Lost in the Southern Tablelands Weekend Seminar

This year the Society will hold its second ever Lost In weekend in regional NSW - this time in the historic town of Goulburn, the centre of the County of Argyle and Australia's first inland city. The diverse programme will look at many aspects of family research and where applicable presentations will feature local examples to demonstrate resources. Topics include, using maps and plans, how records relating to occupations such as mining, pastoral and hotels might help us follow the lives of our settler ancestors; the hidden gems in solicitor's papers, settlements and local communities; the wealth of resources around the State in our regional State Archives; and some developments on the internet for Australian, Irish and International research.

Full program and details re accommodation etc. available here. Registration fee covers the conference and includes morning/afternoon teas and light lunch. Bookings essential by 28 October 2011. Cost: $115.00 - financial SAG members and Goulburn Historical Society & Family History Group members can attend for $95.00.

Visit to Kenmore Hospital

If you are attending the Lost In the Southern Tablelands Weekend seminar and will be in Goulburn on the Friday afternoon, we've arranged a tour of the Kenmore Hospital Museum's buildings and upper hospital grounds from 3.30-5.00pm.

This is a wonderful opportunity to visit a site which is now only very rarely open to visitors (you can read more about Kenmore Psychiatric Hospital history at Southern Tablelands History Matters and here.

A $5 donation to the Museum will be collected on the day and you'll need to meet at the Hospital site which is in Taralga Road. If you've already booked for the Lost In weekend we'll be contacting you shortly to see if you'd like to do the Kenmore Hospital tour as well; otherwise just indicate if you will be attending when you register for the Lost In weekend and we'll reserve a spot for you.

State Records NSW Open Day

To celebrate their 50th anniversary State Records NSW is throwing open its doors at the Western Sydney Records Centre at Kingswood ( 143 O’Connell Street ) from 10:00 am on Friday 28 October. The theme of the day is the Archives are alive – there will be talks, behind-the-scenes tours, hands-on activities, expert conservation advice, film screenings, and a free sausage sizzle! For more information go to their website at: http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/open-day. Here you can book into a tour, a talk and a workshop. Choose which sessions you'd like to attend and State Records will send you a confirmation email setting out your day's activities.

Society of Genealogists (London) Membership Offer

This month we have a special offer on membership of the Society of Genealogists in London available to our members. If you join the SoG before 31 October they will waive the GBP10.00 joining fee if you quote the promotional code SAG11.

This means you only pay the standard one year overseas subscription which is GBP27.00, and with the exchange rate working in our favour this makes it a very attractive offer. SoG has a number of 'member only' databases on their website and a wonderful library in London, so this is a particularly good deal if you are visiting the UK in the next twelve months.

You'll find further details and the application form on their website at www.sog.org.uk/membership.

Deceased Online

It's a great time to check out the DeceasedOnline database of UK burials and cremations!

On Saturday 22 October Pauline Kettle and Martyn Killion are running a presentation on Deceased Online, a new British website which is constantly adding cemetery and crematorium records to its databases. There are only a few places left - find out more here.

To coincide with this presentation, Deceased Online is offering SAG members a special 'BOGOF' (buy one get one free) offer on credits for use on their website from 10 - 30 October. This will effectively half the cost of doing searches on the site during this period and will give members a great chance to check it out. You'll find details of this special offer on the SAG home page here. Visit www.deceasedonline.com to find out more about the records they already have available.

Don't Forget - We've Got a New Online Shop!

We moved over to a new online shop a couple of months ago. So if you haven't used our shop for a while bear in mind that you will need to re-register by setting up a new user name and password - the one you used on the old SAG shop will no longer work. You will be prompted to do this the first time you get to the checkout - you don't need to do it before this. Please also be very careful when following a link from an old SAGe newsletter as this may still lead back to the old shop site. If you are looking at a yellow and green shop you are on the wrong site!

A chronological list of all activities is now available for online viewing and bookings here. You can also phone Monday to Saturday during office hours on 9247 3953 or call in during library hours Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday.

All activities are held at Richmond Villa, 120 Kent Street unless otherwise specified.

