Day 4 of 30 days x 30 minutes of Family History

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[School children] [picture] / European & Australian Photographic Company 
[ca. 1855 -ca .1875] John Etkins collection State Library of Victoria


Janine Adams from Organize Your Family History challenges genealogists to do this regularly, and boy do I need this! 

Basically - to quote Janine - 

you commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research/organizing/whatever for 30 days in a row (i.e. the month of November). The “rules” of this challenge are very fluid. For example, you could decide that, for you, 30 minutes daily translates into 15 hours of activity over the course of the month. 

I am in the process of downloading photos taken on my mobile phone at the State Library of Victoria a couple of weeks ago while doing some family history research into my Ellis ancestors.  George and Isabella Ellis taught at country schools in Victoria, Australia from 1868-1881.

Yesterday I spent my 30 minutes reading about the history of the development of education in Victoria. Really interesting stuff.

Today I hope to save more images and print them out to learn more.  It's a bit of a tedious process.  I have to download the images and then edit them - cropping them and then print them out.  I don't know about you but I cannot read and absorb stuff from the screen.  

I took 126 photos and I have digitised and printed twenty-nine pages so I'm about a quarter of the way through.  This morning it took me 30 minutes to start this blog post and print out six images. Crikey! At this rate it will take me another two to three weeks to digitise the rest. Gah! This is where a family historian's time goes.

Most of what I am printing out is from a history of educaiton in Victoria called Vision and Realisation published for the centenary of the establishment of education in Victoria.. The link to the catalogue record is here.

The history documents all sorts of data of interest to family historians e.g. curriculum, teachers salaries, inspectors, politics and funding. I learnt a new word in my reading last night which I hadn't heard of before - mensuration - do you know what that means? It's in relation to mathematics apparently. I'm googling it now.  It means measurement - 

  • the part of geometry concerned with ascertaining lengths, areas, and volumes.

Who knew? Not me - but maths was never my strong point.

What have you been up to family history wise? Have you learned any new words? Did you enjoy school? Who were your favourite teachers and why? 


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