Webinar recordings and Learning videos

Well good afternoon and welcome to the webinar. I'm Andrew Sergeant and I’ve

been a reference librarian here at the NLA since 2000. By the way the image you’re

looking at is of Andy Cunningham and his sisters taken around 1920 probably at the family’s

property, Lanyon. Canberra locals will know the place well.Now the aim of today’s session

will be to show you how using our collections of local and social history in a range of

formats can help paint a richer picture of the lives of your ancestors to fill out the

basic details of dates and places that you may already have from your genealogical research.

Maybe it’ll help you to understand things like why they moved or why they changed jobs

and how they lived. Now there’s a fair bit to cover so I’ll get straight into it. Don’t

forget that you can submit questions to Heather and me during the course of the webinar and

we’ll try to cover at least some of them at the end.Now this isn’t going to be a

history lesson but I thought I’d give you this brief timeline of the history of Canberra

to get things going. As I mentioned a minute ago knowing what happened and when in the

place where your ancestors lived can be really helpful as you try to add flesh to the bare

bones of birth, death and marriage records in your family that you might already have.

Your ancestors may well have been involved in some of these events in some way which

will give you further avenues of investigation. A quick example might be the opening up of

the country to railways where your ancestors like some of mine were railway workers. So

it could be a worthwhile exercise for you to put together your own timeline of the places

you’re investigating even if they’re not very detailed, such as this one. So you can

see this one for Canberra starts with the evidence of indigenous Australian habitation

in this region going back to at least 25,000 years ago found in the Tidbinbilla Nature

Reserve. Several different tribal groups lived around the region, namely the Ngunnawal, Ngambri

and Walgaloo peoples. Now for those interested in indigenous genealogy I’ll show you where

to find a guide shortly that will be a good starting point. So 1820 we have the first

European explorers led by Charles Throsby in several journeys from what’s now Lake

George reaching Molonglo and Murrumbidgee Rivers. In 1824 the first European to actually

purchase land here was Joshua John Moore. He never actually lived here but established

a farm named Canberry. It took him what’s now most of Civic, the ANU and Acton Peninsula.

In the 1830s further farms were established, Palmerville, Pialligo, Yarralumla, Duntroon,

Oaks Estate, Tuggeranong, Lanyon. You can see how some of these names are from long

before the actual capital city of Canberra was established.1845 the first church opened,

St John the Baptist at Reid which is now Canberra’s oldest building. In 1863 the post office was

established. In 1887 the railway from Sydney finally connected through to Queanbeyan. In

1900 a Royal Commission was established prior to federation to decide on a site for the

new national capacity city separate from Sydney and Melbourne. In 1908 the decision was made

by Parliament to locate the capital city at the proposed Canberra site. 1909 the federal

capital territory was created from New South Wales transferring of land to become Commonwealth

Government land. In 1912 an international competition to design the new capital city

was won by American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin.

In 1913 the foundation stone was laid for the city. The first sale of leases of federal

capital territory land was in 1924. In 1927 Parliament moves from Melbourne to Canberra

with the opening of the interim Parliament House and we as the then Commonwealth Parliamentary

Library came with it.Now after the second world war is when we really start to see Canberra

develop into what we have today and apart from what’s on the timeline on the screen

you have things like 1946 the ANU being founded. Woden started to be developed in 1964, Belconnen

in 1966, Tuggeranong in 1973 and Gungahlin in 1991.Now a little bit on what we do. Library’s

role as defined by the National Library of Australia Act 1960 is to ensure that documentary

resources of national significance relating to Australia and the Australian people as

well as significant non-Australian library materials are collected, preserved and made

accessible. In short our mission is to collect, connect and collaborate. Now here’s what

our homepage currently looks like. I’ll click through to the live site and quickly

show you some of the important features to look out for. This is how our home page currently

looks and if you scroll down a bit you’ve got the link to the catalogue for searching

collection material within the Library, you’ve got a link to Trove and to eResources and

I’ll go back into those in a bit more detail later. There’s information under getting

started that’s useful for people who aren’t familiar with the place. The link to get a

library card and if you don’t already have one it’s very well worthwhile getting one

even if you’re not based in Canberra because the card will give you access to electronic

resources.This Ask a Librarian tab, this is currently the preferred way of contacting

the Library during the closedown. If you click through to the enquire now button that will

start up an online form for you to fill in which will come through to us in the reference

section and it’ll then be allocated to the most appropriate section of the Library to

respond to. Also on the homepage right up the top we’ve got lots of dropdown tabs

and under Using the Library you’ll see a lot of information there, research guides,

family history research, link to our learning sessions, information about the reading rooms,

getting copies and more. There’s also much more information under the other tabs too

that you can have a look at later.Okay. Now before I go any further I’d like to point

out our online research guides. You may have seen the link a second ago. From the home

page there’s a link under the Using the Library tab for research guides. These include

many family and local history-related topics and I’ll click through to it now. There

we are, they’re listed alphabetically so you can see the very first aerial photographs,

