Week 49 (Dec. 3-9) Written

OK, it's soapbox time again!

I have blogged several times over the past few years about the importance of family historians recording their own significant events for inclusion in their family history, to be handed down to future generations.

In 2020 the world experienced a historic global pandemic, with many of us moving in and out of lockdowns and various restrictions on our daily lives as the world struggled to limit the spread and impact of Covid-19.  Like many I was stood down from my job, saw businesses close and contacts restricted, and in the small community where I live, unforgettably saw armed police restricting travel across the state border.  I spent my 50th birthday in lockdown, isolated at home.

While many of my memories of the pandemic restrictions, which flowed on into 2021, are stressful, there were also many positives.  So many people came together to keep each other going.  Online shopping boomed and the concept of 'click and collect' became (and remains) common.  In the genealogical community meetings and conferences went online and access to many digitised records were relaxed to make research from home easier.  The idea of working from home became much more common in many industries.  During this time I did my best to record my experiences and feelings, both positive and negative.

Hard on the heels of 2 years of Covid lockdowns, 2022 saw my home area suffer the worst floods in living memory.  While my home itself was not impacted, many friends saw their homes flood, roads and highways were cut, access to services cut, shops closed and like many I came under an evacuation order.  

We watched the Murray River flood parkland, the water creeping closer and closer, flooding homes and breeching levies like the one behind the library where I work - see the photo below.  As the water rose the community came together to frantically sandbag homes and businesses, another wonderful show of community spirit in the face of a crisis.

These are memories that need to be recorded as part of our family history.  We have all lived through a global pandemic and lived through or witnessed a number of historic events in recent years.  Recording our memories of such major events should be a part of our family history records, for the generations that come after us.

Then there are the smaller events of family significance.  A birthday, anniversary, funeral, graduation, family reunion and so on.  These need to be recorded and added to your family story.

So please, become your own storyteller and get record your memories.  Get it written.

Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• Common last names How to trace elusive ancestors
• The war detectives Meet the researchers identifying the remains of the fallen
• DNA test buyer's guide Our expert's verdict
• Christmas in the workhouse How our ancestors celebrated
• Orphanages and children's homes Find records online
• Around Britain Merseyside
• And more..... 

 

Website Wednesday - Meyer's Gazetteer

Meyer's is arguably the most important of all German gazetteers. The goal of the Meyer’s compilers was to list every place name in the German Empire (1871-1918). It gives the location, i.e. the state and other jurisdictions, where the civil registry office was and parishes if that town had them. It also gives lots of other information about each place. The only drawback to Meyer’s is that if a town did not have a parish, it does not tell where the parish was, making reference to other works necessary.

Searching Meyer's

Type the name of your place in the search box.

• You can use a wildcard * (an asterisk) in your search. For example, ‘*gheim’ will return ‘Balgheim, Bergheim, Bietigheim, Billigheim’ and anything else that ends in ‘gheim’.
• You can type only the beginning of a name and it will return all places that begin with those letters. For example, ‘Neu’ will return ‘Neu Abbau, Neu Abschwangen, Neuacker, Neuafrika’ and many others.
• You do not need to include umlauts; ‘Munchen’ and ‘München’ will return ‘München.’ You can type umlauts if you wish, but you should not expand umlauts, e.g. ‘ü’ as ‘ue’, as that will return no hits.

A list of places with that name will appear—all those places of the same name, but with other jurisdictions which will help you identify your town.

• You can ‘Filter results by region’ with the drop-down menu. The regions are the various states/provinces of the Second German Empire (1871-1918). Filtering will help you determine the correct town by narrowing the number of returns you get.

Choose the town for which you want more information. This takes you to the ‘Entry’ page.

• You will see the name of your town and a menu that includes the following items: Entry, Map, Ecclesiastical, Related, E-mail, and Feedback.  You can click on each for more information.
• You will see the entry as it appears in Meyer’s, the extraction of the entry, the explanation of the extraction, and a map. The extractions include and are primarily limited to jurisdictions and parish information. The explanations are helpful for those who do not speak German or are not familiar with the old jurisdictions. For example, you will learn what Kreis, Bezirkskommando, and Landgericht mean.
• By clicking on ‘View entry on PDF of the original page,’ you can see the entire page on which the entry appears.
• Click on ‘Show previous and next entry’ to see the previous and following entries. If there was a correction in the Meyer’s addendum, this will also be indicated.

Family Tree UK Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• Findmypast’s Pals Campaign
• Blenheim Palace develops pioneering digital twin
• 41,356 census substitute records from Fermanagh, Wexford, Cork, Dublin & Kerry now online
• Call for presentations: Academic Genealogy Conference, June 2026
• Locate shipping company ephemera via online catalogue
• Prize-winning educators at The National Archives
• Barley purchase orders, 1825-1834 
• New look Family Chartmasters’ website 
• DNA Club news 
• A Family History Manual: ‘An excellent example of sharing knowledge’
• Tracing Royal Marine ancestors at sea and at home
• Desolate and destitute
• Speeding up family history with AI for genealogy safely & strategically
• How does Family History fit into history?
• And more... 

