Aunty Kath's Slides

Dad's younger sister, Kathleen Curry, was the first person in my immediate family who travelled from Australia to work in another country. 

Kathleen Curry 1927-2013

During the 1960's Aunty Kath and her friend Pat Jones travelled to Wellington, New Zealand where they lived, worked and explored. A second adventure in that decade took them to Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea where they also worked. I remember devouring Kath's letters recounting her adventures that she religiously sent home to Nanna each week. Perhaps I was inspired to travel by her letters. 

Aunty Kath was also one of the first people in our family who had a 35mm camera. Our family only had a Brownie Box camera that took tiny black and white images so I was most impressed with the brilliant colour slides Aunt Kath's camera produced. 

As Kath had no descendants of her own her husband's family passed Kath's collection of colour slides on to me after she passed away. 

I have been busy scanning and sharing the family photos in the collection with my cousins and they have brought great joy. I didn't know what to do with her travel snaps that included several holidays in Australia. I was surprised that there was only a small collection of images from PNG. What to do with those I found? 

For want of somewhere else to share them I am pasting them to this post. Perhaps they will help someone in the future who is searching for a particular image. 

Thankfully these images were labelled so I am adding Kaths's descriptions from 60 years ago to each image below.

Native Mission Village

Manus Island

Bomana War Cemetery

Chapel on Manus Island

Shrine at Bomana

War Cemetery near Rabaul

Bitapaka Cemetery, Rabaul

Koki Native Market

Koki Water Village

Native Village, Port Moresby

Samarai Island

Samarai Island

Samarai Island

Native Village near Lae

Native Village near Lae

Native Girl and Baby

The Redding Sisters

 From time to time I take a look in Dad's old photos and try to work out the identity of the subjects. Thankfully Dad labelled his snaps so I knew that these young ladies were Eileen and Pat Redding.

As Dad's family lived in Canowindra I initially concentrated my efforts on finding a Redding family in that area but searches in the usual places bore no fruit.

A search for Eileen Redding on Trove yielded a couple of hits for an Eileen Redding living in Waitara, one of these was a report of her wedding that indicated that the bride's attendants were Patricia and Geraldine, that sounded promising. It was then easy to find her marriage to Adrian Leyden in the NSW BDM indexes. 

It struck me that I had been looking at the wrong area. When Dad was in the Army he spent time in Sydney with his aunt and uncle who lived in James Street, Hornsby right next to Waitara so that is where he would have met the girls.

I popped the name Eileen Leyden into Google and found a death notice. The notice was rich in information which confirmed I had the right Eileen, gave the names of Eileen's siblings and I was able to deduce that Eileen was the older of the two girls in the photo.

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Eileen's death notice

Leyden, Eileen Frances.

(Nee Redding)

27/11/1927 - 2/4/2019
Aged 91 years

Loving wife of Adrian (Dec). Beloved mother of Michael, Peter, John, Tracie ,Richard and their families.
Fond sister of Mary, Patricia (Dec), Geraldine, Philip, Kathleen.

Eileen's family and friends are invited to attend her funeral service to be held at St Patrick's Church Asquith , 1 Royston Parade on Monday 8th April at 11am.

Source: https://tributes.smh.com.au/obituaries/5701/eileen-frances-leyden/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

My next task was to find Patricia, the schoolgirl in the photo, who from the above notice learnt that she had passed away before her sister.

Back to Trove I went and searched for "Patricia Ridding". I found more answers with a poem posted in the Children's pages of The Sun newspaper. 

1944 'WATER FAIRY', The Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 - 1954), 17 September, p. 2. (SUPPLEMENT TO THE SUNBEAMS), viewed 15 Aug 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article229276036

Patricia was aged 12 in 1944 so would have been 13 in Dad's photo, that fits. Her address was on the Pacific Highway which is just around the corner from James Street.

Patricia's marriage to Howard Francis Longworth was registered at Hornsby in 1956.

-------------------------------------------

Patricia's death notice

LONGWORTH,
Patricia Audrey OAM.
25.4.1931 - 17.3.2019
Late of McQuion Park
Beloved wife of Howard (dec), loving mother of Simon, Philip, Matthew, Ann-Mary, Timothy, Stephanie and their families.

Family and friends of Patricia are kindly invited to attend her Funeral service to be held in the Chapel at McQuion Park, 28 McAuley Place, Waitara on Monday 25.03.2019 to commence at 10.00am.

In lieu of flowers, please donate on Patricia's behalf to your favourite charity.

Source: https://tributes.smh.com.au/obituaries/79876/patricia-longworth/

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Faceless no more

I have been preparing my slides for the webinar on Online Books that I am presenting next week for The Society of Australian Genealogists.

