The 2nd edition of my Land Research for Family Historians in Australia and New Zealand is now available for pre-order, printed or e-book. The general principles and types of records have not changed, but where to find them and the names of the (usually) government repositories have changed in the ten years since the 1st edition. The book covers land records such as grants, Torrens titles, maps and plans, in all the states and territories of Australia, and New Zealand. The photo on the cover is a part of the property of my great-great-grandfather Richard Eason near Blayney, NSW. The house where ..read more

Griffith’s Valuation The Griffith’s Valuation of Ireland was a systematic survey of all of Ireland. It was made to determine how much money the UK government could expect from collecting rates and so it was designed to make a record of all the properties in Ireland. The results were progressively printed and published by county from 1847 to 1864, and these are what you see when you search Ancestry or AskAboutIreland. Here’s an example from County Tyrone: Griffith’s Valuation of Ballymackilroy townland showing Robert Ewing’s land Here we can see my ancestor (perhaps, it’s not easy to be sure ..read more

Otha’s letter to his brother Percy Otha Everleigh Bassett was killed in action in France on 3 July 1916. He had written home a couple of weeks before, telling his family about life on the battle front and comparing what he saw of the countryside with his experience as a farmer back in Condobolin in western New South Wales. That letter was published in the local newspaper, and was transcribed last year, on the 100th anniversary of his death. The words ‘killed in action’ are a very broad description, and must have been heartbreaking for the family back home, trying to imagine what ha ..read more

Today (3 July 2016) marks 100 years since the death in France of Otha Everleigh Bassett, Keith’s great-uncle. Otha was a country lad, a share farmer from Condobolin in the very centre of New South Wales; he was 5 feet 11 inches tall with a dark complexion, grey eyes and black hair. When he enlisted in Condobolin on 11 May 1915 he was 24 years and 7 months, and gave his father Alfred Bassett as his next of kin. He was shipped out of Sydney on the Orsova on 14 July 1915, and ‘taken on strength’ on 5 September 1915, joining a composite company attached to the 9th Battalion in Gallipoli ..read more

Name indexes are now available online for free from NSW Land and Property Information (LPI). The indexes available are: Grants Index 1792-1862 Torrens Title Purchasers Index 1863-1971 Old System Vendors Index 1825-1986 Old System Purchasers Index 1 July 1896-1985 Go to the Historical Land Records Viewer (HLRV) at images.maps.nsw.gov.au. You will have to accept the terms and conditions before you will be allowed in. Click on Search by Attribute. The drop-down list ‘Search By’ will become available: Select Surname Initial and type in a search criteria: For the Grants Index and the ..read more

This post was originally published on 22 December 2008 on my Genealogy in NSW Blog site. I had since created a new blog – Fiji Genealogy –  with much more information about Fiji research, but that site is broken and I haven’t worked out how to fix it. I have recently spent a week in Fiji researching my father’s family. My father is a part-European Fijian whose European ancestors arrived in Fiji in the early to mid-1800’s. Since civil registration began only in the 1870s with the Cession of Fiji to Great Britain there are very few records from before this time to show w ..read more

Some knowledge of the gold rushes in the nineteenth century can help us understand aspects of our families’ history that we’d been missing. It is difficult for us now to imagine the enormous pull that a gold rush had on people, the chance that a fortune could be made so quickly, and so we may not consider that our ancestors took part. This knowledge would have helped me enormously when I was first researching my Stewart family. The Stewart family My grandmother was very proud of her father, William Stewart, an architect and inventor who lived in Albury, New South Wales, for most of his life. H ..read more

Many libraries and universities in Australia and elsewhere hold the collections of missionaries, researchers and other travellers to the Pacific Islands. This photograph of a gathering in Lambasa was taken by Archdeacon A.N. Williamson of the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle during his travels to Fiji some time between 1900 and 1930. He took many other photographs, some depicting individuals, such as this one: Archdeacon Williamson’s collection is held by the University of Newcastle and has been shared on Flickr and on Trove. Have a look through them and see if there are any people or plac ..read more

It is amazing how much information can be gained from newspaper family notices, and in particular funeral notices. Here is an example from Trove in the Sydney Morning Herald of Tuesday 27 November 1900, on page 10:   I had been searching for the death of one Mary Nugent. What I can learn about this family from these three notices is that this Mary Nugent was the wife of Mr P. Nugent (perhaps Patrick?). They lived at 57 Balmain Road, Leichhardt, and their (surviving) children were James, Francis, Alfred, William and George. They also had a daughter, Mary, who married William Beardmor ..read more

I’ve recently started using Instagram, after an absence of a couple of years. It’s fun! Any photo you take looks better on Instagram – it’s small, so it doesn’t matter if it’s not in focus it’s square, so you are forced to crop the photo to focus on what’s important you can quickly and easily make the colours brighter you can change the colours altogether, so it looks like art or an old photograph I find them Instagram photos very useful for blog posts. Here’s a post I just wrote about technology and the year ahead. When I went looking in my collection for the perfect illustration I fou ..read more