Last week a very exciting event happened in my family. My father had his 90th birthday. We celebrated with a family weekend at his home in a small town in Northern New South Wales. Family members travelled from far and wide. My father is the proud patriarch of 5 children, 19 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren. Almost everyone was able to attend the celebrations. My father was born on 10thJuly 1926 in Lismore, New South Wales. He is the … Continue reading
I have previously written in this forum about elusive ancestors. Those ancestors that you can only trace back to a certain event in their life and then you reach a dead end. You know they are your ancestor because you have the proof. You have traced backwards from your self via the relevant birth, death and marriage certificates. You know they were not born in Australia because you have the death certificate which states that they were born somewhere else … Continue reading
Of course not, I hear you say, but unfortunately there are family photos for sale in many charity shops around the world. They are removed from their albums and all provenance is lost. We have to persuade our families that the family photos have value so they don’t just “clear out the rubbish” when we die or go into a nursing home. How can we do that? We need to tell the story of the photo. Every photo … Continue reading
The Australian government recently announced budget cuts that will almost certainly negatively impact further development by the National Library of the collection of books, newspapers, photographs and journals currently available free of charge to Australian researchers. On one of my forays into Trove’s newspaper collection I came across a bit of buried treasure, an article that illustrates the wealth of information in these collections and the importance of maintaining and developing them. The article appeared in a Sydney newspaper in … Continue reading
I went to England in July last year to catch up with my mother and brother both prior to and after the Unlock the Past Baltic cruise. Have you visited family or a repository, perhaps attended a conference or just a half-day or full-day course, made lots of notes and reminders of things to follow up afterwards and then find that ‘life’ makes this follow-up seemingly impossible. It feels somewhat selfish to focus on ‘following up’ when there are a … Continue reading
