It is now the end of Day Two of the Unlock the Past NSW Expo at Coffs Harbour. It has been a great day. There were again a wide range of talks available and I attended some excellent presentations today:
Finding the address isn’t enough: the links between local and family history by Dr Carol Liston was very informative. It is so important when researching that your ancestors are more than names and dates. Putting your ancestors in context in their community gives life to them and they become people who work, live and play. Using local history resources to do this is essential and as the people we research were part of their communities if we don’t use these resources we are short-changing our research.
Dr Liston gave a well rounded talk with very good resources and she showed how these resources were used in her own family research to answer some questions about how two people knew each other and subsequently married. The gasp of astonishment from a person in teh audience who recognised their own ancestor’s name in the selection map being shown was enough to make all of us smile (and wish it was us!). The maps that are available in New South Wales for what appears to be a quite reasonable fee was remarkable. I wish I had lots of New South Wales research to take advantage of being able to get the files which allow you to track land ownership sent as a PDF.
This led beautifully into the next presentation by Nola Mackey on Regional Newspapers: their value to local and family history. We all know the value of newspapers for hatch, match and dispatch notices but they contain so much more. Nola explained some of the valuable things she had discovered while indexing papers and how the newspaper could give information not easily found elsewhere. this is particularly true of local papers. Apart from the disasters and major events that are always reported the activities of life are meat on the bones for us.
Knowing your ancestor won a medal at the shooting competition or scored a goal at the football match adds life to them. Knowing what the weather was like on the day they married, knowing that they had written a letter to the paper complaining about the state of the roads or the lack of a school. regional papers generally provide more local information than do the papers that cover a much larger area but all papers should be investigated and with Trove we have a great online resource but it is important to remember that not all papers are online and to check out the holdings of your local history library and State library for what be available in hard copy or microfilm as well as what is online.
I did my “Time with an Expert” session after this presentation and had a wonderful time. A large part of what i find fascinating in research is looking at a problem and teasing out possible avenues to follow to answer the questions. I find everyone’s family interesting and love talking to people about ways of solving their family history problems. One of the delightful people I spoke with today had a problem relating to the fact she had ann email from 2004 found in the Rootsweb Mail lists archive which gave detailed information about her family line but the email address is not current.
Again this shows the problem of not keeping an email address such as Gmail as a family history email as no matter how often you change ISPs you will always be able to be found in the future. How many messages have you put up where the email address is not current and how many disappointed people may be out there hoping to contact you?
At the very least repost messages to the email lists your interests and queries so you are able to be found.
I also attended a special presentation by Mark Cryle:
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Helen. Sounds like a fun event.
I heard on the grapevine that your brickwall talk was one of the best.
Hi Jill
Thank you for those kind words. The brickwall talk is always a fun one to give as you can see people thinking about what you are saying and you can almost see the wheels turning and at times suddenly the light-bulb moment!
Yes it was a fun event with excellent speakers and I had a ball. Cairns will be even better.
It was really nice to meet up in person with some of my online friends.
Thanks for your detailed report. Friends of mine went down for the day and their comment was 'Not many people attended'. What did you think?
Hi
There were about 160 on the Friday and about 200 on the Saturday so reasonable numbers. Venue was large so there was plenty of room.Some people had traveled a distance, one gentleman came down from Bribie Island.