How will our generation and those of the future be documented? What records will be available and searchable?
Family Trees basically are sketches of the trunk and branches bearing names and dates of births, marriages and deaths of generations of families, and Family History, the details -the who, what, where, when, why and how.
Family Trees may be formatted horizontally, vertically, or in the round; using online programmes, own calligraphy, or even embroidered. One talented seamstress embroidered a large tree, with the family names depicted on apples. It was easily brought up to date – when a son-in-law strayed, she embroidered a worm emerging from his apple.
The Glen Innes Land of the Beardies Museum Research Centre contains extensive resources including maps, hard copies of the Glen Innes Examiner indexed from 1874 to 1991, (that paper is also on *Trove to 1874 – 1954), Glen Innes News indexed by Christine Thomas from Issue 1, some issues of Profile; hundreds of thousands of cards with details of people – BDMs, Examiner references etc., schools, businesses, properties, sports, industries, cemeteries, early midwives and so on, as well as books, ledgers, documents, reminiscences, more than 60,000 photographs scanned to a database – photographs are so valuable in family and local history – just look at the great photograph above – worth a thousand words.
Computer records may need re-formatting but hard copies, unless attacked by silverfish, damp etc., should be reasonably safe.
What will our generation leave? Many newspapers documenting the minutiae of the life of communities have shut down.
In our so called ‘Paperless Society’ a password/pin on our phone locks up the photos never to be captioned or printed, emails and messages, diaries, addresses, contacts……
Documents on laptops and computers – password/pin protected. With recycling, upcycling and repurposing history is lost.
Online- *TROVE a veritable treasure trove of digital copies of thousands of newspapers, up to about 1954 – free, searchable and downloadable. Many others including Society of Australian Genealogists, Royal Australian Historical Society, Australian War Memorial, Ryerson Index, National and State libraries, National and State Archives, Cyndis List, Ancestry – but do be aware that some family trees here are not reliable.
Our historical society is delighted to have been offered a professional presentation by a Sydney genealogist to talk on Celtic History at Celtic Festival time in May– more details and the booking process will soon be available.
