Bush Dancers |
Seonaid Lewis strutting her stuff! |
Lesley Silvester dancing the night away |
Bush Dancers |
Seonaid Lewis strutting her stuff! |
Lesley Silvester dancing the night away |
I wanted to show the Cornish Association stand without people as otherwise you would not get the full effect of what a colourful stand they had produced. The rest of the time there are too many people around for you to see their great display.
The first presentation of the day was Jenny Higgens talking on the National Library, an amazing resource that on talking to some overseas visitors we don’t appreciate as much as we should! Over 6 million pages of newspapers, Picture Australia and so much more. There are a number of oral history recordings which are gradually being digitised and which includes a number from the Broken Hill project. These were done in the 1980s and included interviews with some people who were born in the 1880s. Wonderful to see that heritage being kept and made available for future generations.
In more modern times these contracts when they have survived can give great information about our family history.
I assisted on the Guild of One Name Studies stand. Regular readers would know I run a One Name study on Quested, which a name that is mainly found in Kent, England. We had a wonderful time showing people where their surnames were found in the 1881 census. This is done using Surname Atlas which is a very useful program that looks at surname frequency from the 1881 census and has listed these by county and what is even more useful by Poor Law Union. This can be very useful as it can show where a surname may originate.
Colleen has written three excellent books and there was a crowd around the Gould Genealogy stand buying her books and taking advantage of having the author present to do a signing. I already had her Forensic genealogy book but did purchase her two other books (and got them autographed!)
I am very much looking forward to her other presentations at Congress.
Then off to morning tea and a perusal of the exhibitors. Trove was showing some of the proposed changes to their website and gaining customer feedback. The changes look very good.
After lunch, Daniel Horowitz from My Heritage was the next presenter on “How we Share and Preserve Memories in a Digital Age”. This presentation was quite interesting and well done in the first half and then became more of an infomercial for My Heritage which while interesting would have been better as the last small section of the presentation.
I stayed in the main lecture hall for Dr Chris Watts talk on “Researching a British Merchant Seaman” Chris knows his topic well and has written a detailed book on this subject. He concentrated on the pre-1858 records. Life has become a lot easier int his time period for researchers as FindMyPast has added quite a number of Merchant Seaman records on their website. Post this time period crew list records are held in a variety of places including UK county records offices, UK Maritime Museum as well as Newfoundland. This was because the UK Archives did not have the space to accept all the thousands and thousands of boxes of crew lists.
Then afternoon tea followed by a presentation by David Holman on “Using British Medals to Help Fill Out Your Tree”. Again an interesting presentation by someone who was very familiar with his topic. David gave a good description of the various medals and when they were issued and the changes that occurred. He also gave information on where we could find further information about the reasons why a medal was awarded.
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.
Then straight ahead is the entrance to the Museum.
Family History Fairs and Expos are wonderful events for an attendee as they have access to speakers on a variety of topics, historic displays, online data providers, books, postcards and other goodies to buy. They are also able to learn more about many smaller specialist societies that are present at the Expo.
![]() |
About 1910 Central Railway Station Brisbane |
The 7th Unlock the Past History and Genealogy Expo is being held in Brisbane 25-27th June. Bookings are now open.
At the Geelong Expo |
It is being organised by Unlock the Past in conjunction with History Queensland, Genealogical Society of Queensland and Queensland Family History Society.
History Queensland will not be holding a separate Family History fair this year.
A program of about 39 presentations in two streams will run almost continuously throughout the Expo.
Presenters will include Audrey Collins from the UK National Archives, Shauna Hicks, Judy Webster, Helen Smith, Carole Riley, Kerry Farmer, Jill Ball and others from Queensland and interstate.
Most talks will require a ticket to attend. Key presentations by Audrey Collins will be $10 while most of the other talks in these streams will be $5 each. In addition there will be over 20 additional FREE talks and product demonstrations.
David Evans a Gulid memebr giving advice |
Goodies available |
As well as the talks there will be an Exhibition Hall with an expected 70 exhibitors including Gould Genealogy, FindMyPast (Australian, UK, Irish, British Newspapers and now also in the USA), Guild of One Name Studies, Judy Webster, Clean Cruising, Inside History magazine, Irish Wattle books, Ryerson Index and Stephen Dando-Collins already committed.
In other expos we have seen libraries, archives, family history societies, historical societies museums, photo restorers, online data providers, FamilySearch, researchers, specialist societies, book publishers and more. Keep checking back to see the ever expanding list of exhibitors .
There will aslo be a Research Help Zone where you can ask questions and you will be able to book an appointment with an expert for some more detailed advice. These are fantastic opportunities to help solve that brick wall problems you may be experiencing. Remember to come prepared with the background information about your problem, where you have already looked and what you found, what documentation you may already have and you will then be able to get the most out of your session with the expert.
The Expo opening hours will be
Note: Images shown were from the Unlock the Past Expo at Geelong in 2011
I have been a bit jealous of Jill Ball and the Flip-Pal scanner she bought back from Rootstech last year.
There has been lots of dicussions about the scanner and what it can do on Facebook and the various discussion forums and Jill has a demo video on her site..
There have been a number of Australians who have visited the States and bought back a Flip-Pal with them and I know it was on a number of people’s 2011 Christmas list.
Caroline Pointer has just published an excellent post on reasons why you would buy a Flip-Pal. Well worth a read!