April Happenings!

Our monthly meeting was held on April 14th at our rooms at the Old School House. We had a very imformative evening.

Our newest member K. Dyer had in his possession an old diary that had belonged to his great great grandfather Joseph Bird Burgess who kept diaries every year of his working life as a piano tuner. Sadly, it seems only the 1872 edition survived. Mr Dyer kindly read some excerpts from the diary relating to his ancestors visits to the Cobram district. He has consented to us publishing some of the entries on this blog. So stay tuned in the coming months for more on this. 

Just a bit of background information on J B Burgess:
Joseph Bird Burgess (b. 19.6.1830 Watworth, Kent, England, and died 20.3.1907 Geelong, Victoria, Australia). His wife Margaret nee Foster (b. 23.3.1833, Gillingham, Kent England, and died at Hay, NSW 10/1/1895). They married on 1/8/1852 at Bredhurst, England, and sailed to Port Phillip on the 895 ton S.S.Wandsworth. He was 23 years old, and his wife 19 y.o. They left England on 7/9/1852, arriving Port Phillip 1/1/1853.



"JBB" was a pianoforte tuner and Professor of Music. He was a very religious man, who enjoyed singing, tuning pianos, writing and selling music, hated the hot weather day and night! And continually worried about his financial position...


JB's 1872 diary contains information of all his trips tuning pianos in the Southern Riverina, and northern Victoria during that year.

March Happenings!!

At our March meeting we were lucky to have our newest member Shauna Hicks come and give a talk to the group on "Demolishing Brick Walls". Shauna has a wealth of knowledge on Genealogy and all things historical. She was able to give us a number of new avenues available on the web in searching for records that we may not have earlier had access to. Some of our group member were overwhelmed by the use of nings, blogs, rss feeds and all the other social networking tools available. Hopefully, in this blog members can break down the barriers and learn how to access some of these tools.

Shauna has just published an interesting book on preserving your family archives, titled "Your Family History Archives". This has some very useful information on protecting your archives and family history for future generations. I highly recommend everyone has a read of it.

Shauna Hicks
Partner Groups
Unlock the Past
WorldVital Records Australasia

Some other recommended site for helpful information that were mentioned during the talk that people should have a look at are
Judy Webster's Site

TROVE - National Library of Australia

World Connect - Rootsweb

Shauna mentioned the use of nings in research. Ones that she mentioned which I have now become a member of are:

Genealogy Wise

Looking 4 Kin