I’ll mention a bit of those later, lots of family history-related items, one on indigenous

family history that I mentioned, indigenous language collections, the Australian Joint

Copying Project, maps that’ll be very handy for you in a few minutes so lots and lots

of interesting topics. These have been put together by our reference staff and I would

really recommend them to you as a first point of call before you do any new research on

our website. Now I’m going to spend the next little while showing you the variety

of things you can find in our collections through the catalogue to help you fill out

the story of your Canberra ancestors. Before I go any further I should stress that while

this session is about Canberra if you’re not from around these parts you can apply

the same techniques for searching for material in our collections relating to your locality.

I’m also going to mention books and other physical items in the collections but as nobody

can actually get in to see them at the moment I’ll also be showing you what you can access

online through the catalogue, Trove and eResources. Okay, to begin I’m going to show you a few

tips on searching the catalogue. What we’re doing today is really a crossover between

local history and family history so I’ll be doing a little of each.Probably the most

obvious starting point is to search for your particular family’s name and see what comes

up. Many of us might have a family member who’s already given us a head start by publishing

a family history and the Library has thousands of these in our collections, most of which

will be available for interlibrary loan to your local public library if you’re not

a Canberran. If you know of such a book it’s easily found by an author or title search.

My own family is an example.My mum’s cousin published two volumes on the McInnes family.

If any of you out there know any McInneses around this district, especially around Queanbeyan,

then they’re probably my lot. So a search for the words in McInnes family will bring

up these two books. Just quickly go into the catalogue and show

you how I got them. They’re the top two there. As you can see there’s also 40 odd

hits for other works in the collection about McInnes family. Now there’s the two books

there and you can see my very handsome great-great-great-grandfather, Duncan, and his father, Gilbert, the patriarch

of the family. There they are again listed on the catalogue with all these other ones.So

those 40 odd hits are for people who are not my family and therein lies a bit of a hurdle

for you. You may not be looking at the right family at all. We have over 150 entries in

the catalogue for Smith family, for example, so how do you get around checking through

all of these individually on the offchance that one of them has something on your family?

Thankfully there are people out there who have dedicated themselves to helping with

this quandary. They create bibliographies of family histories.In Australia one researcher

in particular, Ralph Reid, embarked on a long-term project that at its conclusion listed over

9,600 family histories that were published in and relevant to Australia with an index

of almost 450,000 surname or title entries and a supplementary listing of related placenames,

and an index of 26,000 surnames listed in selected pioneer registers. Ralph periodically

deposited his work with us on CD-ROMs, each updating the last as well as in print. Now

these aren’t widely held in libraries but we’d be happy to check our copies for you

if you put a query in through our Ask a Librarian service that I showed you earlier.Now what

if your family history hasn’t been published in its own right? The family name might not

appear in a catalogue record but you know that they’ve been long-term residents so

they could well be mentioned somewhere. Well there are locality-specific biographical registers

and indexes often produced by the local genealogical or historical societies such as this one for

Canberra and Queanbeyan produced by HAGSOC. A good search term to use in this case is

the word pioneers. A subject search, you can see that I’ve changed the search method

from the default all fields to subject for the words pioneers Queanbeyan or pioneers

Canberra will bring up a number of examples. This particular one contains 112 pocket biographies

of pioneer families, about a page on each and although their names don’t appear in

the catalogue record there's some of my McInnes at one of the family homes, [Mungula] 14:23,

long ago demolished near what’s now Callum Forest. The men in the family were apparently

very proud of their bikes and rode in local bicycle club competitions. So how do we go

a bit further, for example into where our ancestors lived and how they lived? This is

where we cross back over into the realm of local history. This time I’m going to do

a basic keyword search for the term, Canberra history. You can see I left it on all fields

which is like a keyword search but this results in almost 10,000 hits, far too many to handle.

