There is a wealth of seminars and other educational opportunities concerning Ireland and the Irish in the next few months. They are not all in Sydney so be prepared for some travel.

From There to Here - Exploring 19th Century Irish migration to Australia

Celtic Club 316-320 Queen Street Melbourne     Saturday 13th September 9:30am to 4pm

This seminar is being hosted by Genealogical Society of Victoria Irish Interest Group. Facilitator is Dr Val Noone and the speakers are:

• Dr Richard Reid - Why They Came (Keynote address)
• Dr Keith Pescod - 19th Century migration hostels - care or control?
• Dr Richard Reid - The Irish in Australia
• Dr Pauline Rule - Irish Women in 19th Century Colonial Victoria
• Dr Charles Fahey - The Irish in Northern and Central Victoria

This is a rare opportunity to hear such learned speakers covering a single topic of Irish relevance in such depth. Cost is $45 including lunch and morning and afternoon tea. Bookings through the Genealogical Society of Victoria on (03) 9662 4455.

Far From Famine - a gathering of the descendants of Irish Famine orphans 1848-1850

St Clement’s Monastery, Galong, NSW           Thursday 2nd to Tuesday 7th October

St Clement’s Monastery is host to Shamrock in the Bush every year. This special gathering is to be held in honour of the 4114 female orphans sent to the Australian colonies from Irish workhouses between 1848 and 1850 during the Great Famine, although you don’t need to be descended from one of these orphans to attend.

Keynote speaker will be Irish archaeologist and historian Michael Gibbons. The long list of speakers will include Richard Reid, Cheryl Mongan, Perry McIntyre, Cora Num, Brad Manera, Jeff Brownrigg, and many others on a range of topics related to Irish and Australian history and the immigration of the Irish to Sydney, Moreton Bay, Victoria and South Australia.

Workshops and research assistance will be available from Cora Num and other experienced researchers. Irish Australian music and culture will be on display, with entertainment provided in the evenings. A ecumenical thanksgiving service and commemorative tree-planting have also been organised.

This is a marvellous opportunity to immerse yourself in the history and culture of this period in Australia’s history. The price includes accommodation, all meals, lectures and entertainment, including the official dinner in Galong House on the Saturday night. The price varies according to the accommodation chosen from $570 to $640 for 5 nights with a discount offered for payment before 30th August.

Full details of the programme and further information can be found at the website or by emailing the organisers at famine@shamrockinthebush.org.au.

Convicts! - a day of seminars at the Society of Australian Genealogists

Richmond Villa, 120 Kent Street, Sydney Saturday 25th October

Not strictly about the Irish, to be sure, but so many of the 140,000 or so convicts brought to this country were Irish that I thought this day warranted inclusion. Topics include:

• Getting started with convict research
• The administration of government-employed convicts
• Beyond the basics - finding out more about your convict
• Convicts/transportees and those colonial convictions in the UK and Ireland

A collection of convict items will be on display. Morning and afternoon tea are included in the price of $50 for members of the Society and $60 for non-members.

Irish Day - a day of seminars at the Society of Australian Genealogists

Venue to be confirmed Saturday 29th November

This seminar day is still in the planning stages but promises to be another excellent opportunity for Irish researchers in Sydney. Organised by Perry McIntyre. More details will become available at the Society of Australian Genealogists in the next few weeks.

Tour of Ireland May 2009 with the Society of Australian Genealogists

A regular feature on the calendar of the Society of Australian Genealogists is a genealogical tour of Ireland hosted by Perry McIntyre and Richard Reid. These tours are very popular and focus on repositories of interest to researchers. The exact itinerary can be tailored to the interests of participants.

I hope to see you at one or more of these events - please say hello!

If you know of any other Irish seminars or events please let me know and I will include them here.

The first issue of the Sydney Gazette (image courtesy of the National Library of Australia)

The Australian Newspapers project coordinated by the National Library of Australia in conjunction with Australian State and Territory libraries was initiated to digitise early out-of-copyright newspapers. To complement this process an online service was planned to provide access to these images free of charge.

