Who were our female immigrants (convict and free) and how do we write their stories once they step ashore?

Who were our female immigrants (convict and free) and how do we write their stories once they step ashore?

This is the topic of my first talk on the 4th Unlock the Past Cruise (our first day at sea, hopefully after a good nights sleep Tuesday night)...on Wednesday at 3.30pm, check your program for the venue.  Here is a summary of my talk:

The forced and voluntary emigration of women to Australian began with the first fleet. Unassisted and assisted female emigrants arrived in Australia as wives, daughters and mothers, mostly within a family group. While still under sentence convict women can be traced via marriage applications, assignment registers, conditional pardon lists, convict indents, and tickets-of-leave. Immigration records can provide a starting point for researching women as they faced the rigours of living and working in a new land. It is when they were freed and able to marry, travel interstate and re-locate elsewhere, that research becomes more difficult. Using the sources and resources from her book Finding Florence, Maude, Matilda, Rose: Researching and Writing about women in family history (Unlock the Past) Noeline will provide insights, understandings, resources and some questions you might ask to better track the lives of women and children as they leave their place of origin, sail across the seas and then step ashore to disappear into the bush, the family and far flung communities.  Noeline will draw on her many years as a historian of women and the family history to outline some basic techniques for finding the stories of women in this very early period of Australian colonial history.

This is the first of two talks I will be presenting on researching and writing women into family history.  The second talk titled:

Haven in a heartless world! Researching and writing about the family, women and children

will be presented on the last day of our cruise, on Friday 12th at 4.30pm as we sail back up the coast towards Sydney after a glorious visit to Hobart and environs.

A summary of this talk:

The family has been called a ‘haven in a heartless world’ but it is also much more than that; it is the place where women and children are located, where we find them as we go about our family history research . Using the sources and resources from her book Finding Florence, Maude, Matilda, Rose: Researching and Writing about women in family history (Unlock the Past) Noeline will guide you through the range of strategies useful for researching and then writing about the women and children in your family. Thinking about and understanding relationships between men and women, husbands and wives, and parents and children  will help you research and write and place your female characters more precisely in their historical and social contexts. Many of you will want to write about one female ancestor, perhaps to highlight her story within the final family history. The primary aim of this talk is to help you do just that.

I know that many genies do want to research and write more fully about their female ancestors so come along and take part.

See you there.