I love TROVE

I’m in the middle of the NSW ACT Family History conference in Canberra and just sat down to have a good look at my emails – five notifications waiting for me from Trove that articles I’ve been waiting for are available.

It’s frustrating when you can see a relevant article but just can’t read it (yet), but good that you can get an email alert when it does become available simply by clicking on the little envelope and entering your email address.

Four of the articles are related to our (Ku-ring-gai Historical) Society’s WWI project but one is for my own family:

 

A wedding notice for my great grandmother’s brother.

For those of you who like coincidences and statistics, my great grandmother, Florence May PEARSON (1875-1947) was born 18 months earlier than her brother Frederick Charles Rowden PEARSON (1876-1949), and died just 20 months earlier than him.

The article is a wonderful example of the treasures that can be found in local papers. It gives great descriptions of the dresses, the attendants and their relationship to the married couple. Then it goes on to list all the gifts, who gave them and in some cases, their relationship to the couple - a family history treasure indeed.

I think the ‘Miss Pearson’ listed is my great grandmother (she didn’t marry until three years later), as the only other sister was a bridesmaid and was listed as Miss Emma Pearson – they both gave cheques, as did their two brothers.

I suspect this practice of publishing gifts (and the givers) in the paper, put pressure on the guests to give a good gift!

Their parents aren’t listed – I’ve written about their sad deaths previously. 

The Pearson children were raised by their mother’s parents, the Mr and Mrs F A Rowden listed in the article.

There was a Trove master class on the first day of the conference, where even those of us who considered ourselves pretty seasoned users learned some new tricks:

A good way to keep up with new items for your favourite searches is to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the orange button to subscribe to the web feed.

You can do this for new (newspaper) issues too – by going to the Digitised Newspapers, ‘Show all titles’ then scrolling to the bottom to select if you want to be alerted about new titles or new issues (or both!).

There were a few good search tips for difficult or common names too, but I’m sure they are in the search tips and I just hadn’t got to read them yet – always too busy searching.

I'll write about them later (when I've tested them out).