Tinsel Town

As I was looking for a cemetery photo to adorn a post on the Geneadictionary I came across this photo of Ben Hall the Bushranger's grave in Forbes Cemetery.  I snapped this image in April last year when visiting my Great-Grandmother's grave.

Tinsel Town!

I can't fathom why the grave was adorned with Christmas Tinsel in April.

Another grave photo

Trove Tuesday - Coming soon

Browsing through the list of newspapers on Trove I was delighted to see that Cowra Free Press (NSW : 1911 - 1921) had been added to the collection as my grandparents, great-parents and great-great grandparents lived in the district from the 1880s to the 1950s. 

I put a simple search into Trove for CURRY and of course got a few recipes but some also some articles mentioning the name CURRY.

Imagine my frustration when I found this reference to my Great-great-grandmother:

Coming soon!

I do have an unsourced newspaper obituary for Bridget but wonder if this is the same or if it will contain extra information. I guess I'll just have to bide my time.

Twice in one week....

....it's almost too much for an old girl to bear.

Earlier this week I wrote about a response I had to my one of my "Do you Know...?" blog posts.  I often hear from other people via comments on this blog or my family web site.

A recent comment on my "I Found it in Forbes" blog post sent shivers up my spine. For over 20 years I have been trying to gather more information on my Great-Great-Grandmother's family to no avail. A name like Bridget Ryan made my task rather difficult. My trip to Forbes unearthed an obituary that gave me a few clues about which I blogged. On Wednesday this comment appeaered on my post:

Now aren't I fortunate to have an Ancestry.com account! I hopped on to that site and found details of extra siblings for Bridget and some family stories.

And you know what I am going to do?  Commit what some other genealogists see as a Mortal Sin - I am going to copy this information into my database and publish it online before I check my sources. I will then set aside a few hours to do a bit of research on these new cousins and add sources as I find them because my online tree is a work in progress that I share with others. If others choose to copy my erroneous infrmation they do it at their peril.

But I digress. The purpose of this post was to share my excitement and stand on my virtual pedestal to promote social media as a marvellous means of making cousin connections.

Fab Find in Forbes

For our homeward journey from Congress in Adelaide we took the long way round. We had never visited the outback City of Broken Hill but had been wanting to do so for a number of years. Taking this route through western New South Wales provided, in addition to some sightseeing, an opportunity to visit a few cemeteries.

In Broken Hill I looked for my grandmother's sister's grave but could not find her listed in the Broken Hill Cemetery database even though I have her funeral notice indicating that she was buried in the Catholic Section of that Cemetery. I did, however, locate a few graves of more distant relatives in that cemetery.

My Great-Grandparent's headstone in Cobar

Our next stop was Cobar where I wanted to get better quality images of my Duncan Great-Grandparents' grave. This we accomplished early in the morning after we had been repelled by the over 100f. temperatures on the afternoon we arrived. I also wanted to locate Elsinore, the property my grandparents, my  mother and the family lived on in the 1920s and 1930s. The staff at Great Cobar Heritage and Visitor Information Centre went out of their way to help us but we were unable to locate Elsinore on maps in the Centre. I was pleased to see that there was a huge photo of my Granddfather's catering truck in one of the displays and in another display a large photo of Gertrude Pusell, another of my grandmother's sisters.


About another 300 km down the road was Forbes. I knew that my Great-Great-Grandmother, Bridget Curry (Nee Ryan), was buried in the cemetery there and wanted to visit and take a photo. While we were travelling along I discovered on the internet that The Forbes Family History Group was open yesterday, Wednesday; we did not tarry as I was keen to visit the group to see if they could direct me to the grave and hopefully give me some other information on the family. I have never been able to locate any information about Bridget's family or her immigration as there are so many girls named Bridget Ryan in the NSW immigration records.

Volunteers at work - Forbes Family History Group

 As I gingerly opened the door of the centre I was greeted by laughter and happy chatter; tiptoeing into the room I found around ten people working away at tables and computers. They appeared to be engrossed in indexing tasks. I was greeted warmly and within ten minutes a volunteer, Jan, had found the grave location in their cemetery index. Another volunteer was concurrently looking in other files for me; she found an obituary for Bridget. At first I wasn't too impressed as I already had an obituary from the Sydney newspaper that didn't tell me much; then I stopped and read the proffered obituary; it was a more detailed one from the local, Forbes Times. I let out a squeal.

Bridget Curry (nee Ryan) Obituary

For twenty years I had been trying to find out more about Bridget and this scrap of paper gave me some wonderful leads. It listed Bridget's children confirming their places of residence in 1911. The best piece of information was that she had a brother who was a pioneer priest in New South Wales. From using the clues supplied in this article I have, in a couple of hours, found so much about the interesting life of Rev Michael Harrington Ryan and also that Bridget had a sister who had emigrated to the Colony with her husband Peter Birmingham in 1842. Once I can get to some libraries and use print resources I should be able to add more branches and leaves to my tree. I also need to go through the microfilm of The Forbes Times to see if I can get a clearer copy of the document.

Forbes Family History Group

I was so impressed with the collection at The Forbes Family History Group; it isn't a collection that is rich in published print resources, its strength is in the huge collection of locally prepared indexes and files that were stored around the walls in A4 folders. I am ever so grateful to the volunteers in that group who have devoted many hours to developing these local resources.

I cannot express how thankful I am for the work done by The Forbes Family History Group.