Ever hear that thing about how Angela Lansbury and Malcolm Turnbull are cousins? Through his mother Coral Lansbury? Well, here are all the ways in which they are NOT related to each other. Coral & Angela are NOT first cousins as stated here in this 1951 newspaper article (Carol/Coral, same letters, newspapers don’t care): *Side …
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The Daguerreotype
The Daguerreotype was popular between 1839 and 1860. The equipment was heavy weighing 50kg, cost a year’s wages and involved posing for 5 minutes but it spread like wildfire. The first one to be brought to Australia arrived in 1841 by a Captain Lucas. Do you have a Daguerreotype photo? It’s a one-off image on …
Newspapers
Trove is a completely free Australian resource of digitised newspapers and more. Trove is every researcher’s best friend. newspapers.com is not free but you can see some info without paying if you get your sneaky research skills on. It’s not complete and mostly has USA papers, some Canada and UK plus Aussie papers The Age …
Beginnings of photography
For hundreds of years, scientists and artists all over the world had been playing around with the camera obscura to project images and understand the properties of light and colour but no one could work out how to fix the image. Watch this to see the camera obscura in action: Then in the early 1800s, …
Births, Deaths and Marriages WORLDWIDE
To search for BDM records or Vital Records as they’re known in the US, Family Search, Ancestry and Find My Past are the places to go. Family Search is completely free, you just need to set up an account with them. Ancestry and Find My Past can be used for free at libraries. See if …
Before Photography
Most of us have old photos of strangely dressed people looking stern in a photo album or box somewhere. If you’re really lucky, they’ve been meticulously labeled with the names of the people in the photo and the date it was taken. Maybe even the place too! A lot of the time though, we’re left …
Births, Deaths and Marriages AUSTRALIA
Australia has state based historical BDM records available online. These archives will generally give you births up to 100 years ago, marriages up to 50-75 years ago and deaths up to 30 years ago. Read each site’s search tips to get the most out of them. You won’t want to buy every record unless you’re …
Kindred Secrets 