This search looks for both words, Canberra and history, in all the fields in the record,

title, author, subject, publishing details and any notes fields. This is the broadest

possible search but it will pick up lots of results that won’t be relevant. The default

sorting is by relevance ranking, similar to a search engine which puts those results with

both words together to the top so you may get some good results on your first page but

by the last page a search like this will throw up a lot of meaningless results for you. So

the message is be careful when doing an all fields search. It might work well for some

searches but not for others that incorporate commonly used words.So a good way to narrow

it down straight away is to change the search method to subject and you can see there I’ve

now changed it from all fields to subject and this straight away has the effect of narrowing

it down to just over 1,200 hits. Still a lot, of course.Now you can also sort your results

by date, author or title if relevant. I’ve sorted this list by date, oldest to newest

and you can also use the narrowing options on the right-hand side to further narrow things

down. In this case the format and eResources options might be particularly useful to see

what's been digitised that you can access offsite. Now another way of being more specific

is to use the hot links subject headings in the catalogue record. You can see this example

is quite a few subject headings. These are assigned by catalogue as according to a global

standard called Library of Congress subject headings. The technical librarian speak for

this is controlled vocabulary. You don’t really need to remember that, just remember

that this system allows you to use the standardised term across most library catalogues anywhere

in the world. If you’re in a record like this simply click on the link to see more

on the same subject. Now while it’s a global system it is based on US cataloguing rules

so you’ll need to keep in mind that it contains American terminology, for example it might

use words like ranches instead of farms in the subject headings or railroads for railways

etc. So if you're using subject searches just be aware of that.Now some other things I’d

like to note before I leave this record is cite this link. That’ll generate citations

in three different styles or send it off to endnote which is very handy if you’re creating

a bibliography or writing an article. You can email or print the pages as well, of course.

The add to favourites link - when you logged in with your card this will let you keep and

sort as many catalogue records as you want to indefinitely. That way you can come back

to them any time without the need to write down details.The online versions link there

– this one usually goes to a digital version on the publisher’s website which may no

longer exist so you’ll see options there to look in Trove, the Wayback Machine or Google.

In this case the site was the Canberra 100 site that was created for the Canberra Centenary

in 2013 and as the way of things on the internet this site doesn’t exist live anymore but

if you click on the Trove link you go through to the Trove web archive where you’ll actually

get a PDF copy of the book.This field is also where there would be a link to an ebook version

of a publication if it was deposited with us which might be accessible offsite depending

on the access conditions set by the publisher. Now the series field there, if you know the

title of a series, in this case Keys to Canberra’s History, and you wanted to see what else was

published in that series use the advanced search tab up here, select series from the

dropdown menu and type or copy and paste in the name of the series and that will bring

up the rest of the titles in the same series for you.Check the notes field if there is

one for any information about the item that might be important. The similar items box

over at the right can be another good way to discover related results. It’s computer-generated

based on common keywords that it’s found in the records so it may or may not find things

that are actually relevant to your particular search. The find in other libraries link here

drops you straight into Trove and does a search for the item to let you see where else it

might be held.Now I want to show you a bit more on subject searching which is the best

way to locate material if you know what to do rather than just searching for random keywords.

You can simply use combinations of the subject heading terms in the basic catalogue search

screen and change the search method to subject. This will find records that have these terms

just in the subject field which will usually bring up adequate results for you. You might

remember that I did this a little bit earlier when I narrowed down my keyword search for

Canberra history.But to do a more methodical and precise search click on the browse alphabetically

tab. I think the best way to show you this is going to be live so I’ll leave the slides

for a minute and go back to the website, just hope it works. Okay. So there is my results

for Canberra history and as you can see I got 1,200 results. If I click on the browse

alphabetically tab and select subjects and now I start typing in one of those Library

of Congress subject headings you can see it starts wanting to drop me in that place at

that point in the list. You’ll see it’ll start going chronological and then from there

alphabetical and Canberra ACT will have most of the headings. Some of them will have more

than one subheading and the more headings the narrower the subject focus of that work

is going to be. Then you simply click on the previous and next arrows to go back and forward

through the list. You can keep going as far as you want.So try the same for Queanbeyan.

