Family History Month
Published on 11 July 2025
We're celebrating Family History Month in August with an invitation to everybody who’s thought about looking into their family history but didn’t know where to start.
Are you new to family history research?
On Tuesday 5 August at 2pm, professional historian Alicia Cerreto will introduce you to a range of online resources, and provide tips and tricks for researching your family, including how to keep track of your research. This workshop will be held at Parkdale Library and bookings are open now.
You can also book a one-on-one tutorial session with one of our skilled librarians, who will take you through the wide range of library resources available.
Have you been researching your family history for a while?
Then join one of our monthly sessions where we explore the practice of history. Bookings are open for the rest of the year, with a waitlist available for fully booked sessions.
We have plenty for you to read and explore as well.
This year, renowned Australia author Kate Grenville released her own family history. Unsettled: A journey through time and place is the recounting of Grenville’s family history through a personal pilgrimage to the places those stories happened. We’ve already seen fictionalised glimpses of her family history in The Secret River (2005), but her new book explores her own discomfort with living on stolen land. Unsettled intentionally puts First Peoples back into Grenville’s stories of family and the places they knew, and changes everything she thought she knew.
Unsettled is available in printed book format, eBook and eAudiobook.
Another big literary name to recently publish a family history is David Marr. His Killing for Country: A family story (2023) is told in a more familiar fashion but is relentless in its brutality and resurfacing of family shame. Knowledge about the family’s involvement with the Native Police and massacres in Queensland stopped with Marr’s great-grandmother, Maud Uhr. Marr uncovers it all and publishes it for the world to see, breaking the silence and creating a deliberate remembering where deliberate forgetting once existed.
Killing for Country is available in printed format, eBook and eAudiobook.
As well as these stories (and plenty more besides), we’ve got loads of books and resources exploring the mechanics of family history research, not just the retelling of it.
Join us for our introductory workshop, get yourself on the waitlist for our regular family history sessions, or work through our catalogue of stories and advice. Whatever way you do, get into your family history.
Find out more