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5 Jun 2010
Posted in Tools and Resources
The challenge this week is:
Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and then take the steps to accomplish it.
Haha, I thought. that one’s easy! My biggest challenge is finding the time to get everything done that I need to do. So I’ve decided, for the sake of this challenge, to narrow it down.
I don’t seem to find time to read any more. To just sit down with a book and read it. I used to do most of my reading on the train into the city, but these days I tend to do stuff on my netbook computer, which I’ve talked about before, or read research notes or minutes and notes for Council and committee meetings.
I used to always carry a book with me. Always. Now I don’t. If I think I’ll need something to read I might take a family history magazine or journal with me, but usually the netbook is enough to keep me occupied.
How do I read the books I need to read to further my research? There is so much I have to read:
- books on Australian history
- books on Fijian history
- books written by early settlers and sailors in Fiji (usually downloaded from Google Books as PDFs)
- books on how to find records for family history
- journals and magazine, which are arriving all the time
- fiction (we all need some down-time)
Last weekend, when I was walking past my local Borders bookstore, I saw the answer. The Kobo is Borders’ answer to Amazon’s Kindle. It’s an e-reader that is cheap ($199 Australian), light, easy to read, and small enough to take anywhere. It does nothing except read books, which is what I want. It reads PDFs as well as e-book formats.
Unfortunately I couldn’t buy one on the spot as they had run out, and were taking pre-orders. I said I’d think about it and went home. I thought about it so much that I rang and pre-ordered it from home. They told me it would be in on the 7th June, which is next Monday.
On Thursday (3rd June) I got a call to say they were in, and I could pick mine up! Woohoo!!! I did. I had a workshop to prepare so I didn’t really get to play with it until yesterday.
I’m already reading more than I ever did before. I’ve started on Dickens’ Great Expectations, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read before, although the story seems strangely familiar. I think that contemporary fiction counts as educational, don’t you? At least I’m not reading Harry Potter!
And I feel much better for it already. Reading is what was missing from my life.
The Kobo is a little slow to change pages, so I’ve already learned to press the button a little ahead so it’s there when I’m ready for the next page. I’m still looking around at what books I can put on there. It came with 100 books already, including Dickens and Jane Austen.
The PDF part is still a bit of a challenge, though. I downloaded two PDF books to experiment. They are:
- Smythe’s Ten Months in the Fiji Islands, 1864
- Fanning’s Voyages to the South Seas, 1838
I’ve had success finding ancestors, or potential ancestors, in these sorts of accounts, so I’ve got to keep reading them. Printing and reading takes way too much paper and toner, and I tend not to read them on the laptop, although of course I search them for surnames and places as best I can.
So far reading these PDFs has not been a success. An e-book flows so that no matter what font size you select, the text flows to fit the page. PDFs don’t do this, so there’s a lot of scrolling involved which is too disruptive, even in these old books where the pages are actually quite small. Apparently they are looking at software changes to allow this, but in the meantime scrolling is slow.
So that’s the challenge I need to resolve next, and this is what I’m doing to resolve it:
- I’m experimenting with zooming in and changing the orientation to landscape, but it’s still slow to get down the page.
- I’ll experiment with the different page sizes of different documents
- I’ll look at different formats. Perhaps these books are downloadable as e-books rather than PDFs?
- I’ll be experimenting with Descent, the journal of the Society of Australian Genealogists, which was published from the beginning of the Society in PDF form. That will save me having to decide before I leave the house which one I’m up to. If I can resolve the PDF issue!
Wish me luck!
29 May 2010
Posted in Eason, Tools and Resources
I nearly dismissed this week’s challenge out of hand. I had heard of Find-a-Grave, and I thought it was an American site, with only American graves.
I was wrong.
I searched the FAQ for ‘international’ to see if it covered countries other than USA, as I couldn’t easily find this information on the homepage, and found that some fixes had been done to clean up the list of countries, including Australia. Woohoo!