Week 48 (Nov. 26-Dec. 2) Family Recipe

I have commented before on the family recipe book, primarily created by my sister.  One of the more fun jobs while we were cleaning out the family home was emptying out Mum's recipe drawer.  While the drawer contained a few proper cooking books, and some complete magazines, it was primarily a combination of loose snippets torn or photocopied from old magazines and books, and hand-written recipes from who-knows-where.  Many had notes written on them - things like substitutions of ingredients and notes on who particularly liked the dish.  There were also a number of recipes written out by others and given to Mum - by several different friends and relatives, judging by the assorted handwriting.  She even had a little A5 folder with hand-written favourites stored inside.

Included in that recipe drawer were the details of so many dishes we remembered from our childhoods - some with fondness and some with a shudder!  My sister and I spent an entire afternoon sorting through these scraps of paper, reading them out to each other and sharing our memories.  Yes, there really WAS a recipe for Dixon Street Chicken!  Do you remember Mum's spaghetti and mince casserole?  So many family recipes are now recorded in our family recipe book, complete with notes and comments.

Food, cooking and mealtimes are such an important part of our families, and so often discounted.  What was your favourite home-cooked meal as a child?  Do you have the recipe, and do you ever cook it for yourself as an adult??  Do you remember any cooking disasters - either your own or that of another family member?  Having them written down with all our memories and stories attached to each recipe is something I treasure, and such a simple thing to create.  If you a looking for a Family History project, maybe a family recipe book is something to consider.

Week 47 (Nov. 19-25) The Name's the Same

Every family has their popular names - names that appear generation after generation regardless of fashion.  There were also fads among names - copying that of the current Monarch and their family, for example, as well as using a traditional name common amongst ancestors.

Naming patterns were also frequent in many families, although they are by no means a reliable way of predicting the names of children.  Traditionally, the first son would be named for the paternal grandfather, the second son for the maternal grandfather and the third son for the father.  For females, the first daughter would be named for the maternal grandmother, the second daughter for the paternal grandmother and the third daughter for the mother.  Providing, of course, these names were not the same.  

In the 1700s the top five names for each gender were :
Boys - John, William, Thomas, Richard and James
Girls - Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah and Jane

In the 1800s the top five names for each gender were :
Boys - John, William, James, George and Charles
Girls - Mary, Anna, Emma, Elizabeth and Margaret

There was also the tendency, unusual as it may seem to us today, of reusing the name of a child who had died.  In the 1700's and 1800's this occurs frequently in my family tree, with the name of a child who has died in infancy being reused for the next child of the same gender born to the family.  

This can make research quite tricky, especially when a popular name has been used by several branches of a family.  In my Irish Mulholland family, for example, four brothers all named their first son James, after their father.  One child died at 2 days old and the name was reused 18 months later.  This meant there were five children named James Mulholland, born within six years and a few miles of each other.  Sorting out which records belong with which child is quite a challenge.

Then two of them married women named Mary.

Week 46 (Nov. 12-18) Wartime

Russell Nicholas Clark, WW2

This week the focus is 'Wartime' which seems fitting as we have just commemorated Remembrance Day.  As I have commented previously my family was extremely lucky, in both world wars and other conflicts, to have most of those who served not only come home, but come home fairly unscathed.  Once second cousin was killed in France in World War 1 ; one uncle died in the Merchant Navy in World War 2.  All the other relatives who served – my father, uncles and great-uncles and more recently several cousins - returned safely to their loved ones.  While they all had to live with the memories of the conflicts, they were mostly uninjured by their experiences and able to rebuild their civilian lives.  

So many others were not so fortunate.  Numerous Australian families endured the loss of loved ones on foreign soil, the arrival of the dreaded telegram, or the return of family members forever scarred by their service.  So many who returned faced a lifetime of ruined health or years of recovery and rehabilitation, and ongoing trauma from their wartime experiences.  My family has been lucky indeed.

 

Ernest Green, WW2 postcard from Egypt

Through the National Archives of Australia I have downloaded several family military records -  the NAA has indexed and digitised Boer War and World War 1 and 2 dossiers, which you can search and view online for free.  Other websites include Discovering Anzacs which allows you to add your stories and images, and the Australian War Memorial, which has databases like the WW1 Embarkation Rolls and WW1 Red Cross files.  Researching  newspaper reports in Trove has also been a gold mine, with reports of enlistments, farewells, news from the front, even letters home published in local papers.