At least one newspaper was chosen for each state, including the earliest one for each state. New South Wales newspapers selected are:

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1803-1842

The Sydney Herald 1831-1842 (became The Sydney Morning Herald in 1842)

The Sydney Morning Herald 1842-1954

The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser 1843-1893

Digitising began in July 2007. Scanning has been been completed for these newspapers and the process of putting them online has begun. The Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation has donated $1 million to enable the digitisation of the Sydney Morning Herald to 1954.

Last month a beta version of the service was released. For New South Wales the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser is available from the first issue in March 1803 up to the end of 1815 and the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser for the 1840s, early 1850s and early 1880s. This represents a total of nearly 13,000 pages, or roughly 5% of the total. Click here to see the latest statistics.

The website is terrific. It shows you the whole page and shows a transcript of each article on the side. You can enlarge each article individually and turn the whole page into a PDF file or image to be downloaded. A warning - the transcripts have been created using OCR, or Optical Character Recognition. The quality of the printing is highly variable and quite often the characters are mistaken by this automated process and so you see things like “V oTi.cK” instead of “Notice”. We can see by looking at the text that it is “Notice” but computers are not that smart yet.

Another thing to watch out for is the old use of the letter “f” instead of “s” so the word might say “reforted” instead of “resorted”.

There is advanced searching capability which is necessarily dependent on the OCR.

You can add tags and comments to articles, and you can correct the text that was generated automatically. If every one does this when they find an article it will be a great website very quickly, and much easier to search.

If you sign in you can add your own private comments and tags to articles. This is very useful for your own research - you can add tags for the name of your ancestor and the type of article.

The National Library and everyone involved are to be congratulated for getting this project off to such a great start.

Family Tree Magazine, an American genealogy magazine, has published their latest list of 101 Best Genealogy Websites for 2008.

What has this got to do with an Australian, you might ask. I admit that the majority of American websites have little relevance to us here in Australia unless we have ancestors from the US but if you think about it, Americans have similar problems to us. Most Americans’ ancestors came from somewhere else, as ours did.

Once they get far enough back up their family tree they need to know about English and Irish and Scottish and European research just as we do. The US and Canada had large waves of immigration in the same periods as Australia; theirs just started earlier than ours.

So what is in the list of 101 best websites? This year they’ve broken them down into categories so their readers, and browsers like us, can pick and choose according to relevance.

Best for Beginning Researchers This is a category to pick and choose from. Cyndi’s List, WorldCat and FamilySearch have universal relevance, but the US Library of Congress may not.

Best for Web Researchers I was a bit confused by this category - surely they are all good for web researchers. They appear to be sites that you can spend a lot of time in, “in your pajamas”. Many of them, such as Ancestry and WorldVitalRecords, have Australian content as well as British and European. Others are places to link with other researchers and share information, such as WeRelate and Shared Tree.

Best for Military Researchers is purely for American military history, so if you are interested in that I will leave you to check it out on your own.

Best for US Researchers is similarly restricted to American research, as is Best for African-American Research.

Best for Canadian Research may be useful if your ancestors siblings went to Canada instead of coming here, as one of mine did. Others changed their minds about Canada and came here. It’s daunting to realise that you suddenly have to learn about a whole new country and its records and knowing that a good place to start is the Canadian Genealogy Centre, part of Library and Archives Canada.

Best for Immigration Research is best for immigration into America, although The Ships List has Australian and New Zealand lists as well.

Best for British Isles Research has a good list of essential sites, although I’m not so sure about Burke’s Peerage Online. GENUKI is an essential first stop and FreeBMD should be on everyone’s list of favourite sites with English or Welsh ancestry. Scotland and Ireland are not left out, with ScotlandsPeople and Ireland’s History in Maps.

Personally I think this list could have been longer, or broken into smaller categories. What are your suggestions?

Best for Continental Researchers is similarly brief with just seven sites for the whole continent.

Best for Jewish Research is possibly a neglected area in Australia. Less so in the States where Avotaynu is probably the best known Jewish research site.

Best for Genetic Researchers is another universal category. GeneTree is a social networking site that uses mitochondrial DNA test results (from the female line).

I haven’t listed all 101 sites for obvious reasons - you can go there and look around to your heart’s content. An Australian-made list would obviously be different, and every compiler would have their own version.

What are your favourite sites?