Archive for the “News” Category

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.

You can also have updates sent to your blog reader here.

And you can see the most recent newsletter here.

I am an occasional indexer for FamilySearch, about which I have written before. There is an enormous number of projects to be indexed from all over the world. You can see the current list here.

One of the projects currently available for indexing is the Sydney Cemetery Inscriptions, a collection of index cards for cemeteries including Rookwood, the largest cemetery in Sydney and probably Australia. Name, age, date of death and cemetery name is the minimum information that I have so far seen, although there is capacity for birth date,  parents’ names and spouse’s name.

FamilySearch indexing is the easiest to use indexing software I’ve ever seen. The screen is split between a digital image of the document being indexed and the form to be filled in. Many fields give a list of common names, placenames, etc, which help enormously if the entry is hard to read. There is a lot of help available, on the screen and on the website. The biggest advantage is that each batch is indexed twice, with a third person to adjudicate if there are any discrepancies, so you do not have the pressure of getting it perfect.

A batch consists of a variable number of entries to be indexed, depending on the document. These cemetery batches only have 12 or 15 cards to a batch that I have seen so far, so you can whip through one quickly. I used to index Irish Civil Registration indexes and they had 375 names to a page!

The sooner we get this indexed the sooner it will be available to all of us. For more information or to sign up click here.

If you haven’t visited ScotlandsPeople, the official government website for Scottish Genealogical data, recently you may have missed some of the more recent developments:

OPR Deaths and Burials

Old Parochial Registers (OPRs) of baptisms and marriages have been available on ScotlandsPeople for a long time. They allow searching of indexes by names and places and parents names and the downloading to you computer of an image of the relevant page in the register. Burials are now included in this collection for the first time.

Scottish churches were not especially enthusiastic about recording burials. Even where burials were recorded registers were subsequently lost or destroyed through neglect. Do not be surprised if your ancestor’s death does not appear.

Even if an entry does appear it may reflect the date of payment for hire of the mortcloth (draped over the coffin or the body for the funeral) rather than the date of the death or the date of the burial, with no indication of which date is recorded. 

More information about this collection can be found here.

1881 Census

Up until recently the 1881 Census of Scotland was represented by an index only – the index created by the LDS Church. The 1881 Census has been re-indexed and digitised in the same manner as the other censuses. There is now two versions of the 1881 Census of Scotland on ScotlandsPeople. 

More information can be found here.

Source

ScotlandsPeople. Website. http://scotlandspeople.gov.uk/content/help/index.aspx?1263.