On Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May, 10am to 5pm, you'll have your best chance ever to look up those elusive ancestors of yours!

Your chance comes at our annual "Showcase", in three buildings at the Observatory Hill end of Kent Street, in the historic "Rocks" area of Sydney. Our headquarters, Richmond Villa is #120, right next to the fire station.

Come and visit us, find a few relatives, maybe have a meal in one of the many restaurants nearby and wrap up a good day out by seeing what's been added to the area's tourist attractions lately!

But allow plenty of time to explore Showcase. This year we've got:

• a huge variety of databases & indexes - including these unpublished ones:
  • Uncollected Government Pardons - 4,000 people originally sentenced to Life or 14 years and who hadn't collected their pardons by 1850
  • Convicts' Wives and Families - 2,000 petitions by male convicts to have their families brought out
  • Female Orphan School, Parramatta - 3,000 children who passed through the school
  • AGCI - the Australasian Genealogical Computer Index - 500,000 new entries never before available!
  • NSW divorces - 1900-1902 and 1910-1920
  • Sydney Benevolent Asylum - 38,000 inmates from 1857-1868 and 1877-1888
  • County Clare 1901 Census - work in progress
  • Huguenot Quarto volumes 1-59 - volumes 41-59 not yet published
• hundreds of duplicate genealogical titles and second-hand books for sale at bargain prices
• lots of family history organisations, government departments, bookshops - and us!
• archives, government departments and our own genealogists to help you
• books, CD-ROMs, maps and computer software for sale
• family history computer programs being demonstrated
• advice on using the Internet for family history research
• a great deal on membership - 16 months for the usual 12 months subscription
• refreshments, lucky door prizes and much more!

For more detail visit our web site.

SAVE by buying tickets NOW
$9 (1 day - valid either day) or $13 (two days).
Buy during our opening hours by phone on (02) 9247 3953, or in person at 24 or 120 Kent Street Sydney. Or at any time on-line.

Or purchase at the door during Showcase - $13 (1 day) or $22 (two days).

Recent Accessions

Cornwall
We've just received a big run of indexes to the 1871 census in Cornwall - your chance to find those ancestors who seem to have strayed from the parish you expected them in!

Devon
We've also recently received a lot of early 19^th century baptism transcripts from Devon parish registers.

Montgomeryshire
Also new to our shelves is a wide selection of transcriptions of monumental inscriptions and parish registers from Montgomeryshire.

Details of these and other recent accessions will be available on the web site shortly, from www.sag.org.au/store.html.

Click here to access all our on-line catalogues and databases . . .

Primary Records Catalogue
The computerised section of this catalogue is on-line and has just been updated, adding about 15,000 new references, and bringing the number to about 305,000!

The structure of this database is not like our library - it grows like topsy as members and others donate material from their own research. So it's not organised by subject like our library - you can't browse the shelves hoping to find something relevant alongside something else you've found!

But we've got a good search engine which should find anything we have that matches any search word or phrase you enter. Then it's just a question of clicking on each "hit" and seeing whether the file name and the other items in that file confirm that the hit is relevant to your research.

Have you got your research interests on our web site?
If you've got them there already, and have a personal web site with some family history pages, we'd be glad to provide a link to them from your existing entry. Just let the webmaster know the address and we'll arrange it!

If you haven't checked our Members' Interests lately, or haven't added your own, now's the time to do it! Just visit www.sag.org.au/store.html and stop reinventing the wheel!

Unidentified family photos?

You can solve the mystery with Researching, Reading and Recording!

We are pleased to announce that one of our main speakers at our conference, Researching, Reading and Recording will be Lenore Frost, author of the ever useful guide, Dating Family Photographs. Lenore's session will focus on how to put names to the faces of those unknown photos - a source of great frustration to us all!

More details on the conference, which is being hosted by the SAG for the first time, are available on our web site at www.sag.org.au/new/conference.htm.

And remember.....you can register for an all inclusive conference package or just come along to one or both days of the conference. Either way, be sure not to miss out - bookings are flooding in!

Put the dates in your diary - 5-7 October for Researching, Reading and Recording, the annual conference of the NSW & ACT Association of Family History Societies.

Check out these spots on the web!

If you've ancestors or collateral relatives who went to the United States of America, you may find it worth visiting www.ellisisland.org. Ellis Island - the home of New York's Statue of Liberty - was the entry point for over 22 million passengers and crew between 1892 and 1924, all of them now indexed.

The site is new and heavily overloaded by USA visitors during American peak hours. However, a little persistence pays off and once you've logged in there's a good search engine. Passenger lists give name, ethnicity, residence, date of arrival, age at arrival, marital status, ship and port of departure. From there links are provided to the ship's manifest, the ship's history and photo, plus any annotations left by previous visitors to the site - a good way to find new cousins if you annotate an entry with your own contact details!

Our own web site has recently been upgraded with a new search engine. The previous one confined you to searching for a particular word/phrase and wouldn't accommodate differences of spelling or word order. Our new search page at www.sag.org.au/search.htm lets you search for "any word", "all words", "exact phrase" and "sounds like", which should make it much more useful!
Please note that, like the old one, the new search engine does NOT search our library or primary records catalogues, nor members' research interests - these databases have their own extensive search facilities at www.sag.org.au/store.html.

Did you have relatives who fought in the Boer War? Then you may find http://users.netconnect.com.au/~ianmac/boermain.html worth a visit. There you'll find a good number of links to particular contingents sent by the Australian colonies, together with links to the enabling acts of parliament, to accounts of particular actions, to listings and photos of various memorials and to various archival sources that can help you.

If you've got a great tip - a site that you get real value from and think would be worth sharing - let us know!