As I'm on holidays I have taken out a week's subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald Archives. These archives cover from 1st January 1955 until 2nd February 1995. I have been using them to look up death and funeral notices to add names to more recent branches of my families. I use the Ryerson Index and electoral rolls on Ancestry in conjunction with the SMH Archives.
The archives are relatively easy to search. When you hover over a page, a section turns yellow and that section is enlarged when you click on it. You can print or save the page as a pdf if you wish or add it to My Collection on the website.
Each time I find a death on the Ryerson Index I add it to a spreadsheet with the details from the index and the main family name it pertains to. I have a separate page for each newspaper. After I find the information from the newspaper I delete the line from the spreadsheet. Usually I conduct this research at Dixson Library at the University of New England in Armidale, which has microfilms of most of the newspapers I'm interested in. However, as my list is extremely long, I'm pleased to be able to make significant inroads this week without leaving home.
I've already got my money's worth. A few queries have been proved correct and others have been disproved. I've even discovered that I lived at a university college with one of my third cousins in the early 80s.
The archives are relatively easy to search. When you hover over a page, a section turns yellow and that section is enlarged when you click on it. You can print or save the page as a pdf if you wish or add it to My Collection on the website.
Each time I find a death on the Ryerson Index I add it to a spreadsheet with the details from the index and the main family name it pertains to. I have a separate page for each newspaper. After I find the information from the newspaper I delete the line from the spreadsheet. Usually I conduct this research at Dixson Library at the University of New England in Armidale, which has microfilms of most of the newspapers I'm interested in. However, as my list is extremely long, I'm pleased to be able to make significant inroads this week without leaving home.
I've already got my money's worth. A few queries have been proved correct and others have been disproved. I've even discovered that I lived at a university college with one of my third cousins in the early 80s.
Dear Sharon
ReplyDeleteThanks for this tip and the introduction to your great blog. I'm also participating in the Year of Reading.
I like your sidebar of surnames/places - I may have to steal that idea for my own blog - imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, yes?
I think I stole the idea from someone too.
ReplyDelete