About me

Jeff Madsen’s great grandfather Martin Madsen, was born in Denmark and arrived in Newcastle, NSW in May 1877 as a crew member of the barque Avona.

On his mother’s side he is researching his great, great, great grandfather Thomas Griffiths who was sailing schooners out of Hobart between 1839 and 1850 before being lost at sea, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean sailing to San Francisco.

He spent 18 years preparing maps and building databases for the NSW Office of Water and was involved in a family company selling GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, as well as providing consulting and training services.

He has also been a user of the Historical Land Records Viewer (HLRV) since 1999 and is now using it to research historical land records to enhance family research.

Jeff also has an interest in digitising records and images due to the large photographic collection left by his wife’s grandfather who was a professional photographer with a studio at Ashfield. He left a legacy of glass negatives, photo albums, celluloid negatives, diaries and 16mm movies. This collection is now being digitised.

He has lived at Gymea Bay for the last 54 years with his wife Roberta. He is a member of Botany Bay Family History Society, Society of Australian Genealogists, Newcastle Family History Society.


Many are the changes in technology in that time.