Month: July 2015

Where do I begin searching?

Miss W. General info , , , , ,

I am so lucky that my family history has mainly been in Tasmania since the early 1830’s. I began my researching by asking questions of my mother who seemed to know everything about the family or at least her side of it. My father knows very little about his side and is amazed at what I am finding out for him. Unluckily, we haven’t had any heirloom bibles or notebooks handed down in the family, so I am having to start from scratch.

My number 1 spot

The LINC webpages which has just been updated this week. These are resources related to Tasmania but they do have other links to visit outside our clean, green state. Type in the name of your relative in the search bar at the top.

This search will include

  • births RGD 33
  • deaths RGD 35
  • marriages RGD 37
  • convicts
  • wills and more

Then visit the record, remembering to take note of the source of the record. How much did you find that was useful?

My number 2 spot

The National Archives of Australia – this is for information after 1900 when Australia became one federated country rather than separate colonies. I do a record search and will find war records as well as naturalization records, some passenger lists – both boat and plane. Part of the NAA this year is the Discovering ANZACs website – joint project with National Archives of New Zealand – where all World War I service men and women have their records open to the public. See another post I have written telling you where to find more war records.

My number 3 spot

This is Trove which is part of the National Library of Australia. It has a section of digitized newspapers from all states of Australia. These are being updated all the time. What is also great is they include a citation button in top left corner where you can copy the source of the record very easily. I use the Harvard/Australian version all the time to keep things consistent in the family tree software programme I use.

Readers: What are your three favourite repositories or places to find information for your family history? Do you have some for places outside Australia?

When I began researching

Miss W. General info , ,

Back in the mid 1970’s when I first began my family history research, I made a lot of errors. I wish I knew about those guidelines.

Some included:

  • asking lots of questions but not writing down the answers – I was young, I would remember what I had been told
  • putting all my information in a big box – not sorting it into family names
  • finding information in books or on microfilm or card catalogues but not writing down where I found it

But there were a couple of things I did early on that helped me:

  • I visited my local Historical Society and asked them questions – they directed me to pedigree charts and family group sheets
  • They also directed me to the state archives where I would find births, death and marriage records on microfilm or microfiche

But nowadays with the internet, family history researching is so much easier.

You could join a course like the one run by the University of Tasmania or you could:

Find some beginner guides for family history from the following places:

To help document your research you can find online pedigree and family group charts

Download charts from here

Readers: What is something unusual you have found when looking at records about your relatives? Leave your story in a comment.

New family history course

Miss W. Family History Course

The University of Tasmania is now running their introduction to family history course again. They have taken note of many things mentioned by those of us who did it over the Christmas break in 2014/2015.  I was invited by Dianne Snowden to be a moderator for this course, so I can see the tremendous changes that have been made.

1. They have allowed a two week orientation program where students get the chance to learn the terminology for online learning, as well as having a chance to navigate around the MyLO platform which is used at the Uni. This also means those who enrol late still get a chance to learn the computer skills needed before heading into the actual family history learning. Included in this learning is a practice dropbox activity and a practice quiz which they must pass with at least 50% correct before going onto the family history modules.

2. The course is over a longer period of time which allows for more detailed learning on those areas of family history which might be different to normal history eg referencing and citing of sources.

3. There is only one major assignment and that is a research plan rather than the report we did in our course. Assessment also includes a quiz every two weeks and discussions in your groups. These discussions are assessed on quantity rather than quality as we had. Students have to start 8 discussions and reply to at least 16. Each module completed will mean chances to start your own discussions on topics of interest but also based on the research you want to do.

4. Students put themselves into discussion groups with a maximum of 50 students per group. There are three skill levels and these were explained before students decided which one they put themselves into.

It has been interesting to follow conversations in the Facebook group as well. The same worries we had in our course are also found with this new group of students. Many of them though, were champing at the bit to get started with the first module of true family history learning.

As I am a moderator of three beginner groups, I often give them the link to my blog and the links we used in our previous course. These have come in handy especially for storage of information.

As the actual course gets going I will be adding further posts to the blog and further points to this post.