Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Friday, September 28, 2012

Trove -- Too Bad We're Not All From Australia


Trove, the website of the National Library of Australia, has, as of today, 310,226,952 Australian and online resources. Too bad we aren't all Australians, although I am sure they are glad we are not. As a matter of fact, some of my ancestors came to the United States from Australia in my Parkinson and Bryant lines, although they were not natives, having immigrated from England. I still have relatives that live in Australia and a niece that lives near Perth. When I was younger, I dreamt about going to Australia and particularly digging for opal in Coober Pedy. Now that I am much older, it looks like this is one dream that will never come true.

I have mentioned this website before several times, but it bears repeating. It is an example of what can be done if the powers that be are convinced that digital records are important. Here is a breakdown of the Trove collections:
Journals, articles and research139813780
Books17347395
Maps386375
Diaries, letters, archives529811
Lists27741
Music, sound and video2472666
Digitised Newspapers and more73829387
People and organisation908499
Pictures, photos, objects4812909
Archived websites (1996 - now)70126130
Total310254693
If you don't have Australian relatives, you still can find some gems of information and families extending back into England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I have even found entries by my genealogical blogging friend, Jill Ball.

2 comments:

  1. The beauty of TROVE is that volunteers are continually editing the text created during the digitization process making it more and more useful as time goes by.

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  2. James, We'd love to see you in Australia some time - it's never too late!

    Thanks for giving TROVE a plug - it is the most amazing resource and as Rosemary mentions a very successful crowdsourcing project continues to correct the OCR text to make it even more useful.

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