I was browsing through an online .pdf copy of  Parramatta and District Soldiers in the Great War, 1914-1919. Mr GeniAus on seeing the image on my desktop asked whether there were pictures of his Ball Ancestors in the publication.

I had used the publication several years ago for another purpose but didn't think to check for photos of  Grandfather James Ball or Great-Grandfather, John James Ball. Mr GeniAus immediately fired up his laptop and entered the term "Ball" into the publication's search box. He was rewarded with three Ball images. The first was for Fred Ball, brother of James and the second was of James. We had previously seen copies of these images in local newspapers via Trove.

The third image was of "Pte. J. Ball Sen of Liverpool", John James Ball. We have been researching the Ball family for thirty years and this is the first photo we have found of John James. We were both gobsmacked and annoyed with ourselves because we had first looked at this publication several years ago but had blinkers on as we were consulting it for a different purpose.

Needless to say we are both excited that John James in no longer  a Faceless Ancestor. Now we can look again at the few unlabelled Ball images we have to see if we can identify more for John James' gallery.

Don't bore their socks off

In response to a post from Carmel Reynen on Facebook recently.  Lisa Vassallo in a comment said "I would like to know what people are doing to keep it all going." The conversation was all about our family history research and passing it on. 

My lengthy response was along these lines (I have edited and formatted it since I posted on Facebook).

A favourite picture of my Mum

Interest waxes and wanes. With 16 descendants I hope someone inherits the geneabug. My children all follow my blog and are most interested when I share an ancestor story. 

I let grandchildren enter data into my family history program (after I have backed it up) and I let them search it. They love looking for people with their own forenames or funny names, those that share a birthday or seeing how many people come from a certain town, country or village. 

The kids have enjoyed looking at my family website and creating the ancestor and descendant charts available there. 

Two of my children and two of my teen grandchildren have done DNA tests. They enjoy hearing about the results after I have done the hard slog of working out the matches.. 

Ancestor and old photos are another turn on, I have them all digitised and sit at computer with kids and go through them. I find anything we can do together at a screen piques their interest. 

Clock made by an ancestor

We have obtained three grandfather clocks made by an ancestor. These are each in a family home and are a constant reminder of the kids' heritage. 


We willingly lend precious artefacts to grandchildren to take to Show and Tell at school (it's always a relief when the items are returned). 

Stories of our 10 naughty convict and other black sheep ancestors give them a giggle. They are also impressed by the few famous cousins in our tree.

Sharing family snippets from Trove gets a  response. 

I try not to bore the socks off family members but to create an environment that provides opportunities for them to learn about their heritage.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink!

Following Taneya's Tip

I love it when I pick up a really useful tip from another geneablogger.

Yesterday as I was catching up on some blog reading I came across a recent Tech Tuesday post from Taneya Koonce in which she talked about the organisation of her digital images. She mentioned that she had been a user of Picasa but that when Google withdrew support for that product she returned to an ACDSee  product she had used previously.

That post was so timely for me as I have been looking around for something to replace Picasa.  Picasa still works but I don't want to be in a situation where it may crash and I lose all the info I have added to my images with the program.

I immediately investigated the ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10 program by seeking out reviews and reading posts in user groups. There was a lot of positivity so I took advantage of the month's free trial and downloaded the program.

Playing with ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10

After 6 hours use I find that it is a sophisticated package that has some features I may never use but it does what I want and more. The tags I had assigned to all my images in Picasa have appeared in the IPTC Metadata keyword field. This was a major criteria for me, a feature that was essential. Being able to apply metadata that conforms to IPTC international standards is most important to this old librarian, I have spent most of my time today doing that. I have played around with retrieving images from my sample collection and that works well.

I only had to resort to the Help Menu a couple of times as I played with my photos from 2017 so I guess that means it is fairly intuitive.

ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10  is not cheap but is on special online for $USD99 until 17th January. I won't be parting with my money immediately. I'll play with the program a little more but I am confident that I have found a solution that suits my purposes.

A First Cousin Once Removed

Some time last year when Mr GeniAus tracked down the contact details of his father's first cousin he immediately contacted her by 'phone and asked would she mind if we visited some time.  Then life got in the way.

Finally on Sunday we made our way up the motorway to the Port Stephens region where the cousin resides. We had armed ourselves with some ancestor charts, a narrative on some of her Ball ancestors, copies of photos and some chocolate biscuits. Can you believe I left my camera behind in our accommodation in Newcastle? Luckily Mr GeniAus and I both had our mobile 'phones. I had my laptop in the car but didn't take it into the house initially as I didn't want to overwhelm this octogenerian. 

