At the recent Congress in Brisbane I spoke about leaving a large footprint for future generations. While my presentation concentrated on our personal histories I believe, that as generous genies, we should endeavour to record the history of places that are important to us. I am undertaking a one-place study in an attempt to meet that goal. A one-place study is a fusion of local and family history.

My study is titled Carey Bay 2283 : People and Places – Past and Present. I focus on people who lived, worked, played, hatched, matched and died in Carey Bay. As there is little information on the history of the Carey Bay area prior to British colonisation my study concentrates on the last two hundred years since white settlers and missionaries came to the area.

Carey Bay is on the shore of Lake Macquarie in Lake Macquarie City, NSW, Australia. It is situated in the land of the Awakabal people who inhabited this region for the last 50,000 years. 

Although this name Carey Bay, which was formerly part of Toronto, was only gazetted in 1991 the area of Cary or Carey Bay has been known as a location since the late nineteenth century. The area was named after William Cary, a director and shareholder of the Excelsior Land, Investment and Building Co and Bank Ltd. that developed and subdivided land in the area.

A little over a year ago I wrote “I did it!

“Just two nights ago I bit the bullet and registered a One-Place Study.

Over the past weeks I have visited the OPS (Society for One-Place Studies) website several times to see how the published sites were set up and learn about the registration process.  I opted to use Blogger, a free product I have used for nearly twenty years. I then spent too many hours playing with the set-up of my site even though I know that I can easily modify it as my study grows. I will have a series of static pages accessed from a top menu bar, my blog posts will appear on the Home Page

Registering the study on the OPS site was painless. It was comforting to receive an almost instant reply from the webmaster indicating that my application had been received and would be evaluated and, if I had ticked all the correct boxes, would be posted in the coming days.

The efficient webmaster emailed yesterday and indicated that my study had been approved and was live on the OPS site. I guess I can’t chicken out now. I spent a few hours yesterday adding a Timeline to the site. Looking through the list which contains links to many newspaper stories from Trove gives readers an indication of Carey Bay life in earlier years.”

So why did a time poor old genie launch yet another project?

I have been a member of The Society for One-Place Studies for ten years and, during that time, I often thought about undertaking a study. I have been impressed by the depth and breadth of the studies being undertaken and felt that I do not have the time to undertake a study that measures up to those others have done.

Several years ago I purchased and read Janet Few’s book, Putting your Ancestors in their Place: a guide to one place studies. This excellent guide didn’t bolster my confidence. Despite this and the depth of studies like that of Kim Baldacchino I was toying with the idea of registering a study.

My reasons were:

• This statement appears on the Society for One-Place Studies website “There is no fixed, rigid way to carry out a One-Place Study – the beauty of it is that you have full freedom and flexibility to shape the Study to suit your methodology, Place, and information available”, So I can do it my way!
• I believe that doing something is better than doing nothing at all.
• Australia is a big country and the number of one-place studies being undertaken here is abysmal. I want to let the world know about my little area of  “The Lucky Country” I salute my genimates who are already undertaking studies.
• As a newcomer to my local area I want to learn about its history and people. 
• Since moving to Carey Bay, I have amassed quite a collection of genealogical data on the people who live here. 
• As Carey Bay, on the shores of Lake Macquarie, is such a pretty place I have amassed quite a collection of photos of the area.
• I have a commitment to preserving local and family history for future generations.
• I want to encourage others to commit to recording and preserving the history of their places.”

Since launching fourteen months ago I am pleased with the progress I have made.  I am happy with the set-up of my Blogger site but realised that I need some other products to complement the pages and posts I shared on that platform.

I maintain my master list of people on RootsMagic which provides me with a facility to create custom reports by people and place. That this product syncs nicely with several online databases is a bonus. I find the connections with Ancestry.com and MyHeritage records most useful.

To complement the Blogger site I am using two other online products. I resisted sites that require a paid subscription. On FindaGrave I created a Virtual Cemetery, Carey Bay 2283, that lists the final resting places of people with a connection to Carey Bay. I have currently memorialised about 200 people on this site and continue to add to it as I do further research.

While I share stories of some people in individual blog posts such as this recent post  it took me a while to decide on a method of sharing the stories and biographical details of all Carey Bay people. I needed a product that would live on after my demise. My epiphany came after I was the subject of a Wikitree Challenge last July. I saw that Wikitree, which focuses on accuracy and uses a shared, collaborative environment for genealogy research, would be the perfect vehicle for recording data about the Carey Bay Family. To date I have created 125 profiles and placed them in the Carey Bay Category.

To deal with place history I have created pages on Blogger for each of the streets in Carey Bay, At present there are only links to the websites of the few businesses and services in the community. For social history there is a timeline page on the blog that lists links to Carey Bay stories from Trove and other media outlets. The blog pages will be complemented by blog posts on some individual properties, people and events.

My Carey Bay resources are housed in a folder on my laptop and the resources I have used in a  references page on the blog. I hope this is useful for others conducting one-place studies.

In the future I will plug away at recording people and place information in hand. I have not promoted the study outside of my social media accounts. In the coming months I will reach out to the local community through local Facebook Groups and in our local Family History Group.

As I ponder the future of my study I reflect on Robert Frost’s verse:  

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.”
I pray that I have enough miles in me to do justice to Carey Bay.