This afternoon we went to Glenelg by tram. It is a pleasant trip with some beautiful stone homes visible from the tram.
Monument for first landing |
Old Town Hall n now the Discovery Centre |
Afterwards we visited the Bay Discovery Centre which is well worth a visit. It is in the lovely heritage building that was the Old Town Hall. Just inside the door was the Honour Board for World Wars. There were a large number of names listed for WW1 and I am not sure whether these were for men who had served or who were lost.
There are some very interesting historical displays upstairs. At the top of the stairs was a showcase containing this interesting visitors book. It contains the names of people attending the Proclamation Day celebrations on 28 December from 1898-1922. This tradition continued for more than 100 years. What is particularly interesting is that the date of arrival and ship are also listed. This series of books may the clue to finding out the arrival date of some-one’s ancestor.
Then the tram ride home to go and register for the AFFHO 2012 conference, slip back to the hotel and get changed for the welcome reception.
The welcome reception was also held at the Convention Centre. There were a number of people in historic dress. It was great to catch up with Shauna Hicks, Carole Riley, Kerry Farmer, Jill Ball handed out some Mardi Gras beads to the bloggers among us so if you see us wearing these beads come and chat as we are some of the 2500 Geneablogger people who write genealogy blogs.
I also met Daniel Horowitz from My Heritage. I have recently joined this site and I have to say am quite impressed as I had uploaded 196 of my direct line ancestors recently to My Heritage. It was an easy Gedcom upload and the Smart Matches started to occur. This is where the site does a check and suggests other entries that match your information. 256 Smart Matches were suggested of which I could immediately confirm 251, do some further checking on three and reject two on which I had not included much information. So I was quite impressed with this result.
I also had a nice chat to the team from FindMyPast and exciting things are happening there! Even better when I got back to the hotel to watch the new Australian episode of Who Do you think You Are? there was a Twitter announcement that FindMyPast UK had just released 1.3 million London Westminster parish records!
The conference presentations start from tomorrow morning at 9.00 with the official opening and the Exhibition Hall opens from 8.30am. Remember you are able to register on the day just to visit the Exhibition Hall to chat with all the exhibitors if you are not able to attend the conference.
Now it is time to get some sleep so I am fresh and alert for the many presentations I will be attending tomorrow. So goodnight all.