Memories of Covid-19

As restrictions due to the global pandemic ease for us in Australia, many archives and libraries are recording for future generations people's experiences of the crisis.  As family historians, we need to do the same thing and record our own experiences of this time.

The Covid19 pandemic has been (and still is) a major historical event.  For all of us who have lived through it, there will be memories of Covid, both positive and negative, that stand out.  There were, and still are, new routines, changes in how we live, work, communicate, shop, relax, learn, and more.  We will never forget the sight of police blockading state borders, images of empty streets at midday in our cities, the shock of walking into a supermarket and seeing panic buying or stripped shelves.  Then there are the more personal experiences - business closures and work stand downs, learning to work from home or change our daily routines.

Then there are the positive experiences.  Teddy bears and rainbows in windows, people standing at the end of their driveways on ANZAC Day, the joy of getting out and about after lockdowns ease.  For many of us the simple pleasures in life have taken on new significance as we rediscover them after the trial of lockdowns.

For myself, there are a number of memories I have recorded already.  Living in a border town, the sight of police on the bridge between our twin towns came as a shock the first time I saw them, even though I already knew they were there.  There was the shock and uncertainty of being stood down from my job, not once but twice.  The sight of neighbours all out standing at the end of their driveways for dawn service on ANZAC Day.  The friends who appeared on the road outside my house to sing 'Happy Birthday' to me (in an appropriately socially distanced manner) when my 50th birthday fell during the second big lockdown.

These stories are all part of my personal contribution to my family history and I hope that one day, years from now, family members will look back at the stories and emotions I have recorded and it will help them understand the impact Covid19 has had on our lives.

Scotlands People

ScotlandsPeople has announced that thousands of volumes of historical records from the collections of National Records of Scotland (NRS) are now available online for the first time.

Images of more than a million pages from the kirk session and other court records of the Church of Scotland can now be viewed and downloaded. These records contain details of key events in communities across the country between 1559 and 1900 and are one of the most important sources for Scottish historical research.

You are able to browse through the kirk session records for free, only using credits when you would like to save an image, as these records are made available without intensive indexing of their contents by personal name, place or other subjects.

ScotlandsPeople have also produced a series of guides to help you understand how to use the records and how to navigate the virtual volumes system. 

New on FamilySearch

Over the past year there have been a number of new and updated records added to the database at FamilySearch.  Below are some of the data sets added for Australia.  While not all records contain images, they are all available free and are well worth exploring.

Victoria Petty Sessions Registers 1858-1985

Court records extracted from several different Archival Series and held by the Public Record Office Victoria in North Melbourne, Australia. The records are arranged chronologically within each of the Magistrate Courts and contain brief details of minor criminal matters and committal proceedings.

Number of Records -  3,095,843

Australia Cemetery Inscriptions, 1802-2005

Cards of cemetery inscriptions from many cemeteries throughout Australia. The majority of the cemeteries are in Queensland, but there are some in New South Wales, Norfolk Island, Tasmania, and Western Australia. Some cards include information culled from local newspapers which sometimes include birth and marriage announcements. The cards are sometimes in reverse alphabetical order and there are sometimes many interfiled cards which do not belong to the sequence--generally these have a slash mark across the cards that do not belong in the sequence. The file was the product of many years of work by Jim and Alison Rogers.

Number of Records - 1,124,411

Victoria Coastal Passenger Lists, 1852-1924

Coastal passenger lists from Victoria, Australia. The original lists are located in the Public Records Office of Victoria, North Melbourne, Australia.

Number of Records -  3,244,620

South Australia, Immigrants Ship Papers, 1849-1940

Immigrants ships papers containing a record of births and deaths aboard, 1849-1867 and 1873-1885. Indexed records in collection include passenger lists arriving and departing from South Australia. Information on images varies but may include ship's name, master's name, tonnage, where bound, date, port of embarkation, names of passengers, ages, occupation, nationality, and port at which passengers have contracted to land. Original records in the State Records of South Australia, Adelaide.