So I did a search for my usual test surname – Eason – and restricted the country to Australia. Eason is uncommon enough that I don’t get thousands of results, and not so uncommon that I don’t get any at all.
Much to my surprise the list of results included John Eason, buried in an unmarked grave in Condobolin. I was a bit surprised, as I have a copy of his NSW death registration and a photo of his headstone in Blayney.
Entry for John Eason, buried in Condobolin in 1933, from Find a Grave
Clicking on the link to Condobolin Lawn Cemetery gives this information:
There are approximately 1000 unmarked graves in the general cemetery.
“I visited the undertaker, the council, the ladies club, the local Anglican and Catholic churches, the local court house and the local historical association, asking what records they had. I tried the local newspaper; they have their back issues to about 1906 on film but they weren’t big on obituaries. They don’t have a monumental mason in Condo.”
In compiling the list, reference was made to the NSW indexes of births, deaths and marriages and to military records for further information. The images may be viewed and downloaded from the list of all inscriptions for this cemetery.
I’m impressed that someone has gone to the trouble of deducing that the reported approximately 1000 unmarked burials in Condobolin Lawn Cemetery must include John Eason, whose death was registered in Condobolin. Unfortunately it is dangerous to make these sorts of assumptions. John was in Condobolin with his daughter when he died, and was apparently transferred to Blayney to be buried with his wife Lily, who predeceased him by three years.
Headstone of Lily and John Eason, Blayney Presbyterian Cemetery. Photo taken by the author, Dec 2008.
The website allows corrections to be sent to the contributor, and I have now done so.
Lessons learned:
- Don’t dismiss a website just because you assume it is American. It may have gone international.
- Don’t assume that the contents of websites where information has been voluntarily entered is correct.
3 May 2010
Posted in Tools and Resources
For those of us with French ancestors here is a blog that focuses on research in France. It has articles, links to websites, book recommendations, and everything you need to get over your first dismay when you discover that your ancestor came from France.
Anne Morddel has been writing this blog for a year now, and to celebrate her first anniversary she is giving away a copy of her five-page checklist of research you can do on your own before you need to contact a professional in France, called Preparing to Research an Ancestor in France.
To obtain a copy you need to send her an email. You can find her email address here.
31 Mar 2010
Posted in Tools and Resources
The day started off well – I had some ideas about how to continue with a client’s research that I had restarted yesterday, and I had the points in mind I needed to add to the report after yesterday’s fruitless search for convict records.
But when I actually sat down at my desk to do it…. nothing. I waffled around with email and volunteer tasks and other things. No good.
Here are my tips for when this happens to you:
- Start the clock. I have a program that tracks my time on specific tasks, and sometimes it is enough to just start the clock for that task. It’s like making a commitment.
- Put some music on. Not the radio, with talking, and not music that you would feel compelled to concentrate on. It has to be background music, or favourite music that you know well.
- Move. Take the laptop and the paperwork and sit somewhere else. Sometimes the distraction at your desk is enough to put you off. Pick up only what you need and sit at the dining table, or out on the deck.
- Start with a smaller task. Instead of jumping straight in to the report-writing, do something that’s related but not quite so involved. Something quick you can knock off easily. Like a blog post!
- Walk. If it’s a concentration problem you may need to go for a quick walk around the block. Sometimes I walk up and down the stairs 5 or 6 times. Gets the heart rate going!
You may need to do all of these things, but you will get it done!
4 Feb 2010
Posted in Genealogy, Tools and Resources
Week 5
Play with WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a massive network of library content that the public can search for free (user name and password not required). Not every library is a part of WorldCat, but the vast size of the network makes it an important genealogy tool. If you are looking for a specific book or publication, enter the identifying information into the WorldCat search box and see which libraries hold the item. You may even find that you can get the item through your library’s inter-library loan program. Don’t forget to search for some of your more unusual surnames and see what comes up. The goal is to play with WorldCat and examine its possibilities for your own research. If you’re already familiar with WorldCat, play with it again. The network and collection grow and change constantly. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with searching WorldCat for this exercise.
