DISCOVERING YOUR FAMILY’S HERITAGE

The friendly staff of the Toowoomba & Darling Downs Family History Society would love to help you with your genealogy research. Here they walk you through how they can assist:

Why would you have a shower and go into a library or research centre when you can just sit in front of your computer checking the internet in comfort all day? Many of us would prefer the latter. However, you can only do so much family history research in the comfort of your own home using the internet.

So, what are the reasons you would visit our Harristown research centre:

■ New Leads: You may think you are uncovering everything there is to be found, but believe me, our volunteers always seem to be able to find something extra.

■ A Helping Hand: It’s much more fun to work in a social atmosphere instead of sitting by yourself. It’s nice

to be able to share new information and sometimes when you’re stuck, we can help you find the way.

■ Local Archives: There are resources you’ll discover that you won’t find anywhere else.

We all know how great TROVE (an Australian online library database aggregator) is – especially for newspapers.

This is a resource we constantly use. However, we always check the

Darling Downs Gazette and the early (Toowoomba) Chronicle index as well as the early Dalby Herald index.

Optical character recognition doesn’t always work and that is why the society is constantly indexing

newspapers, government gazettes, etc.

The Chronicle is presently indexed for various subjects up to 1990 and, at time of writing this article, there was a total of 922,630 records in the index.

While all years have not been indexed yet, they have been for 1861 to July, 1892 and from 1921 onwards.

We have many indexes relating to books on our shelves, cemeteries, schools, photographs and local histories, etc.

We are fortunate to have many members who volunteer their time to not only man the centre, offering members and casual visitors their expertise in researching family history, but also they continue to index our many records.

In keeping up with the digital age, many of our records are now on computer and we have four dedicated to Australian resources and one for overseas.

We also have five film readers which are necessary because once you find the record in one of the newspaper databases, then it is a simple process to check the film and print out the article.

Naturally, we also have many records in print and these are catalogued by postcode number, family history, immigration, convicts, etc.

All of these records (and more) will only be found at 452 South Street, Harristown.

I know visitors are always surprised at the records we have that can’t be found anywhere else, and certainly not on the internet.

Why not call in to say hello and find out more about your family?