Mr GeniAus' Grandfather - there is a strong family resemblance

We organised our arrival for 10:00 am so the cousin wouldn't feel obligated to feed us. Of course we stayed longer and enjoyed lunch with the cousin and her husband. The cousin was most interested in her family history but didn't have any certificates or documents to share. She corroborated stories we had heard and gave us some names and dates that provided enough clues to track down references for some BDMs  and burials. She was able to help us identify some family members in our photos and we set her straight on one she had mislabelled. 

It was a Win-Win day - we came away with images of two studio photographs of Mr GeniAus' Great-grandmother one of which was with his Grandfather. This was so special because the only photos we have of these two are a couple of blurry amateur images. The cousin was delighted because of the documents we had prepared for her. 

The icing on the cake was when I fetched my computer from the car and read the cousin an account of her parents' wedding I had found on Trove. When we got home Mr G printed off a hard copy and have mailed it to her with a copy of her Grandmother's will.

I had a fun day today going through the notes and finding references including articles from Trove to add to my database.

Collaboration Rocks.

Aussie Images

As I cast around for images to use on my blogs and in presentations I want to respect copyright.

State Records NSW recently posted on Facebook some images  from the series NRS 15051 School photos. Of course I followed their link and  found some charming old images of  schools my parents attended.  I then did a further search for some family related towns and localities via The Photo Investigator Search and found a load of images that would enhance my writing.

When I saw the note "Reproduction rights: State Records NSW"  on the images I thought "Oh, bother" I can't use them legally.  Then I noticed at the bottom of the pages a Menu item "Copyright". I am so pleased that I followed the link.

I'm no lawyer but after reading their Copyright statement I believe I can use the above mentioned images if I append the description required by State Records NSW ie "© State of New South Wales through the State Records Authority of NSW".

You can read the Copyright Statement for yourself here http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/about-us/copyright-policy.

I am enhancing this post with a photo from the collection. I chose it because it is of a family group  in a rural setting going to school in 1929 and that is how my father and his siblings travelled to school at Bangaroo about that time. It would be perfect to illustrate a post about the Curry Children's school days.

This photo is described thus on the website:

Burdett Public School - members of Sid Nash family leave for school

Digital ID:	15051_a047_002044.jpg		Date:	c. 31/12/1929
Format:	Black and white photograph		Size:	160 KB
Source:	Item held at State Records NSW		Rights:	Reproduction rights: State Records NSW

© State of New South Wales through the State Records Authority of NSW

Stanmore Shame

After hearing Michelle Nichols talk at Hornsby Shire Family History Group last Wednesday and pondering on the value of photos to family historians Mr GeniAus thought it would be nice to offer some of his collection to his old primary school.

From Marrickville Library website

So last week he phoned Stanmore Public School and asked if they had an archivist. They didn't. Then he asked if there was anyone who looked after the school history and if there was anyone who would be interested in copies of his photos from the 1950s. I listened as he asked a series of questions of the person at the other end of the line and got the feeling there was no interest. I was right.

When he got off the 'phone I could just tell how disappointed Mr GeniAus was. Perhaps the person he spoke with may have been very busy or having a bad day but surely she could have taken his name and number and asked the principal, the teaacher librarian or folk in the staff room if anyone was interested.

We had a little chat and talked about other places that might show more interest. Mr GeniAus phoned the Marrickville Library and asked to speak to the local studies librarian. What a different response he got.  The librarian was definitely interested in the photos and would be delighted to have copies in the local history collection.  Digital copies will be on their way to Marrickville real soon and should find their way into the online collection there.

Kudos to Public Libraries and Librarians.

Trove Tuesday - Family Photos

I just came across this post from twelve months ago and as I liked the article so much I am reposting it.

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This week finds me knee-deep in photos. My cousin lent me a small suitcase of photos belonging to her parents Thomas William Curry and Lillian Duncan who were my parents' siblings. In that case I have found many treasures.

I wondered what Trove had to say about family photos. The following is an article from the Australian Women's Weekly in 1971. You can view the article here http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4890692.

1971 '[No heading].', The Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982), 23 June, p. 32, viewed 26 November, 2013, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4890692

I thought I had them all scanned...

...but they keep turning up.

Mr GeniAus recently produced this little snap taken in Sydney many moons ago with his big brother and requested that I scan it. As I was playing with the image I thought I'd share it - he was a little cutie.

Mr GeniAus and his big brother

Trove Tuesday - Christmas Shopping

Although I found several images from a search for "Christmas Shopping" on Trove most of them had copyright restrictions that prevented me from sharing them on this blog.

