Conduct a search on Primo or Trove to see the wide range of sources that are brought together by these federated search engines. What have you observed?

Inspired by our recent spate of bad weather, I decided to search for information about Camden’s history of flooding by using the phrase “Camden floods” to search Trove’s databases.

I found it interesting that Trove organises the results by categories. The Newspapers & Gazettes, Magazines & Newsletters, and Images, Maps & Artefacts sections would be very useful for people researching local or family history, but they could be potentially overwhelming for our students (especially those with literacy issues). Each category only shows three resources and while it is possible to click a button to view more results in that category, I can’t see many of my students doing this. Nonetheless, it presented me with some interesting resources which satisfied my curiosity and taught me something about my home town. Some of my favourites were an article dating from 1890, and historic photos from the 40s and 50s. I wouldn’t necessarily be able to find these resources searching via Google!

Because of the apparent usefulness of these resources to genealogists, I decided to type my last name in to see what would appear. The first result was an article from The Sun in 1926 about one of my ancestors’ weddings – a lovely surprise! I can see myself having a lot of fun with this wonderful resource! Clicking through on one article I could see that it had a scan of the original article, next to a transcription which had been indexed into the database. One thing I noticed is that spelling of the indexed resources will make a difference to the search results. Because my ancestors were illiterate Irish convicts there’s a lot of ways our last name can be spelled in the records, as you can see from this article about a rather exciting and tragic thunder storm in 1861: