This is a fabulous website if you have any Warneke, Lees, Smith, Leak, Birchmore, Bishop, Coulter, Ahlers, Stables or Stocker ancestors.
http://warneke.id.au/magazine/
Screenshot of the Warneke website
It is chock full of information. Even if you don’t have any ancestors on the site it is still a fantastic read. Ably maintained by Paul Warneke it has profiles, news, research, clippings and stories like these;
Violet Softley Testifies in Charge of Stabbing Case
John Marsh Emery Killed In Action
I’ve been trying out the Billion Graves android app and website on the suggestion of fellow Genieblogger Jill Ball aka Geniaus. Reading Jill’s blog this morning I see that she’s been using the app too.
Payneham Cemetery in Adelaide, South Australia is removing headstones and re-using old graves. You can see my previous post about this here. When Jill told me about Billion Graves I decided to go back to this cemetery and photograph more headstones for this project. Billion Graves uses the latest smart phone technology to record not only a photograph of a headstone but also its location. Smart phones with GPS capabilities can record location data along with each photograph. Those who install the Billion Graves app on their smart phone can photograph cemetery headstones, and upload them to the Billion Graves website. When you get home you can transcribe them and then they are available for everyone to search and use. All the cemeteries being photographed are plotted on a world map and the GPS coordinates show the location of each grave within the cemetery.
Transcribing my headstone photos
I found the app very easy to use. The only problems I had are that there is no zoom feature when taking photos and the app often crashed and had to be closed and restarted. It was a slow process on my phone as I could only take one photo at a time and wait for it to upload before taking another photo. I don’t know if this is an issue with my phone or the software. I may email Billion Graves and ask them about it because I LOVE the opportunity to record genealogy and history for everyone to see and use!!
I went to Payneham Cemetery, as per previous post, with a list of graves to find. I found one which was on my list and two which weren’t.
John William Adams Jnr
This is one of the headstones I was looking for. It’s amazing that I found it as it has been moved from the grave site.
Flora Sobels
This is one I photographed on the off chance that Flora might be ‘one of mine’. There aren’t that many people named Sobels in South Australia.
Henry Alfred Wigzell
Henry was another surprise find and again the name isn’t very common so he’s most likely in my lot. I’ll look for them in my tree database today.
I’m going back to the cemetery today, I’ve printed out the cemetery map and will mark off each area as I’ve checked it. The moved headstones are placed around the cemetery grounds in clusters and the ones with heads still attached to their graves are in the traditional rows.
I was surprised by my distress today in seeing large areas of Payneham Cemetery being prepared for reuse.
Payneham Cemetery, Adelaide
I hope that everyone was contacted before the headstones were moved.
Payneham Cemetery, Adelaide
Payneham Cemetery, Adelaide
It seems such a shame to move headstones at all, we are loosing so much of our history. I think that at the least all headstones should be photographed, the inscriptions recorded and all of the information and photos put in an online database for everyone to access freely.
I just want to encourage everyone to keep taking photographs and videos of everything around them- our families obviously, our flora and fauna, historical buildings, homes, churches, parks, the streets where we live and the cemeteries and headstones. If we don’t record what we’ve got we’ll loose it. I want to be able to show so many things to my grandchild who is due in October!!
An old family farmhouse is possibly going to be demolished and the property used for housing. I don’t want to see it go. It’s Willison’s Farm, Lot 5o Golden Grove Rd, Modbury, South Australia. If you would like to know more please leave a comment here or on our Facebook Page.
Willison's Farm and Historic Vineyard
My notes grew less and less as the Congress went on. In Stephen Young‘s keynote Descendancy Research; when you can’t climb up your family tree, branch out I did make a note to ask my Mum about a conductor’s baton she has which used to be mounted on the wall of the house I grew up in. I’m not sure where it is now and I also don’t know whose it was and what its importance is. When I find out from Mum I’ll post it here.
I said hello to John Kitzmiller on the escalator going home Friday and he made this observation about Adelaide, “There aren’t many police cars driving around” which struck me as an unusual observation at first. I’m just used to there not being many police cars around but I guess being from the USA John isn’t.
