Family history across the seas

I’ve just been reading my monthly e-newsletter from the National Library of Australia.

Every day around the country and around the world, family historians sing the praises of our wonderful Trove. It is a truly amazing research opportunity of a world-class standard. Certainly no other newspaper digitisation I use comes close to it, let alone all the other aspects of Trove: maps, journals, images, sound, books etc. The newsletter tells us that 22 million people are using Trove annually…isn’t that an astonishing success. Equally astonishing is that there are over 396 million items digitised on Trove!

And we’ve been able to access this wonderful resource completely free wherever we live around Australia or the world! Distance and isolation just don’t affect us with Trove.

The Library is appealing to us for make a donation towards the cost of maintaining Trove. I don’t know about you, but Trove has opened up family stories that I’d never have known any other way. Sure, you can go to the library and search microfilms for known events like weddings, deaths or probate, but it’s those random discoveries that reveal our ancestor’s day-to-day lives.

Why not join me in making a donation to Support Trove? I know I’ve surely had my money’s worth from it and happy to make an occasional donation to help out. I’m adding the image to my blog bar, perhaps you’d care to also?

AND MORE EXCITEMENT AHEAD

The Library also has great things in store for those of us visiting Canberra for Congress 2015:

A Special Collections Reading Room

This is how the library describes it: The lovely new space overlooking the Main Reading Room will open on schedule on Monday 5 January 2015. Readers will then have direct access to the Library’s pictures, maps, manuscripts, oral history recordings, music, ephemera and rare printed material collections in one place for the first time.

What fun we’ll have, and I wonder what family discoveries we’ll make?

Keepsakes: Australians and the Great War.

This will be a display of the Library’s own resources and memorabilia relating to World War I.

LECTURE ALERT

Professor Bill Gammage AM, author of The Broken Years, is presenting this Friday 5th December about “First AIF Men I Knew“. If you can get there, you really shouldn’t miss it. His work is remarkable.

By the way, have you ordered a National Library card yet? Do make sure you have one before Congress <tip>.