A gift to you from Twigs of Yore (and son)

If you are the type to rip the paper off with abandon, go ahead and click here. If you always read the card first, carry on.

My 10 year old son (who was last mentioned on this blog snapping shots with the Billion Graves app) wants to be a coder when he grows up. I keep telling him that, once he has the skills, he can build my perfect genealogy software. He seems to have accepted this fate. Either that, or he thinks I’m joking*.

So one day, when Mr 10 was looking for ideas to code, I asked him to work out how to build a web form with a button that would return different search strings depending on what was entered. I wanted such a thing because late last year I analysed historical birth notices in Trove and came up with conclusions about an effective search approach to use. In short, the best results were obtained by running a series of searches with the surname and one other relevant search term in close proximity.

Mr 10 quickly worked it out and obliged with the coding. We are excited to present to you the ….

Trove Helper

Merry Christmas!

 

* I am joking. Mostly. Partly. A little bit.

Victorian Places

I’ve just come across the excellent Victorian Places website, which was produced by Monash University and the University of Queensland.

The site blurb says:

“This is a website containing the history of all the places in Victoria (Australia) that have now or once had a population over 200 at any time since the establishment of Victoria as a British colony.”

The entries I looked at were everything a genealogist hoping to be spoonfed basic contextual information about an ancestral place could desire. I think I’ll be making heavy use of the site.

New on Ancestry–Victoria, Australia, Rate Books

Now THIS will keep me busy! The Rate Books collection is from the Public Record Office of Victoria, but with the advantages of Ancestry’s search features (which I think are actually pretty good).

Victoria, Australia, Rate Books, 1855-1963

Something I would like to see is an easy way to see all the record sets on Ancestry that are sourced from a particular archive. eg a quick way to see what else they have from the Public Record Office of Australia. I know of a few PROV collections on there – I wonder what else I’m missing? Do you know of a way?