simply mind boggling but this wasn't shared nor was information on their DCAMX system which delivers new field capture images immediately to the web. Again amazing stuff, but sadly John did not achieve his keynote message and only reinforced the belief that sponsors should not give keynote presentations.

My next session was Colleen Fitzpatrick with more forensic genealogy CSI meets Roots and I was so rapt in the presentation I went out and bought the book The Dead Horse Investigation: Forensic Photo Analysis for Everyone. Colleen is a great speaker, adds humour and engages the audience and I know I'll be going home to relook at all my photos to see what I've been missing.

After morning tea, I went to Roger Kershaw's talk on Tracing Criminals Transported to Australia. Roger is from the National Archives UK so he was using UK records to illustrate his talk to start with and Australian records towards the end as he traced the life of a convict. I would have liked to see him cite the sources he was using on his slides and this might have prevented some questions/comments from the audience during the presentation. It's an area that I give talks on myself so there wasn't anything new for me but I did like some of his illustrations as a picture conveys so much more than just a few words can.

At lunch time I had to quickly eat a few sandwiches and then pop out to the shops as I realised that morning I had forgotten to bring anything to wear for the conference dinner. As I usually only wear black pants and different tops all I needed to find was a nice top quickly and as someone who hates shopping, that's not always easy. In the end I bought three because I couldn't decide but I will be able to wear the others in Sydney next month when I give family history workshops at the Royal Australian Historical Society.

Just as I was about to dash out, I met up with Aimee and  her new young one who didn't look at all happy to be attending his first genealogy conference and also Sharon, a Twitter/Facebook friend and fellow Unlock the Past cruiser. We had a few quick minutes to catch up on news and then I was out into the Adelaide heat (even though it is autumn) to shop. I managed to get back just in time for the after lunch plenary session on  FindMyPast presented by Vicki Eldridge a well known Sydney genealogist.

As the session was being filmed, there was additional pressure on Vicki as well as trying to talk about all the great things available on the three FMP sites - UK, Ireland and Australasia (they call it Australia but as it also has New Zealand and the Pacific I like the broader name, I'm guessing that one day there will be a FMP NZ) and the new British Newspaper Archive. I've been fortunate to hear many talks on FMP from a variety of speakers and one of the things that always stands out for me is how much new material is going online all the time. It's almost impossible to keep up!

As principal sponsor, FMP had a big exhibit area with three staff all busy most of the time doing free searches of the various databases and explaining the features of each. For the congress there were also special subscription deals which is a great opportunity for those wanting a personal subscription they can access at home any time. For those who don't need that much access, FMP is also freely available at libraries, genealogical societies and state/national libraries. As a keynote presentation Vicki gave a thorough and professional overview of FMP which gave the audience a detailed knowledge of what is on offer. I'm looking forward to 17 April when the new website for FMP AU is launched so mark that date in your calendars!

My next session was Stephen Young on Power Point Your Family History and I found this an interesting way to present a family history or a slice of history at birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and of course funerals. My Mum's 78th is coming up and I thought I might try and put something together to show the family when I'm up in Brisbane in June. Although I'm not across all the whiz bang features that Stephen used in his demonstration, I'm willing to try and learn a few new tricks. What I would have liked is for him to mention some of the other free software eg Google Docs that is similar to PowerPoint as not everyone has it and may not want to buy it just for the odd presentation.

At afternoon tea time, I finally managed to catch up with Stephanie from State Library of Queensland who I had seen from a distance at various times. After a soothing Earl Grey tea and some tasty biscotti, I went to the session on Juvenile Emigration with Elspeth Grant previously at the Migration Museum in Adelaide. I had met Elspeth the night before at the Lord Mayor's reception. Had she warned me it was going to be such an emotional session, I might not have gone. As well as giving us the history of the various 'juvenile' schemes, Elspeth also had two people come along to tell their own personal stories. By the end of Bill and Pat's stories there wasn't a dry eye in the room and a few people were reaching for tissues. It was a great way to highlight how some of these schemes broke up families and how people have since tried to refind their families with all the emotion that brings. It was certainly a different way of looking at genealogy and family history research.

Not surprisingly that session went a bit over time so I raced back to the hotel as I wanted to get Day 2 blog out before I went to the conference dinner. Thankfully I did, managed to tweet and Facebook it for those reading about our daily adventures and then it was pre dinner drinks with Helen and Seonaid before going back to the Convention Centre for dinner. I'm not sure if it was by luck or design but most of the dinner tweeters were on my table with the exception of Liz (aka Infolass) and we managed to tweet for most of the evening.

As I seem to have a reputation for my culinary wining and dining, I should make some comment on the dinner which was a self serve at table mixed breads and continental antipasto platter. We only discovered the olive oil after we had demolished the entree. The main was a herb crust chicken roulade with fresh (overcooked) asparagus, saffron cream sauce and no potato (which was the comment I heard from most people). We must all like our spuds with dinner! Dessert was another self serve at table variety of sweets including fresh fruit tarts, strawberry pavlova, apple and almond slice and hazelnut pannacotta. There was also coffee and chocolates and without thinking I had the coffee but thankfully it didn't keep me awake. Sometimes if I have coffee that late I'm up half the night!

June Penny was the recipient of the AFFHO award for meritorious service to family history and I've known June for many years. She was an inspiration to me when I moved to Canberra and joined the HAGSOC committee and I always admired her meeting style. I hope the citation goes on the AFFHO website as it would take to long to outline all the many things June has done over the years. Well done June. A list of former recipients is here.

There was some bush dancing and music and a few congress delegates joined in including our table member Seonaid from New Zealand. Then Dan Poffenberger was the after dinner speaker and I forgot to write down the name of his talk! But it was a very funny look at odd entries from parish registers and other documents and a great way to end the evening. Then it was time to say good night and totter back across the road to the hotel.

It's hard to believe that today is Day 4 and it will all be over for another three years. I'm already looking forward to Canberra in 2015. Time to get ready and across the road for the last day of talks and to look round the exhibits (and maybe spend money)!