I loved it from the start!

Inside History magazine launched in Nov-Dec 2010, and this month is celebrating that 5 year birthday by giving away 5 subscriptions per day for 5 days. I was thrilled to be the lucky winner of one of those subscriptions. I've subscribed since its launch, so I'm happy-dancing about my win.

The magazine is issued bimonthly, which gives the publishers enough time to pack each issue with so many goodies that us genies love, such as little articles on what people are researching, book reviews and author interviews, as well as Ask our experts, what events are coming up in the family history world, reviews of genealogy apps that might be useful or time-saving for us, newly released datasets from the big companies like Ancestry.com.au, the university libraries, as well as Trove.

Articles about Australian history an genealogy are especially well written, and I always learn something that I didn't know about that time period, looking for my own ancestor's surnames as I read, of course.

As well as this, the magazine is printed on beautiful thick paper, and when it arrives I always smooth my hand over the cover to enjoy the quality feel.

It's available in print and digital format subscriptions, at the newsagent and most big family history events, and hopefully even your local library has it for borrowing. If your library has magazine subscription app called Zinio you might be lucky enough to find it there too.

There is also a Facebook page that links to the magazine, and the website features even more information such as guest blogs, historical articles, author Q&A, and WW1 soldier spotlights.

Thanks to Cassie and Ben Mercer and their team for producing such a fabulous magazine.

If you haven't already read Inside History, give it a try. You won't be disappointed!

She did have a cute nose, though!

I found this funny piece while I was Troving the other day, searching for any snippets I could find about my ancestor, Esther Salamon/Spencer/Stubbs/Bigge. I'm not sure how useful it would actually be to have the capacity for looking around two opposite corners simultaneously. Maybe the excess alcohol helped. I couldn't find much about her elsewhere on Trove. One lady of the same name was charged with infanticide, so I hope it wasn't this damsel. Poor Jane.

Trove article from The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 12 May 1832

I love Trove, but sometimes ......

I don't know of one genie out there who doesn't love Trove for newspaper searches related to our ancestors, but sometimes, no matter how well we fill in the search fields the article we know is there just won't show up. This was the case for my gg-grandmother, Ada MORRANT (1864 - 1913). I'll write her story another day, as it's quite a doozy. 

I was searching for any kind of death notice in the paper for her,  so I was typing my fingers down to stubs on Trove, looking for her using a name-based search. Nothing. I tried variations on the spelling of her married name, Barrett, as well as her own name, Morrant - still nothing. I KNEW it was in a newspaper because I'd found it on the wonderful Ryerson Index, another resource us Aussies are lucky to have at our disposal.

Ryerson Index result for Ada Barrett's funeral notice

Luckily, there is more than one way to skin a cat (apologies to cat lovers). Instead of searching using Ada's name, I searched as if I was reading an actual paper edition of the Sydney Morning Herald for 27 December 1913, and virtually turned each page until I got to the Funeral Notices. And there she was. 4 times! How Trove didn't OCR these entries correctly I'll never know, but at least Ada was there, and well loved by her children and friends judging by the notices.

Sydney Morning Herald funeral notices 27 Dec 1913

So even though I've had a whinge about Trove in the past here, still