Drops you in at that minute and again it starts off with Queanbeyan Age, various societies

and clubs, again works about them treated as a subject, gives you related notes that

might be useful and then it goes into the geographical again which is where most of

the headings are going to be.Again as I mentioned before, do this for whatever location you’re

interested in so do it for say Bathurst. It starts off with the Bathurst 1000 because

numbers come before letters in this system and then it starts going into alphabetical

listings and people with the name Bathurst. There’s a use instead heading so if you

use the wrong heading it might suggest to you which one is the right one to use. If

I went back and narrowed it down a bit further, Bathurst, NSW, it’s now skipped a few pages

and put me into the headings for Bathurst, the location.So this is a much more methodical

way of using the subject headings and it might give you some subheadings that you wouldn’t

have thought of previously. As I mentioned you’ll sometimes also see things like preferred

headings if you type in the wrong term or see also notes that can give you other related

headings to try. Okay so back out of here for the moment and back to the slides. Here’s

just a few suggested subheadings that you can use, they work for Canberra or Queanbeyan

specifically but of course trialling the same method for whatever location you’re interested

in. There’s many more that you’ll see as you work your way through the catalogue

as well. Of course the larger the place that you’re interested in the more headings

and the more likely you’re going to find something. Here's a list of a few of the subheadings

to try after a geographic location such as Canberra ACT or Bathurst NSW. Again the number

of results you’ll get of course will vary depending on the place you’re interested

in but these are some of the more commonly used ones and you can see a lot of those are

directly relevant to family history research in one way or another. Now I hope you’re

enjoying some of these watercolours that I’ve been throwing into the presentation. This

one’s of an old German settler’s farm on the Molonglo River that’s long gone and

the land is now under Lake Burley-Griffin, not far from here. If you have anyone in the

family who may have farmed along the Molonglo Valley there’s a book that will be a very

handy reference to you. It’s called Lost Houses of the Molonglo Valley, Canberra before

the Federal Capital City published in 2007 so fairly recent.Now in the book the author,

Linda Young, has incorporated a map laying out the locations of the farms covered in

the book or numbers there. You can see Linda has overlaid the old course of the Molonglo

River on top of a modern aerial photo. Canberra locals will know that this is where the Library

is so number 16 is just on the lawns down next to the lake in front of the Library.

Now as it happens the previous owner of that farm was my Irish convict, great-great-great-grandfather,

one John Crinigan. It actually belonged to his second wife, his daughter married a Corkhill

and for the locals, yes, the same Corkhills who now run the landscaping supply business.

So working at the Library it feels like I’ve really actually come back to my roots literally.

Just quickly old Crinigan was an interesting character, he came out from Ireland on the

Waterloo in 1837, was assigned to G T Palmer or Palmerville, now in Ginninderra and then

after marrying and getting his ticket of leave he built a stone hut at what is now Amaroo.

Its foundations have recently been excavated and it’s part of the Canberra History Farm

now.Which brings me onto our pictures collection. We have a large collection of historical and

modern images of Canberra many of which are digitised and available through the catalogue.

If you’re looking for a particular place an easy starting point is simply to type in

a location and limit the search format to picture, for example Tharwa, Lanyon, Tuggeranong,

Griffith, Woden. We also have modern collections, not just historical items, for example by

Loui Seselja that I’ll show you in a minute.Here's a shot from Mt Ainslie. You can clearly see

the Sydney and Melbourne building in the middle distance and Northbourne Avenue coming up

to it with Reid and Braddon developing quite well. This image is from the De Salis, Farrer

and Champion families’ photograph collection. Now you can download any of these low-res

images straight from the catalogue for personal use or study through the Trove viewing screen.

If you click on the thumbnail image it’ll take you through to that and then you can

download them or print them from there.Now with items in formed collections such as this

or photos and albums that have been individually digitised and catalogued you’ll see extra

links in the catalogue record such as this one. There’s a link to the parent record

for the collection as a whole and below that is the link to see all the individual child

records in that collection. So in this case it’s as I say from the De Salis, Farrer

and Champion families’ photograph collection and if you clicked on the collection record

link that will take you to the record for that whole collection. By clicking on the

child link you can see here, here’s the first few child records for that particular

collection. Note over here under your eResources the entire collection has been digitised and

is accessible online. Now I mentioned the modern photographs. There’s one from 1996

shot by our staff photographer, Loui Seselja, who also took the photograph of the Library

that you would have seen at the very beginning of our presentation. Loui worked with us for

several decades and took thousands of photos, a lot of which are now digitised and online

because we own the copyright. Okay, onto our manuscript material. Now the manuscript collections

in the Library contains diaries, letters and notes, unpublished material. For the Canberra

region we also have some quite rare family farm business records. Manuscript materials

are of course usually considered as primary source documents in historical research so

as it says in the slide best place, start with the catalogue using a family name or

maybe a relevant subject heading and limit your search to manuscripts. Some of them will

have online finding aid and I’ll show you that in a second. If there’s no online finding

aid you may need to use our Ask a Librarian service to enquire further. Examples specific

to Canberra and the region include the De Salis family, Cunningham family, the Faithfull

family, Samuel Schmach, Reverend Pierce Galliard Smith or Terrance Aubrey Murray of Yarralumla

which locals will know now as Government House. The Manuscripts Collection is quite complex

and very little of it is digitised or accessible online. It often needs the mediation of expert

members of the Manuscripts team so I’d suggest that in most cases you might need to use that

Ask a Librarian form to make initial enquiries if you’re after anything from this area.I’ll

quickly show you an example of a catalogue record and the accompanying finding aid. So

it’s rather a long record. This is the record for papers of the De Salis family from roughly

1840 through to about 1930. You can see it’s a decent-sized collection, it's 14m of shelf

space which is how archivist and manuscript librarians describe the size of a collection.

There are over 50 boxes and indicates that there are permission requirements for some

of these before you’ll get access to them so again this is where you’d need to contact

Manuscripts via that Ask a Librarian form to go further. But there’s also additional

notes in this case about associated related materials that might be useful.Now you also

see up here the link to the finding aid which will give you a detailed listing of the contents

of each box and you’ll need to refer to this finding aid if you want to order copies

of things or use them in the reading rooms. Here’s what the first part of the finding

aid itself looks like if you click through in that link. Again you can then scroll down

or click on links in the table of contents to get more detailed descriptions of the contents

of each. You’ll see now you’re starting to get box numbers indicated.

Okay. Onto maps. Now our maps collection is the largest in Australia and there are many

maps in the Canberra region. Again the easiest way to begin a search is to use a placename

and limit the search to maps. I’d also suggest that you check our detailed research guides

on maps that I showed you earlier to get the most out of your research and of course use

the Ask a Librarian form to contact our maps staff for further advice.Town maps like this

one show the first title holders of smaller town allotments. This one’s of Queanbeyan

and there’s also a very good one at Braidwood from the same time. These examples also show

dwellings and significant buildings in the towns. Many of the house and buildings on

the Braidwood map are actually still there. Pastoral maps will show squatting or pastoral

runs while parish maps were created by Lands Departments to register all landholdings and

will show more detail, title holders, size of the block, a portion number and a purchase

registration number and other useful geographical information which you can then use to request

historical land title searches of the relevant state or territory Lands Department. Many

of the older maps are now online and these are a great boon to local and family history

and show the occupiers of runs and registered land title holders.Your starting point will

be to locate the parish within a county. If you’re not sure of this you’ll need to

use a gazetteer. For pastoral runs there are gazetteers for each state mostly published

in the 1860s or ‘70s while Gleeson’s List of New South Wales Place Names is the most

comprehensive guide for parish and place names for New South Wales. These are both online

and again see the Australian maps for family history research guide for links and more

information while in Wikipedia there’s a very handy article titled Lands Administrative

Divisions of Australia that lists all the land divisions state by state. We also have

a terrific collection of real estate sales plans advertising subdivisions from the late

1800s to the early 1900s. This one’s of Ainslie of 1927. For 20th century research

we also hold a huge collection of aerial photos, I think from memory starting in the 1920s.

So again try a catalogue search for a place name plus the word aerial and limit the format

to maps. Now I’ll quickly show you what I meant about pastoral maps versus parish

maps. Here’s the section of a pastoral map for New South Wales and part of Queensland

that I’ve zoomed in to show the part covering the Canberra region. Now as you can see there’s

not a lot of detail. It’s good for putting a landholding to the larger geographical context,

though. So parish maps are probably going to be of more use to most of you.Here's an

example of the catalogue record for a map of the parish of Goorooyarroo in the County

of Murray near Queanbeyan. This is what it looks like when I click on the thumbnail to

go through to the Trove viewer and when I zoomed in to look at more detail what do I

find but my old ex-convict ancestor, John Crinigan. Officialdom always had trouble spelling

his name, probably the thick Irish accent that he had but that’s definitely him and

as you can see he’s holding a few parcels of land there right next to a larger block

that was assigned to his former master, G T Palmer.So that really says something I think

about how Australia developed into an egalitarian society when an ex-convict could end up owning

land right next door to his former master. I also found lots of other family names on

this map including my McInneses and others that we’re related to through marriage like

the Bing Lees, Southhalls, Rowleys and others. So these maps can be a real goldmine of information

for family historians. Okay, I’ll move on to oral histories. Now oral histories in the

National Library may not necessarily be the first thing that may come to mind but our

oral history and folklore collection is a rich and deep source that is increasingly

easy to access as it is being digitised and made available as audio files through the

catalogue. There are several Canberra-related oral history collections including those listed

here, many of them done by local farming families such as the Oldfields, the De Salis family,

the Southalls, Cotters, the Jeffreys as well as many by politicians, senior public servants

and ordinary citizens.So for those that have been digitised there will be a link to listen

to the audio. You should also look out for the timed notation at the side if available

and some have a printed transcript that is keyword searchable and linked directly to

the audio which is a real advantage. Oral histories that haven’t been digitised or

have restricted access conditions are accessed in the Special Collections Reading Room. To

find more in the catalogue use audio as a search limit.Now you will need to be aware

of permissions attached to the oral history that you wish to use. These conditions will

vary so check the catalogue record carefully and also use the parent child limits that

I mentioned before to go from collection level records to the individual interviews. Once

again contact the oral history staff for advice via that Ask a Librarian form.Now here’s

just a sample of what you can hear. I hope it’s going to work for us, I’ll click

through to it. This is a small portion of Mr Oswald Woodger interviewed in 1971 whose

father had the first petrol station in Kingston. He remembers the start of the Fishwick industrial

area and early businesses so I’ll click on the Listen online. I’ve read all the

terms and conditions and accept them and here you can see now you’ve got your timed transcripts.

I think I’ll scroll down a bit and might go with that one.“That, that place which

I've just mentioned was known as the Garden City Service Station and the recent name I

don't think anybody else could get the name but how-, however. Well, I was in the business

for a few years until 1931 until the depression hit everybody of course. And my o-, my father

and my uncle, Mr Kalthore, and a few other people who were interested in these businesses,

they lost their capital and, and eventually they were wound up I think and leased out

to other people. From there, my father thought that I –“Okay, that’s probably enough

of that, you can listen to more later, of course.Okay, quickly on to our eclectic collection

of ephemera. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ephemera are transient things that are

often not intended to last, postcards, menus, pamphlets, tickets, invitations, programs,

catalogues, greeting cards, timetables, flyers, orders of service, stickers, badges, bookmarks,

trade cards and even plain old junk mail we’ve got. For Canberra this includes things like

federation and the founding of the city and their centenaries, advertising material, area

guides, booklets, postcards, posters, t-shirts. You can also look for ephemera from businesses,

organisations, societies etc. For example here we’ve got the Hotel Canberra, Canberra

Theatre, Canberra Rep, The Canberra Philharmonic Society, Canberra Show, the Grammar School,

Canberra Golf Club.So if your family were involved in any events or were members of

societies you could find little treasures of information that you just won’t get with

other formats. A simple way to find this material is just to use the words Canberra or your

location and ephemera and a basic search. I’ll click through and just show you an

example. So I’ve searched a keyword search for Canberra ephemera and now if I restrict

it to just NLA digital material to see what’s online that anybody can access and here’s

the laying of the foundation stone in 1913. There’s the catalogue record for it. Again

there's the formal subject heading, printed ephemera of Australia which is very broad

which is why in this case it’s probably more precise to actually use a keyword search

with a location and the word ephemera.If I click on the thumbnail and go browse this

collection this brings up the items within that particular collection. You can see there’s

a few there. This one here has eight children or eight pages within it and there it is,

the programme in all its glory. If I scroll on a bit further see if I can pick it up.

Lady Denman naming the city and of course they weren’t quite used to spelling the

word Canberra yet so it’s spelt with one R all the way through the programme. Okay.

On now to newspapers which of course can be an excellent tool for research. We’re lucky

to have much of Canberra’s past available in Trove but there are also other way access

newspapers. We hold a very strong collection of papers relating to the Canberra and southern

New South Wales region as well of course as papers from around Australia in print, on

microfilm and online. With newspapers you might need to be prepared to follow the name

change trail, for example The Queanbeyan Age went through several name changes from 1864

to 1927. It was The Queanbeyan Age and General Advertiser, later it became The Queanbeyan

Age and Queanbeyan Observer. It has now of course virtually disappeared after merging

a few years ago with The Chronicle. Now there’ll be separate catalogue records for each name

change but you’ll see former and later titles in the records to help you navigate your way

through. It’s also important when looking in the catalogue to check the holding section

of the record under the In the Library tab to make sure we actually hold the issue that

you’re after ‘cause there are frequently gaps in our holdings, especially for the 19th

century collection of newspapers.Generally in Trove Australian digitised newspapers cease

at the end of 1954 because copyright still applies after 1955 although we do have The

Canberra Times through to 1995 in Trove. Otherwise there’s very little online in Trove post

1954. You’ll get The Sydney Morning Herald archives which go up to early 1995, you’ll

get those through the eResources portal that I’ll show you in a minute but otherwise

for this period you’ll need to go to microfilm until from the 1990s onwards you can go into

things like Newsbank through eResources which is available from home. So it’s good to

be aware of that gap between when Trove at the beginning of the online newspaper databases

when manual searching and microfilms or even print was necessary. But don’t forget if

you’re not Canberra-based microfilms can be sent to your local public library via an

interlibrary loan. We run regular learning sessions about newspapers using all of the

different formats as well as a Trove newspaper session so I won’t do too much more on newspapers

now. Speaking of Trove I’m betting that most of you will be familiar with Trove to

some degree especially with the newspaper zone. Again I’ll only briefly touch on this

because it can be a whole session in itself. Once again we do run regular sessions on Trove

that you should keep an eye out for. Something that catches a lot of people out on Trove

is that while it’s hosted by the NLA it’s actually a collaborative national project

with contributions from hundreds of libraries, museums, archives and other cultural collecting

institutions around Australia. So look at it like a collection of collections and if

you find something in Trove that you want to reproduce you’ll need to approach the

institution that holds the original material. If it’s not ours we can’t give you permission

to use it. You don’t need a library card to use Trove but you can create your own Trove

account so you get extra features. Don’t forget that it is more than just newspapers,

it lists books, journals, manuscripts, government gazettes, pictures, maps, audio, archived

websites, lists and tags created by other users. You can also restrict your searches

to only online material. Now just quickly here's a couple of results from a search of

the newspapers from my old convict forebear, John Crinigan, to show those of you who may

not be familiar with Trove and how the newspapers look.Now here’s the results after I searched

for the phrase, John Crinigan. You’ll see there’s an article about the remains of

his stone hut in Amaroo, a couple of entries in the New South Wales government gazettes,

there’s six results altogether for that, mostly about contract tenders that he’d

submitted. There's about 34 results for newspaper articles. If I go to the newspapers here he

is in the Queanbeyan Magistrate’s Court in 1863 on charges of assault. Now the original

newspaper wasn’t very well printed unfortunately so the scan’s a little blurry but you might

be able to make out some of it about a pub called Woodman’s Inn where there was singing

and dancing going on and he burst into the room and let one of the singers and dancers

have a bit of a mouthful of how badly he was doing and it turned out into a bit of a melee.

So he was fined one pound and the magistrate said that at his age – he would have been

about 44 by then – he should have known better. Here he is in 1868 on slightly less

serious charges of breaching the Diseases in Sheep Act. The charge was withdrawn but

he had to pay the inspector’s expenses of 10 shillings. There’s a few more instances

where John gets on the wrong side of the authorities. But by the time we see his death notice in

1899 he was now a man of sterling character and held in the highest esteem by all classes

in the community. No mention of his convict past or his brushes with the law. So it seems

like even then you couldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.Okay, onto briefly

our eResources portal. So this is where you come for access to licensed subscription-based

electronic resources such as eBooks, full text journal databases, historical and current

newspaper databases like Gale NewsVault, The London Times archive, NewsBank, it has links

to other websites and genealogy databases, Ancestry and Find My Past. Now 80% of these

resources are accessible offsite either as free websites or through your NLA card which

is another reason to get one if you haven’t done so already.With the Library being closed

at the moment the eResources portal will be well worth exploring. For those new to the

site I suggest you look at the short video under the help tab to get you going and I’ll

show you that in a second. If you’ve previously used our eResources but not for a few months

you’ll see that it has changed quite a bit. The site is now almost totally keyword searchable

except for things like Ancestry, Find My Past and a couple of others meaning that you don’t

need to search individual databases separately. You can do a keyword search across the whole

site and get results. However you can still navigate around the site like you could previously

to individual resources using the browse eResources tab. Now I’m going to click through to the

live site and give you a very quick look and it’s worked for me. Now again I’d need

to accept the terms and conditions before I can go any further. There's the help tab

with the little video that explains how it all works. Under the browse eResources tab

for those who’ve used it previously there’s the browse by category feature that you might

be most familiar with. If you click on the little plus symbols, gives you narrower topics

within them. So there’s one for Genealogy ACT, not a great deal of stuff in there, I’m

afraid, but there’s a link to Find My Past and other things. You can see the little symbols

next to them indicate the type of resource they are so that is a little globe icon, that’s

just a free website that you don’t need to register for. Find My Past has the library

log which means it’s only accessible within the building. Other things with the gold keys

are what you access through your card. You can also search alphabetically if you know

the name of the database that you’re looking for so if I go to A – I’ll get rid of

Genealogy first – go to A and that lists all the resources beginning with the letter

A. There’s a very large full text journal database called Academic Search Complete covering

a huge range of subjects and again you see the variety of material. There’s a link

to an Ancestry.Okay now I’ll do a very quick keyword search demonstration which shows you

how to search across the site. I’m just going to search for Tuggeranong district.