• Thursday 6 October (10.30am - 12.00pm) - State Records NSW - Intro for Family & Local Historians
  Held at the Sydney Records Centre, 2 Globe Street, The Rocks. Learn how to make the best use of ‘State Records’ online and reading room resources (including guides, finding aids, indexes and digital copies of the records) for family and local history research. Presenter: Christine Yeats. Bookings Essential. $15 ($20 non-members).
• Saturday 8 October (10.30am - 12.30pm) - Maps, Gazetteers & Directories online
  Understanding more about the locality or environment in which an ancestor lived or worked can be enormously beneficial to the family historian. This session will look at finding-aids and online resources from around the world to assist you or show you how. Presenter: Vicki Eldridge. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Saturday 8 October (1.30pm - 3.30pm) - Have you tried FamilyRelatives.com?
  Family Relatives is a relatively inexpensive UK subscription website set up in 2005. Although it doesn't carry manuscript material, it does have an extensive range of digitised transcribed parish registers, trade directories, also Medical and Clerical directories. Of particular use are the many Army and Navy lists. It's worth a look and Sylvia Murphy will show How & Why! Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Monday 10 October (10.00am - 11.00am) - Orientation Tour
  Members only. A one hour orientation tour of our library at 379 Kent Street - find out how the library is set out and what services we offer there. Bookings Essential. Free - but a gold coin donation to our Building Appeal on the day would be appreciated.
• Friday 14 October (10.00am - 1.00pm) - Arrivals in Aus & NZ - Library Hands on Workshop
  Held in the Library at 2/379 Kent St, Sydney. This is a hands on session for beginners who would like assistance on the various ways of locating arrivals for their ancestors in both Australia and the New Zealand. There will be a short presentation followed by a research session with SAG volunteers assisting members. Bookings Essential and limited to 14. $40 ($50 non-members).
• Saturday 15 October (10.30am - 12.30pm) - Ephemeral Treasures - Using postal stationery for FH
  Letters, diaries, bills, receipts, postcards and other "scraps of paper" are highly prized by family historians because such items have usually been created or handled in some way by an ancestor. Yet their real value as a portal to the past can easily be overlooked. Social historian Pieter Koster uses postal stationery to show you how to get more from your ephemera. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Saturday 15 October (1.30pm - 3.30pm) - Out of sight - the civic legacy of the convict era
  Drawing on her latest book, Australia's Birthstain, Babette Smith will explain how shame about our convict foundations distorted our history until the reality and strongly developed ethos of a flourishing convict society is neither remembered nor understood. Its people have been reduced to caricature. They were 'Out of Sight', taking with them knowledge of our civic heritage from the transportation era. It was the investigations by hundreds of family historians that recovered our lost memory. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Thursday 20 October (1.30pm - 3.30pm) - The Irish Online - Found, but what does it mean?
  This session will cover the online indexes and databases provided by National Archives of Ireland (NAI) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Records covered in detail will be: 1901 and 1911 censuses for all 32 counties; The 1926 Census of the Republic (26 Counties) and Northern Ireland (6 counties) - Are they available, and when will we see them?; Ulster Covenant covering nearly 500,000 men and women in 1912; Freeholders Records; Street Directories; Will Calendars & Digitised Wills 1858 to 1900 and beyond; Name Search; and PRONI on Flickr (1300 wedding photos 1900-1952 in counties Armagh, Down and Belfast City) free online. Presenter: Terry Eakin. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Saturday 22 October (10.30am - 12.30pm) - Deceased Online
  Join us as we explore one of the most exciting websites to come out of the UK in recent times, Deceased Online. This ever expanding website opens up burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland - a wonderful new resource. Presenters: Martyn Killion and Pauline Kettle. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).
• Wednesday 26 October (8.00pm - 9.00pm AEST) - Webinar - English Marriage Records
  So, you're tracing your English ancestors and have come up against a brickwall - you can't find a couple's marriage. This session will explain how to solve this problem - showing you the sources and strategies to use to get the couple down the aisle. Learn about Lord Hardwicke and why he is every family historian's hero when it comes to tracing marriages. A must whether you're researching in the 1700s or 1900s. Presenter: Martyn Killion. Bookings essential and limited to SAG members only. Price $10.00.
• Thursday 27 October (10.30am - 12.30pm) - Getting Started on Your Family History - Members Only
  Are you wondering how to get started, or what questions to ask? This opportunity is especially for new members with no family history research experience. Learn the fundamentals to start you on the road, and where to find and ask for help. Members Only. Special Price of $10.00. Bookings Essential.
• Saturday 29 October (10.30am - 12.30pm) - Online Resources at the City of Sydney Archives
  The City of Sydney Archives has a growing number of catalogues of digitized records available online, that can help you with family and local history. If your ancestors lived in the City of Sydney local government area at any time from 1842 onwards, this is a resource worth investigating. Presenter: Mark Stevens, City of Sydney Archivist. Bookings Essential. $20 ($25 non-members).

National Archives (UK) - Documents Online

While many researchers with British ancestry will be familiar with the UK National Archives Documents Online facility, there has been a recent addition to the site which may be of interest to readers.

The Archives have added a number of series of digital microfilms which you can search and download. Unlike other records on Documents Online, Digital Microfilms are delivered as large pdf files, each containing a whole piece of a record. Each PDF can be up to 800 pages long and are around 400MB in size. The records are not indexed and need to be downloaded and scrolled through, similar to a regular microfilm.

These documents are currently free to download and there is a specific search facility for the records. Series' available include Admiralty Records (eg ADM10, ADM13), Royal Naval Officers' and Seamen's Service Records (ADM188 and ADM196), Air Force Records (AIR54, AIR78), Cabinet Office records, Passport Registers Indexes of Names 1863-1873 (FO611), Registers of convicts in hulks 1847-1849 (HO9), Home Office records relating to settlers and convicts (HO10, HO11), and many more.