WorldCat is a catalogue of many, many libraries in the world. I’ve used it before and usually it has told me that the book I am looking for is in the State Library of NSW or the National Library of Australia. Unfortunately my genealogy society isn’t part of WorldCat, but one day that will change.
For the sake of this exercise I decided not to look for a book that I know of, but to find books that I didn’t know about. As Amy suggested, I’ve put in one of my unusual surnames – Whippy. David Whippy, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, arrived in Fiji in about 1822 and stayed there.
So I put “Whippy” in the WorldCat search, and waited. 70 results, including a dissertation about job satisfaction in Guam University. I narrowed it down by adding ‘Fiji’, and came up with 5 results, 2 of which were the same.
The most relevant item I found was a microfilm of a play written by Isobel Whippy:
The play concerns the first British Consul in Fiji, William Thomas Pritchard, who arrived in Levuka in September 1858 and was dismissed from his post in January 1863. It is based on a theory that the Consul lost his job because of a love affair with a young woman – possibly a part-European – who gave birth to two children by Pritchard, before he married her in the British Consulate in Levuka a few days afte his dismissal. The play is in two acts – the first covering the period from September 1858 to June 1859; the second from November 1859 to July 1862. There is an epilogue concerning the year 1864.
The microfilm was published by the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau in Canberra, which I happen to know is part of the Australian National University and who microfilm manuscripts related to Pacific history. The films are available in the State Library NSW, and I have accessed them there in the past.
WorldCat, however, told me that my nearest copy was at Yale University Library, New Haven, CT 06520 United States, at a distance of 10000 miles. If I selected the other, identical title, I could find it at the State Library of NSW, the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of Victoria.
There is however, a link to Related Identities, one of which was the Australian National University Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. There’s a timeline for the Bureau that goes back to 1830, which was rather startling until I realised that most of the works listed are about American whalers in the Pacific and such, and filmed by the PMB.
So the end result of my investigation is that I can almost always find what I need in the State Library of NSW, in Sydney where I live. Anything that this library doesn’t have will probably be in Canberra and probably available on inter-library loan, although I haven’t hit this situation yet.
David Whippy didn’t arrive on a whaler but the principle is the same, so I now have a list of resources I can check to find out more about the way of life and the history of Americans in the Pacific, if not about David Whippy directly. Most, if not all, available at the State Library of NSW.
Libraries Australia has a combined catalogue of many libraries in Australia. I don’t know if all the same libraries are in both catalogues. The free version of this catalogue is within Trove.
I put Whippy in the Search field and got a whole heap of results:
As you can see, there’s a vast array of stuff which will take me some time to work through. Not all of it is relevant, but some of it is. For example, the third entry under Australian newspapers (1803-1954) is a page from the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1856 containing transcripts of correspondence about American activities in Fiji. In one of the letters, written by James Calvert, the Wesleyan missionary, Mr Whippy, my David Whippy, is mentioned a number of times as arbitrating with Mr. Calvert in a dispute between the natives and an American ship’s captain. I was then able to correct the transcription of the notoriously difficult newspaper print, and download a PDF of the page or the whole newspaper.
Further down the screen there are sections for Maps, Diaries and Letters, and Archived Websites. All sections can be opened and closed on this summary screen, or clicked on to give the full list of results.
Trove is relatively new, and having now played with it I can see it is vastly superior to WorldCat for my purposes. Australian catalogues are more likely to be useful to me in general to find a book I can borrow in an Australian library. Trove gives so much more than any library catalog that I would be unlikely to go anywhere else.
It also gave me more books than WorldCat did. On its list of 96 books, journals and magazines, etc, it gives the title Gone Native in Polynesia by Ian Christopher Campbell, a book I’ve been trying to get hold of for some time. This book has a whole chapter on David Whippy in Fiji. There are tabs for each State, and under NSW I can see that it’s available at the State Library of NSW and the University of Wollongong Library. There is also a link to show where I can buy a copy – in this case from Blackwell Online for 70 pounds or Amazon from US$79.00 to US$235.00. I won’t be buying a copy for my library, but I have a search in eBay just in case.
