Not much escapes the watchful eye of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or any other social media platform these days. What you had for breakfast this morning, your relationship status, and that silly mistake you made the other day is all out there for the whole digital world to see.

Was it a better world without social media?

• Would my fourth-great-grandfather have achieved viral-status if his arrival in Australia as a convict in 1797 had been posted on Facebook?
• Would my great-grandfather’s relationship status have said ‘it’s complicated‘ if his marriage in South Africa in 1902 had appeared on his social media account, given that he had abandoned the wife he married in Australia in 1901?
• Would family history research be easier today if every tiny, sordid little detail of our ancestor’s lives had been posted up on social media?

I wonder…?

Perhaps the forerunner of Facebook was the District Doings in the local newspaper, as it was called in my home town when I was young. Someone would take on the role of town reporter and report on everything, from the price farmer Joe paid for a bull at auction, to how many stitches young Carol received when a wayward bucket, hurled by her cousin, made contact with her unsuspecting head.

I’ve found notable mentions of family members in District Doings in my old childhood neighbourhood, as well as the marital problems of a distant cousin in 1845, on Trove. Trove is a valuable online resource that houses the contents of long-forgotten newsworthy items from the early days of Australia’s colonised history, captured in the newspapers of the day.

By typing my great-grandmother’s name into Trove, I was able to piece together vital information to discover the biological father of my grandmother – the man my great-grandmother actually married, and it wasn’t the man we’d grown up thinking it was.

Social media, as we know it, wasn’t around in 1797 to immortalise the momentous occasion of my convict fourth-great-grandfather’s arrival in Australia, but more primitive methods were. In good old cursive form, Thomas Tabor’s name was etched into the history books via the manifest of the convict ship he arrived in. The trial that decided his fate in a far-off land was recorded in detail and is now accessible through the Old Bailey online site. Fortunately for those of us researching family history, a lot of those old records have been preserved.

But, will social media still be a reliable source of information in years to come? Will the words on this blog post be found in a Google search by my future great-great-grandchildren? Will Trove still be scanning and digitising newspapers in the next century?

We can only hope so…