Shona Lewis and Marie Hickey, attended the first NZ Family History Fair in Hamilton, representing the Auckland Research Centre, Auckland City Libraries as exhibitors. It was organised by the New Zealand Society of Genealogists, who the Auckland Research Centre has a close relationship with.
Article from Shona Lewis -
It started off on the Friday, with registrations, and the setting up of exhibition stands, followed up by the NZSG AGM meeting. In the evening, the Governor General, Anand Satyanand, and Mayor of Hamilton Bob Simcock, attended the opening ceremony and dinner with a full Maori welcome.
The Fair started on Saturday morning with seminars being run throughout the day over both days of the weekend. Marie and I alternated between looking after the stand and attending seminars.
We had probably the best position right at the entrance to the exhibition hall and right next door to the main NZSG stand; which meant we attracted a lot of exhibitors.
Our stand was decorated with posters and flyers of our Family History events, and leaflets promoting our Family History collections, as well as a few promoting Specials and the Library as a whole. We had a Powerpoint presentation running on loop on the datashow, which showed off our digital library and what sort of information could be found within, and again, slides of our posters about our FH events.
The datashow proved very successful at pulling people into the stand, and allowed us the opportunity of being able to do live demonstrations on the other laptop of how to search on our digital library. On Saturday morning alone, I managed to find a total of SIX ancestors for researchers - immensely satisfying!
The seminars were of good quality - they covered all different topics and were relevant for the beginner right through to the more experienced researcher. As I often present to the public these days, it was of interest to me to watch the different presenting styles. Of value, too, was getting insight and inspiration of what might prove useful for future family history lunchtime sessions.
For me, personally, the most useful tip I learned was to use a different colour folder, box etc, for each branch of my family tree, and to start a new folder for each member of the family once they got married. That way you can tell at a glance which branch they belong to. Useful, as my personal research has got so large, its become quite hard to manage.
The Fair closed at 5pm on Sunday - and was extremely successful. Well in excess of 1000 people visited the Fair over the two days, and its hoped that it will be held again in two to three years time.
Article from Marie Hickie -
I recently attended the inaugural New Zealand Society of Genealogists Family History Fair which was held at Te Rapa.
The week-end included a series of talks lasting about ½ hour each and there were stalls showcasing a variety of exhibitors – Auckland Research Centre included.
I managed to attend three talks over the course of the week-end, these were about Archives New Zealand, Resources in Australia and Unusual New Zealand resources. The talk on Archives New Zealand and Australian resources were very interesting.
Shauna Hicks reminded us that there are virtually no central records for Australia so it is necessary to know when the state came into being and how it was governed prior to that date as the records would be located at the appropriate archives. Graham Langton spoke about the popular records such as wills, pre 1920 army personnel files, passenger lists, notices of intention to marry etc and how Archives New Zealand works. Robyn Williams’ talk on unusual New Zealand resources stressed that you should also “think outside of the box” with your family history research and looking at alternative sources such as school magazines/histories, church/local histories, gazettes etc to get a more rounded view of life in the times of your forebears.
One of the highlights was the Who do you think you are? Presentation by Jan Gow at the official dinner on Friday night which highlighted the family of the Topp Twins – Jools was present as were her parents.
A thoroughly but busy week-end.
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