Over the three days I was at Congress I bought a nice bunch of goodies. I like to buy a number of small things rather than one big thing so here is my list.
Forensic Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick
Car sticker - Caution I brake for cemeteries
Uleybury School and students
I don’t remember which stand these were on but they had packs of cards for sale. I was looking at one with a picture of Uleybury School, here in South Australia, and the lovely lady at the stall said that they had a card with a picture of school students. In the bottom picture are two of my great uncle’s sisters in law Kathleen and Doris Taylor. I am thrilled to have found this!!
South Australian Government Gazette 1851
Cousin Jacks and Jennys - The Cornish in South Australia
Inside History Magazine
I subscribed to Inside History for 6 months.
Finding Your German Ancestors - A Beginners Guide
The Annals Of Bendigo Vol 3 1892 - 1909
I also ordered Volume 1 of the Annals of Bendigo but unfortunately Volume 2 isn’t available on cd. I had only ever seen these in Bendigo Library so I’m thrilled to be able to own them even if it’s not the full set……yet.
There was also another copy of Inside History and Australian Family Tree Connections magazine in our conference bags so I’ve got stacks to read and enjoy!!
Day Three
International Symbol for Deafness
Unfortunately in his keynote talk John Kitzmiller spent most of his time reading from the big screen instead of the smaller one next to him on the podium. I’m sorry John but I can’t lip read your ear! The convention centre’s audio people tried to compensate however it wasn’t enough. When he finished his on screen presentation he faced the audience and spoke directly into the microphone which was great!!
I don’t want these posts to sound like a whinge session. I am sharing from the point of view of a person with a hearing impairment in the hope that those who read this will think about what I’ve said the next time they’re organising conferences or talks or speaking in public.
Names of records in various countries
This will be handy for researching my German ancestors. It shows the names of genealogical records in German also French and Japanese.
John's list of top records to use
As well as listing the records available on FamilySearch.org John spoke about the Oral Histories recorded by the LDS church which are here: http://histfam.familysearch.org/oralhistories/oral_index.php I’ve listened to a couple today but the recording quality was poor. I hope that was only for the ones I chose. This is a fascinating area of genealogy which I hadn’t given much though to. I asked John about Indigenous Australian genealogies being recorded but they haven’t started a project here yet.
Colleen Fitzpatrick – Forensic Genealogy
Colleen’s talks were my favourite of the whole Congress!! I bought her book Forensic Genealogy which she signed for me. The picture below is of one of Colleen’s photo quizzes, the audience had to work out what medical condition was suffered by one of the people in the photo. I happened to pick what it was because I know several people who have had strokes. The older woman in the middle at the front has had a stroke and is partially paralysed. There are more quizzes on Colleen’s website.
Ergot is a fungus which grows on rye (see picture below) In the 1600s in Alsace, the village of Colleen’s ancestors, it was abundant. So much so that it caused the women to have miscarriages and stillbirths for over ten years. It was also responsible for the Salem Witch Trials in that some people suffering from ergotism experienced convulsions and were thought to be witches.
Sue Reid – Online Newspapers For Research
Sue was well spoken so there were no hearing/understanding issues. She gave lots and lots of free online newspaper websites to search. Here are some which I noted. I haven’t got the urls for lots of them but they shouldn’t be too difficult to find.
Australian Periodical Publications 1840 – 1845
Nambour Chronicle
Victorian Government Gazettes 1836 – 1997 at the State Library of Victoria
Gale News Vault at the National Library of Australia
Irish Newspaper Archive
Genuki – http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/Newspapers.html United Kingdom & Ireland newspapers
Cyndi’s List newspapers
Wikipedia – list of online newspaper archives
Google – news.google.com/newspapers
Newcastle Morning Herald
The Argus (separate from what’s on Trove)
Nick Reddan’s Irish Newspapers
Vicki Eldridge – Keynote Talk – Find My Past
Vicki was extremely well spoken!! I only made a couple of notes in this talk and now that I’m reading back over them they don’t make a lot of sense, oh well, I’ll have to do better next time.