My father would be appalled

My father was a very old-fashioned type, a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, a dour Calvinist in thought but not in action, but mostly, he was a very private man. He died, 51 years ago, thinking he took his secret to the grave.

It seems that a couple of years before he married my mother, he was engaged to somebody else, and while the record was there in the newspapers, who would ever bother to poke around in the SMH for 1941?

The problem is that we have a fairly unusual spelling of our surname, and the National Library of Australia has been putting "historic" newspapers (that means 1803 to 1954, though sometimes they reach later) online.

I'm a bit of a power user of the service, and I was idly searching on our surname when the engagement notice bobbed up. It's not a highly interesting item: probably they just didn't hit it off, or she found a Yank or something. The interesting thing to me is that even though he probably never even told my mother about this, I now know. Our world is changing...

I just idly typed in my surname, which has an odd spelling, and flushed an amazing number of hits out of the papers: the funeral of a grandfather, the death of a great-aunt at two months who was, I think, unknown to anybody, the weddings of uncles and births of cousins — and that engagement.

I have also managed to trace the outline of my great-grandfather's insolvency, though there's more to learn there, and I won't be chasing it in a hurry, because family history isn't high on my list of things to do, but the option is there. I just use my search skills to flag stuff so that others with my surname can access it easily, should they wish to do so.

The interesting thing is that the National Library has the newspapers scanned by machine, but then allows registered users to correct the text. The top four contributors have corrected more than 10 million lines between them, while I'm just over the half-million mark, but most of mine relate to the periods and topics I research for books.

Occasionally I need to really chase something down, and in those cases I add comments that will help other researchers that come after me. In other words, it's one of those collaborative things that historians will look back on as the real heart of the internet. I also create a lot of lists, also with annotations.

Interestingly, it appears that everything I do is available if you know how to look for it. Unlike my father, I have no illusion that I have that many secrets. I just have to put the best spin on them that I can.

The link? http://trove.nla.gov.au/ I recommend a day spent playing with it!

If nothing else, you will get some idea about what your descendants may be able to find out about you.