The Cooroy-Noosa Genealogical and Historical Research Group has a long name, a long history (over a quarter century) and a huge catalogue of resources to share with the community.
For short, the members sometimes just call themselves The Genies and the things they do may indeed seem a bit magical at times.
Genealogy – the tracing of family lines – is more than just discovering the records of your great grandparents’ births, deaths and marriages.
It can mean an adoptee finding unknown relatives, or perhaps uncovering the reason an ancestor was transported to Australia, or finding out that your pedigree goes back to the House of Tudor.
The genealogy group is housed in the purpose-built Heritage Centre, opened five years ago on Emerald Street in Cooroy.
It contains a library of books, periodicals, maps and other resources dedicated to family history research and our local area’s heritage. It has a large network of computers with access to online and local databases. Helpful volunteers are regularly on duty to help newcomers with questions about documenting a family tree or finding a lost ancestor.
You can get help accessing websites such as Ancestry.com or finding historical accounts in old newspaper articles or navigating archives, libraries, census records and so on. There are special interest groups that meet regularly such as the Irish and Scottish heritage groups and a writers’ group.
There are regular guest speakers and workshops on subjects related to family history as well as general historical research.
Most recently a workshop called Understanding Old Handwriting was given by Lee Goleby.
She covered subjects such as old styles of punctuation, unusual spellings and translating from other languages. There was advice on using special dictionaries and online resources.
One of the most useful lessons the old handwriting workshop was how to build an alphabet chart for the particular document being transcribed. This involved finding examples in the document of each letter in the alphabet, using words you were able to read, and copying them into a chart. The chart would then help you read unfamiliar words more easily.
Anyone who has ever looked at an old, hand-written document will appreciate just how different it looks from modern handwriting, which itself is something we hardly ever encounter today.
Learning a skill like this is immensely helpful for a researcher reading an old will or the passenger list from a ship’s manifest.
The Heritage Centre, located at 17 Emerald Street Cooroy, is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 9am to 1pm. The public is welcome to use the facilities and attend workshops for a small fee.
For more information, drop in or ring during opening hours. Phone 31290356 or go online at genealogy-noosa.org.au.
