World Vital Records is one of the more recent entrants to the online genealogy records market, and has access to a lot of material from Archive CD Books and the Queensland Family History Society.

Their World Collection, which includes Australia, New Zealand and the UK, is normally double this price, and so this is great value. If you are already a subscriber the year will be added on the end. I am now a subscriber until March 2011!

This is a real bargain. It cost me $72.77 in Australian dollars this morning.

Here is a blog post I read this morning that had a happy ending.

Lynn Walsh is a facilitator and coach with an interest in her family history. She found an account of the robbery of her great-great-grandfather in the NSW Police Gazette of 19 May 1897:

Thomas Gibbons was further charged in company with George Williams with breaking and entering the dwelling of William J Laws, Dock Road, Balmain, and stealing a watch, a scarf pin, two Alberts, four brooches,  a Gladstone bag, two coats, two vests and two pairs of trousers, value 20 pounds (part recovered).

She had no idea what an “Albert” was (and neither did I) but some kind soul who read her post has enlightened her, and she has posted a photo and description as a postscript.

To find out what an Albert is read the original post here.

I hope he got his Alberts back!

An announcement from World Vital Records:

World Vital Records is announcing the addition of the largest number of records to be released in a single day since the site launched in 2006.

To commemorate this milestone, for the first time World Vital Records is offering FREE PUBLIC ACCESS to its entire online collection beginning August 11 through August 13, 2009. This is a perfect opportunity to participate in this incredible promotion.

This is a great opportunity to have a look around at the Australian content in this site, mostly, but not only, provided by Archive CD Books Australia.

Just click on the link below!

At the recent Family History Conference at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City Barry J. Ewell held a session on using your digital camera and scanner for family history research. He shared some of his secrets with the participants, and I think they are worth repeating here for an Australian audience.

Digital camera

1. Ideally your camera should have between 5 and 8 megapixels, and a wide-angle lense. This gives the best possible detail without making the files too unwieldy to use. The wide-angle lense enables both pages of a book to be photographed at once. If you are shopping for a camera I would also add a “document” setting or similar that allows you to turn the camera on and start shooting without having to adjust the flash and macro settings every time – I wish mine did this!

2. Take images of the pages of a book, instead of using the photocopier. Barry uses a small desk tripod and takes the book over near a window. I’ve found that a window isn’t always available, but if you position yourself so that you don’t get a shadow from the light behind you you should be OK. Don’t use the flash – it’s damaging to old documents, annoying for other patrons, and creates a glare in the photograph.

3. Use photo software to brighten up the photos of the pages. Auto-contrast adjustment makes the page whiter and the printing darker, which is what you want. Barry uses Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is relatively inexpensive. I use PaintShop Pro, a similarly-priced application that is, in my opinion, easier to learn, although these days I often use Google’s Picasa or the Picture Viewer that came with Windows Vista for this brightening up task – it’s quicker and easier to scroll through each photo and fix it, although the Windows Viewer doesn’t create a backup of the photograph.

4. Use a metal cookie-sheet and magnets to hold curling pages or photographs down. He has a metal sheet to which he has stuck white shelf-liner paper to give a white background, then uses magnet strips from a craft store to hold down the document or photograph. I can see this working well for pages from a probate packet and I’m keen to try it!

5. Take overlapping photos of large documents and then stitch them together. Large documents such as maps, architectural drawings, or even old wills, can be photographed in overlapping sections. You can then stitch the sections together at home with your photo editing software. This works well as long as you keep the sections the same – make sure you have the camera the same distance from the document each time.

Scanner

1. Use OCR software to scan a document into editable text. Optical Character Recognition software turns printed text documents into an editable document in Word or similar that you can cut and paste into your own document. The quality of the recognition varies with the quality of the document – old newspapers are tricky, new books are fairly straightforward. I’ve used this to scan copies of old electoral rolls for a district into a spreadsheet, and although I had a lot of checking and fixing to do, it was much quicker and easier than typing the whole thing out!

2. Use dark backing paper to scan a document that has bleed through from the other side. If you are able to scan a document that has the text on the reverse side showing through you can put black construction paper behind (on top) of it when scanning. This blocks the text on the other side. I have some prime examples of this, which unfortunately I had to photograph rather than scan, but it’s a neat trick!

You can read Michael De Groote’s full article about this presentation on the Mormon website here.

If you are not a subscriber to the newsletter of State Records NSW then you should be! 

News of new online indexes, changes to indexes, and how to use the website in general is being issued on a continuous basis, and the changes they are making may mean finding your ancestor after many years of being unable to find him/her.

A recent example is the merging of the immigration indexes. Previously the assisted immigration indexes for NSW were divided into three separate indexes, with additional indexes for other geographical areas that were part NSW at the time. If, in your enthusiasm, you missed searching one of the indexes you may miss your ancestor altogether.

Now, all these indexes have been combined into one, although you can search the old indexes individually if you wish. If he’s there you can’t NOT find him! (unless your spelling is too specific).

You can have these newsletter sent to you here.

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And you can see the most recent newsletter here.