We arrived after a nice drive down from Brisbane. Weather and traffic were kind to us. The venue is the C-Ex the RSL centre which is a large centre with many very interesting photos on the walls of troopships, memorabilia of service persons in various conflicts. One person in our group was quite excited to see a pennant from the Westralia a ship her father-in-law served upon.
We set up last night and had a lovely meal at the C-ESociety of Australian Genealogistsx and then to bed ready for today. Great range of exhibitors including Unlock the Past , Society of Australian Genealogists , Family Search, Find My Past, Inside History , the Coffs Harbour Regional Museum with a fantastic dress display.
There were many interested family historians around the expo talking with the various exhibitors and at the presentations.
There was an excellent range of presentations and I managed to attend two so far Social Media presented by Carole Riley. An excellent presentation showing how social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Flickr can really enhance your family history and present it to a wider audience. Carole strongly recommended that everyone should at look at blogs and ideally write a blog as this will get your stories out there and it is a great start for your family book.
I also managed to attend a presentation by Heather Garnsey from the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) who gave an excellent talk on Treasures at SAG which made me want to run to do some research there. Heather raised the important point that SAG has been around for many years and was doing transcribing of cemeteries many years ago. This is important as we all know that many headstones are today unreadable, have been removed for “safety’s sake” or unfortunately have been vandalised so are no longer available for us to read.
I have just come back from a talk by Kerry Farmer on DNA for Genealogists. I have to say this is the best DNA talk for genealogists I have heard. In my work I deal with DNA and DNA tests and am quite familiar with the topic. Kerry was able to present what can be quite complicated material in an easy to understand way. I highly recommend you attend her talk if you ever have the chance. In the event you are not able to do this she has just published a book “DNA for Genealogists” which is available from Unlock the Past. I have just purchased this and am very much looking forward to reading it.
Tomorrow is another day and there are more wonderful presentations to come including Regional Newspapers, Researching Women Ancestors by Noeline Kyle, Caring for your Family Archives with Shauna Hicks, German Research with Eric Kopittke and many more.
So if you are free come along and join us NSW Expo at Coffs Harbour
If you can’t get along follow us on Twitter with #NSWExpo