Family Tree Frog

How many of us still have encyclopedias at home?  How many times have you used them lately? There are all sorts of references available online now through your local library.  You don't need that encyclopedia taking up all that shelf space.  If you go online you will find all sorts of things there.  Membership of Moreton Bay Region Library Service gives you access to Brittanica Library and lots of databases through SLQ.  Do you want to see if that awful vase Aunt Dot left you is worth anything?  Check out Carter's Price Guide for Antiques.  See what's on offer here or check out your own local library. Don't know whether to buy a book or not?  Plenty of family history magazines have book reviews as do family history blogs or social media sites for readers such as Goodreads.  Have you read a good book lately?  Share it with us so we can all benefit. Rights  Not sure where you stand with regards to using those old photos......

I have spoken before about citations and mentioned a couple of books to help you with this in your work.  If you wish to quote somebody else's work in your own you will need a tool to keep track of all your quotations. There are some tools which are freely available in case you don't wish to invest in citation software.  The Moreton Bay Region Library service (and I am sure many others) provides a link on its website to citation, bibliography and reference builders here.  Just scroll to the bottom of the page to find them or you can see them on the links below: Bibme Citation builder Harvard Style Reference Generator Reference Machine Give me the letter Q and I am always going to promote the QFHS - my family history society.   Did you know that you can search the Society's library catalogue online? If you ever visit the library in person you will need to understand its cataloguing system which is borrowed from the one designed for SAG.  The ...

You could say that I have covered Periodicals already under J for journals. However, while I've been compiling these posts, I have also been walking the dog every morning and listening to some Podcasts. What podcasts do I listen to?  Anything and everything really but you might be interested in the following genealogy podcasts.... Genealogy Guys Genies Down Under Genealogy Gems The National Archives Anyways, I was listening to the Genealogy Guys and I kept hearing them mention the PERSI Index on Find My Past.  It's amazing what you don't know about tools that you use on a regular basis.  So I will mention it now for what it is worth.  You can access the PERSI index on Find My Past!!!  You can search it here.  You can read about what it is here on the lovely Family Search wiki. If you have invested in resources for your genealogy library be they books, CDs, certificates...whatever you are probably interested in Preserving them or at le...

Oh my goodness.  Here we are...the difficult bit.  No, not really. You want to arrange your collection so that it looks more professional and things are easier to find.  It's much easier to do so than it used to be with an online service like Librarything.  First of all decide how are you going to organize your library. Dewey Decimal? Library of Congress? Librarything can sort your books for you according to LCC or Dewey. You can also tag your books in Librarything according to whatever description you want to give them.  You can give them lots of tags, not just one. If you wanted to arrange your books as per the Society of Australian Genealogists or QFHS classification scheme then that might take a bit more time.  You would need to add the call number as a separate field of information but would then still be able to sort it by that column once you had exported it as an XML file. Some people have left comments on this blog recommendin...

Libraries aren't just about books, librarians are fond of saying.  I remember being shocked when I first saw my children's school library and it was full of computers.  It wasn't even called a library - it was called a Resource Centre.  But it was run by a fantastic librarian with an unpronouncable name and boy did my kids learn about technology. By Grade 3 they were creating PowerPoint presentations.  I was amazed.  This was obviously well before I was a librarian.  I was a library lover but I didn't know much about what went into libraries or how access to information was managed.   By now you're probably beginning to appreciate that you won't be able to have everything you want in your own personal genealogy library (nor would you want to)....there just isn't enough room.  But it is possible to gain access to the vast resources of other libraries to complement your own collection. So I have highlighted the National Library of Austral...

I'm probably going a bit overboard here but heck...it's my blog, I can do what I like yes? So first up some demystification of some library terminology. Microform This term covers microfiche and microfilm .   I'm always amazed when people don't know what microfiche is.  But then I am getting on a bit and technology has raced ahead so why am I surprised?   Microfiche look a bit like transparent bits of blue pastic with tiny tiny writing on them.  They are about 4 x 6 inches and often come in nice paper pockets to protect them.   They look like this image from Frederic Bisson on Flicker Liseuse de microfiches Micron 355 Here are the readers at QFHS - my family history society. It's a great way of getting a lot of information into a small space. To read the microfiche you pop them in a microfiche reader which - wait for it - has a magnifying lens so that you can enlarge the images (often indexes in family history) to read them. ...

Today I'm taking a quick break from the #AtoZChallenge to participate in good old Sepia Saturday.  Yes I know it's Sunday here in Orstralia but in some parts of the world, it is still Saturday so....as soon as I saw this picture I knew which one from my collection I wanted to use.  Here it is... Flat at Summer Hill in Nowranie Street It's a bit of a crappy old dirty picture isn't it?  But there's some writing on the back which I think must be my mother's writing....except for the bit in darker ink down the bottom which is mine. Transcription: This ain't no master-piece but its not bad, considering, is it?  I mean, I didn't have the proper equipment. I vos very surprised and pleased.  Doesn't the chair look good?  Looks like a ????  I had it on about 20 books to get the height.  Dad would have corpsed. And then my words are Flat at Summer Hill (Arthur Mee's).  I think my words were written maybe 20 years ago after my ...