The image I have chosen is oneof the many from the Australian War Memorial's collection that comes with these Terms of Use "You do not have to seek permission to use the Memorial's images for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organisation. You must seek permission to use the Memorial's images for commercial publication."

The image is entitled "MELBOURNE, VIC. 1942-12-21. A MEMBER OF THE AIF HAS DIFFICULTY KEEPING HIS MONEY FROM HIS WIFE DURING A CHRISTMAS SHOPPING EXPEDITION."

Mr GeniAus can empathise with this serviceman. Times never change!

Thanks to The Australian War Memorial for allowing members of the public to share their photos.

My Dinky

Several weeks ago I reminisced about the Dinky I had as a child. From the requests for clarification I received I realised that "Dinky" was a local term and in a subsequent blog post I explained what a Dinky was.

Two weeks ago my cousin lent me a case of her late mother's photos that I have started to scan. Among the treasures I found were two photos (below) of "Little Jilly" riding her dinky at her Nana Curry's house just as I had described.

Thanks, Cousin Jane, I am enjoying your photos.

Trove Tuesday - Family Photos

This week finds me knee-deep in photos. My cousin lent me a small suitcase of photos belonging to her parents Thomas William Curry and Lillian Duncan who were my parents' siblings. In that case I have found many treasures.

I wondered what Trove had to say about family photos. The following is an article from the Australian Women's Weekly in 1971. You can view the article here http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4890692.

1971 '[No heading].', The Australian Women's Weekly (1933 - 1982), 23 June, p. 32, viewed 26 November, 2013, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page4890692

Is the joining of small images into one big image really as good as stated?

In a comment on my  Family History Through the Alphabet – F is for …Greedy  post where I sang the praises of Flip-Pal mobile scanners Sharon  asked "Is the joining of small images into one big image really as good as stated?"

Sharon, I wasn't sure that the stitching would be as good as the people from Flip-Pal stated so had to check it out. The results speak for themselves.

This was my very first stitching effort in which I stitched my early scans 0015 to 0018 together. It was a large photo (too big for an album). I am wondering if the kids will use it in a slideshow at my wake. 

Image 1 Old girl, Poor dolphin

I scanned and stitched this deteriorating old photo as a demo for a lady at The Shoalhaven Family History Fair last weekend. With a bit of tweaking in photo imaging software it should look pretty schmick. The lady bought a Flip-Pal on the spot.

Image 2 - Old photo

 Just in case the stitches previously done were flukes I grabbed the copy of Inside History Magazine that was in my laptop bag and scanned it just now.

Image 3 Inside History Magazine

You will note the raggy edges on Images 1 and 3, these are visible because I haven't cropped the images to get rid of the of the background on which the items were placed for scanning. On my Image 3 the baby's waving hand is out of focus as it is on the magazine cover.

Pretty Impressive!

Get fit and help others

How about taking a brisk walk around a local cemetery with your device in hand and contribute to the BillionGraves database?

This article has some great tips for taking better headstone pictures.
Million More in May: Picture-taking Tips « BillionGraves Blog

Do you know Jack Bales/Boles, Skewy Chefers or Jack Grant?

Taken in 1941 at East Hills according to the notation by my father on the reverse side this is a photo from his Army days. I think it may have actually been after July 1942 when my Dad joined the forces!

Allan John Curry (L) and mates Jack Bales/Boles, Skewy Chefers, Jack Grant

During 1942 Allan John Curry was stationed at Holsworthy Army Barracks near Liverpool in Sydney, NSW. I cannot find mention of a camp at East Hills so presume that the boys in this photo were at East Hills for some sort of swimming carnival or perhaps a bit of R&R. Maybe they were taking a dip in the nearby Georges River.

East Hills is just across the river from Holsworthy

I'd love to hear from anyone who knows the other boys in the photo. I am happy to send you a higher res of this image whose original is a typical tiny old print.

Do you know?

Following on the advice of Lorine McGinnis-Schulze I have been using my Flip-Pal to scan old photos while sitting on the couch watching television or babysitting.

I have just scanned several hundred of my Dad's many of which are labelled. There are some images of people I have never heard of - army mates, people from his home town, Canowindra, and some colleagues from the NSW Police Force. There are labelled images of places where he served in the war plus some great historical images of the Canowindra area. Similarly Mum has photos of people from her youth plus a few images of the Cobar area.  These images would be a valuable resource for those researching these people and places.

So, from time to time, on this blog I will post one of these photos and maybe someone with an interest might contact me. These posts probably won't be too relevant to my readers in the Northern Hemisphere but with luck they might just reach a relative over the seas.