Isobel’s play is there, with the same results – State Library of NSW, and the reference number is given.
Really, I can’t see why I would use WorldCat on a day-to-day basis. Contributers to Trove include Project Gutenberg, so I might be able to download the book I want then and there.
1 Feb 2010
Posted in Tools and Resources
Week 1
Go to your local public library branch. Make a note of the genealogy books in the collection that may help you gain research knowledge. Don’t forget to check the shelves in both the non-fiction section and the reference section. If you do not already have a library card, take the time to get one. If you have a genealogy blog, write about what you find in your library’s genealogy collection.`
I have been into Hornsby Library many times, and I have a library card, and it even has money on it for printing. Hornsby Library has a good family history section, with two microfilm readers/printers.
They don’t tend to keep up with later editions of important how-to books, and I find that my own are more up-to-date. They have a good local history collection, as you would expect.
The microfilm and microfiche collection is much more useful to me. They have a large part of the Archive Research Kit developed by the Archives Office of NSW (as it was then, now State Records NSW), which includes:
- the Early Church Records collected by the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages from the churches once civil registration was introduced
- Colonial Secretary’s Correspondence from 1788 to 1825, covered by the online index at State Records NSW
- various convict records
- the Immigration Agents’ Lists
- lists of ships arriving
- [forgive the lack of proper citations, I'm writing this from memory on the train]
They also have the Tasmanian birth, death and marriage records up to 1899 on microfilm, which always surprised me until I realised that Tasmania is the only other state that has published theirs on microfilm.
They have a good collection of local newspapers on microfilm, although not full runs.
They also have the rate books and minutes of the local council on microfilm.
I must admit that I have never investigated the resources available on the computers at the library, as I usually have my own, or have used mine at home before I get there. I can also usually find what I’m looking for on the Hornsby Library catalogue online before I arrive.
www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au
28-44 George St (entrance in Hunter Lane)
Hornsby NSW 2077
0298476813
9 Jan 2010
Posted in Computers, Tools and Resources
Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and I’ve been playing with it ever since.
So far I’m just installing the software I need and downloading and installing updates, and the battery has lasted very well. The keyboard feels solid and the major keys are much the same size as on my standalone keyboard, although of course all the other keys are in different places – another keyboard to get used to. The touch pad is much the same size as on my 15in laptop.
It works well and quickly, even though I wasn’t able to upgrade the RAM to 2GB as the salesperson advised me. I’ve seen forums where a lot of people have upgraded theirs successfully, and I might consider that later when I really start using it.
I am expecting to use it when I go into the city or out to the archives, and for my birthday last year I got a mobile broadband … thingy (whatever the thing is called). My old mini is a HP 2133. The battery lasts less than 2 hours, and with Vista it’s very slow to get going – both reasons to leave it at home. If I use it on the train on the way into the city I have to take the power cable to charge it again for the ride home, especially if I actually use it while I’m in the city. I bought it too soon – at the time there was very little around, and what there was was small and made from flimsy-looking plastic.
It’s so small and convenient that I’ll probably use it around the house as well. The fate of the HP is yet to be decided.
8 Jan 2010
Posted in Computers, Tools and Resources
I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part:
You must read and follow all set-up and usage instructions in the provided manuals and Instruction Manual for Safety and Comfort. If you fail to do so, this product will not function properly and you may lose data or suffer other damage. EVEN IF YOU DO SO, TOSHIBA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OR WARRANTY THAT THIS PRODUCT WILL FUNCTION PROPERLY IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. [Upper case in original]
Thanks, Toshiba, that’s very comforting.
Last weekend, when I was walking past my local Borders bookstore, I saw the answer. The Kobo is Borders’ answer to Amazon’s Kindle. It’s an e-reader that is cheap ($199 Australian), light, easy to read, and small enough to take anywhere. It does nothing except read books, which is what I want. It reads PDFs as well as e-book formats.
