Wednesday 15 February 2012

Genealogy notes 8-15 Feb 2012 - Cornish genealogy this week

Where does time go? I've spent a lot of the last week sidetracked by cleaning out my family history file cabinets and rediscovering bits and pieces I'd forgotten about. It really is amazing how much is now online. I must have spent a small fortune printing out images of BDM indexes and other genealogy resources on fiche and film which of course I no longer need hard copies of. Also lots of poor quality printouts from early newspapers which I can now get better quality digital images of through TROVE.

I also spent a bit of time looking at my Cornish ancestors as St Pirans Day is approaching in March. The FamilySearch website now has digitised images of Cornish parish registers so as long as you know the date of the event you can get an image from the digitised register. Certainly beats all those hours of winding through microfilm back in the late 1970s early 1980s when I first started researching my Cornish gg grandparents. The Cornwall Online Parish Clerks website is a perfect companion to the Family Search site and it's no wonder I lost a day or two.

Perhaps the most exciting news of the week was that I entered an Inside History magazine competition and was one of the lucky winners. I'm eagerly awaiting my prize which was a copy of the book Abandoned Women by Lucy Frost - all about Scottish female convicts to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).

I'm off to Darwin tomorrow for the War Comes to Australia Tour which is participating in the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin. It's only five days but the itinerary includes a lot of touring and seminars which should be interesting. Then I have three days off to see our four grandchildren and to do other touristy things in Darwin. We go up every year, usually in the rainy season as there are less tourists then.

Before we head back to Melbourne there is a Darwin family history seminar with the Northern Territory Library and the Genealogical Society of the Northern Territory where  Rosemary Kopittke  and I are giving three talks each. I'm hoping to do some tweeting and blogging from the far north over the next week as I think it will be a fascinating time to be in Darwin.

Reading the Queensland State Archives Feb 2012 qsa-bulletin, I noticed that there is a new online index to lands sold 1842-1859 which is exciting and one of the reasons I subscribe to free government archive e-newsletters is to learn about new resources. The February issue also had lots of other interesting news and if you have Queensland interests then past issues may be worth looking at here.

One day I will catch up with all my reading piles, paper, email, and online but it won't be anytime soon. There's too much happening which is a good thing for family history. Until next time, happy searching!





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