That’s brought up 206 results which you can narrow down by various methods again,

similar to what we do in the catalogue or Trove and I'm just going to pick that first

one there, Tuggeranong town that never was. It was published in the Canberra Historical

Journal which of course we have in print in the collections but this way you can get straight

to it in full text and there it is. From here you can of course download onto your device

or print the article out. There is what Walter Burley Griffin envisaged for Tuggeranong,

it was going to be a military [unclear] 55:41 which never eventuated. Now again I just want

to stress that there’s much in the eResources portal on all sorts of subjects and again

you can read eBooks or download full text articles from offsite if you’re logged in

with a card. Ancestry and Find My Past will have a lot of the records that are otherwise

normally available in the building in our family history area. These will include things

like records for births and baptisms, marriages and divorces, deaths and burials, inquests

and probate records, directories and almanacs, land records, electoral rolls, 19th century

census, convict records, immigration and shipping records and more. Now you can access Ancestry

or Find My Past through your own personal subscription. We can’t do that but we can

do limited lookups on our subscription for you if you send us details of the person you’re

interested in via the Ask a Librarian form but please be aware that we can only do up

to an hour of genealogical research for you so please don’t send us lists of names.

We can’t undertake ongoing research on your behalf. Now a final word on getting copies

of our wonderful collection material. Firstly if your local public library is still open

they may be able to get books or microfilms from our collections or even elsewhere in

Australia. They do that via the interlibrary loan system. There’s usually a fee for this

service so ask your library to arrange this and they’ll tell you whatever fees are involved.

Instead of borrowing you can of course look for second-hand copies of books on the internet

via one of the many bookseller sites out there. I can suggest a site called Books and Collectibles

where many Australian booksellers list their stock and a site called Via Library for international

searches which also covers the Australian sites. Our Copies Direct service is another

alternative. Use it to buy copies of our collection material that you can’t copy for yourself,

for example most special collection items or if you need higher resolution images or

of course material from our general collections if you can’t borrow it. Most things can

be copied within copyright allowances and permissions and exemptions may apply for some

purposes such as research and study.This is the Copies Direct page, there’s a link to

it at the very bottom of our home page. You can see to start an order you can click on

that describe the item cartouche and it will start up a blank order form that you fill

in but the easiest way to order a copy of something from our collections is to go through

the catalogue record itself. At the bottom of any record click on the order a copy tab

or if you’re in the Trove viewing screen for something use the shopping cart icon on

the left-hand side. The order form will then be populated with the details of the item

automatically which saves you a lot of work and you then complete the form online. A credit

card is required. Now if you’re not sure about copyright check in the copyright status

tab. We also have information on copies and copyright under the Using the Library tab

on our home page that I showed you right at the beginning. If you’re still not sure

or if the record says copyright’s undetermined I’d suggest that you put the order in regardless

and our Copies Direct staff will then contact you if there were any copyright or other issues

to deal with and your credit card would not be debited if they can’t fill the order.

Okay, lastly don’t forget that we’re only one of a number of institutions that will

have materials relating to Canberra’s history. Here’s a list of some of the main ones to

consider with links to their websites. Of course unfortunately all are currently closed

to the public but their sites will have varying degrees of online content to explore. While

I’m at it I know that the societies would welcome new members if you're interested in

joining. HAGSOC, the Heraldry and Genealogy Society of Canberra, has an excellent research

library for members and it also publishes a very useful guide to doing your research

called Family History for Beginners and Beyond which is now into its 16th edition. You don’t

need to be a member to buy it. Again there’s a link to that on their home page. Another

interesting one there that many of you may not be aware of is the Capital History Here

website which has only been going for a couple of years. It has regular articles on Canberra

history, updates on Canberra in the news and hosts a new project called Canberra 100 which

over this year will tell the story of Canberra through 100 objects and that kicked off with

the iconic Canberra red brick. Well that wraps it up for me. Thank you all for staying the

distance with me and I hope it’s been useful to you.