Tag Queen

Tina Lyons in a comment on Google+ today indicated that she was tagging her photos. I commented asking what software she used and a conversation ensued. After I had written a very long comment I thought "wow - here is something I can share in a blog post with other genies"...... 


Tina indicated that "I'm using Adobe Lightroom. I needed something that would add the metadata to all my photos. It's easy to do batches and allows me to easily compare photos and delete doubles. Picasa is great for tagging people, but I needed something more robust for the metadata." Adobe Lightroom, is a product with a $AU136.40 pricetag. Now I am a cheapie and use free apps wherever I can. 


I use the free Picasa software. I'm sure Picasa isn't as sophisticated as Lightroom but I'll share my story for other cheap amateurs like me who may be interested. One can add some metadata beyond names with Picasa, it also deals with duplicate images and allows for batch processing.


Picasa deals admirably with the 85,000+ images I have  stored on an external HDD. I had previously used Photoshop Elements for tagging but it crashed regularly. When my collection reached 30,000 I took the advice of photographer, Peter Simon, who was conducting a photography course on a Regent cruise and moved to Picasa. Eighteen months on I am pleased with that decision.

Picasa Tags attached to a Grave Marker

In Picasa I tag people, places (city, country, church, name of place), activity (dancing, swimming, etc), things (places of Worship, Museums,food, restaurants, ships, birds etc) and events by name and I add a year tag for those that are scanned images. All of this metadata appears to be available when I share photos or view them in other software. Basically I tag the who, what, where, and why for each photo. I have encouraged family members to use Picasa so that when photos are shared there is some descriptive information attached.

A word of warning - the facial recognition data doesn't seem to move with an image so I always add a tag with a person's name - these do transfer.

Picasa will also "find duplicate images". This is a very handy tool for someone with as many pics as I have.

Picasa allows "batch editing to make the same edits to multiple photos at the same time". This is a very easy process and saves a lot of time. I use the batch tag to add a couple of generic tags like "London", "Wiggles Concert" or "Rootsech 2011" when I download the photos, I then go through the photos at a later date individually to attach more specific tags.


That Picasa now integrates with Google+ has given me another reason to use this tool. 


We all have different needs, backgrounds and budgets. How do you organise your photos to fit your situation?

Preserving Family Photographs: 1839 to the Present

I seem to repeat myself a lot but I believe that it's the early bird that catches the worm. This morning's catch was a fat and juicy one.

I awoke before the birds at 3:45 am to take part in the latest Legacy Family Tree Webinar " Preserving Family Photographs: 1839 to the Present" with Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective. The content of this webinar is relevant to anyone who is in possession of a family photo. Sometimes I do not take many notes in these webinars but today found me oohing and aahing while furiously writing notes.


Maureen's talk was well-structured and informative and supported by slides that summarised the content. As well as talking about Damage, Preservation and Conservation of various formats she covered Identification, Labelling, Sharing and Display of family photographs. For those who misssed the webinar it will be available until May 14, 2011 on the Legacy site.  

A few of the tips I noted were:

* Always wear cotton or non-latex gloves when handling photographs
* Never laminate photos
* Store photos in acid and lignin free containers ie Archival supplies
* Metal filing cabinets (without rust) are suitable for photo storage
* Scan your original photos at 600 dpi in tiff format at 100% scale
* Only edit copies of your original scanned images
* Use Glide (very fine) dental floss to remove photos from magnetic albums
* Always label photos on back using a very soft graphite pencil (old paper photos) or pen designed for the purpose


I suggest that you visit the Legacy site and listen to the presentation to pick up many more tips.

Maureen has written a book "Preserving Your Family Photographs" that is available from Amazon in the US. Unfortunately the latest edition is not available at Gould in Australia or my favourite online bookshop The Book Depository.

Recently I attended The Dropbox for Genealogists Webinar with Thomas MacEntee. Although this had less content then Maureen's paced session it was an informative and useful introduction to Dropbox that solved one or two issues that I had with the application. I have signed up for future webinars on Google Docs, Writing your family story and DNA. Sadly I'll be overseas for Maureen's next webinar  and won't be able to take part.

I am a great fan of these "free" webinars that give Australians opportunities to hear from internationally renowned speakers.  One has the option of purchasing a CD of the presentation after the event and, no doubt, many people do. There may also be available other material by the presenter that can be ordered from Legacy. I find that by watching the webinar on one computer and taking notes on another I am able to make meaningful notes and take part at no cost except for leaving a warm bed in the early morning hours.