Number of Records - 595,565

Queensland Cemetery Records, 1802-1990

An index which combines several indexes, cemetery transcriptions, burial and other records from cemeteries in Queensland. This collection also contains small portions of New South Wales, Norfolk Island, Tasmania, and Western Australia.

Number of Records - 2,168,409

New South Wales, Assisted Immigrants Inwards, 1828-1890

This collection contains assisted immigrants inwards to Sydney, Australia from 1828-1890.

Number of Records - 263,719

 

Who Do You Think You Are Australia

A new season of Who Do You Think You Are Australia premiers on SBS Thursday 19 May with 8 new episodes scheduled.  This is the eleventh series of the popular family history program, which originally premiered in 2008.  The show follows the same format as the popular British series and follows several celebrities as they trace their own families.

It has been announced that the celebrities featured in series 11 will be Lisa Wilkinson, Bert Newton, Cameron Daddo, Lisa Curry, Denise Scott, Kat Stewart, Julie Bishop and Troy Cassar-Daley.

Over the years I have greatly enjoyed watching this program and the insights it provides into genealogical research and social history, while also being slightly envious of all the expert help the celebrity participants enjoy.  The twists and turns of each individual's family story and the emotional journey of their discoveries is fascinating watching and helps re-inspire me to continue my own researches.  Well worth marking in your diary.

Traces Magazine

The latest issue of Traces magazine is out now and is available free in digital form from Campaspe Regional Library via our eMagazines from Libby.  Ask our staff for more information or for help to download the magazine onto your PC, tablet or iPad.

Launched in December 2017, Traces is the only quarterly printed magazine dedicated to providing its readers with insight into the latest historical research, news and heritage projects taking place around Australia. The expert voices of historians, researchers, heritage professionals, genealogists, and journalists uncover the fascinating characters and stories of our past.

Focusing on Australian history, this edition features 

• Melbourne's most notorious gangster
• A Hobart Town love triangle
• The story of Aboriginal exemption
• And more
  

WDYTYA Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines. 

Inside this month’s issue

• Family history software
  Discover the best software to research and record your family tree with our buyers’ guide
• The Society of Genealogists
  Else Churchill explains how the UK’s national family history society has adapted to thrive during lockdown
• Australian ancestry
  The best websites for family history research down under
• Gibraltar records
  How to trace your family history on the Rock
• Eureka moment
  How WDYTYA? reader Sarah Fuller uncovered a family history that reads like a Catherine Cookson novel
• Plus…
  How to find a missing street address, understanding Irish tithe applotment books, the lives of silk workers and much more…

The Pandemic One Year In

It has now been over a year since the emergence of Covid-19 changed our world in so many ways.  While here in Australia we have certainly not seen the worst of the pandemic, it has nonetheless had a massive impact on our daily lives.  there have been lockdowns, border closures, limits on meeting numbers, business closures and stand-downs at work, and the daily stress of not knowing how long the restrictions will last.  Living in a border town, seeing police on the bridge and helping people fill out border passes at the library where I work is something I will never forget.

Genealogically speaking, the biggest impact for me has been the loss of face-to-face meetings.  How I have missed chatting face-to-face with Genea-mates and the networking and idea sharing that goes hand in hand with meetings and conferences.  Online meetings just are not the same.

Despite the down side of online meetings, however, the rise of virtual conferences has allowed me to attend inter-state and overseas meetings that I would never have been able to attend in reality.  The genealogical community has pulled together, made use of the internet like never before, and been a huge step in providing so many of us isolated at home with interest, stimulation and contact.

The list of those who have made information and resources available online during the pandemic seems almost endless.  Rootstech went completely virtual last month - not to mention also completely free.  Ancestry allowed many libraries and other institutions to allow Ancestry Library Edition to be accessed remotely by members when the normal in-house only use became impossible due to closures.  Family History Down Under, an Australian genealogy conference scheduled for later this month in Queensland, has also gone virtual, as has the Really Useful Family History Show in the UK in April.  The National Archives UK has made all their digital records free to access while they are closed.  The list goes on.

The efforts of all these groups and companies in taking their services online cannot be underestimated, and I would like to send a huge thank you to them all, those I have mentioned in this post and the many, many others.  You have helped keep us sane over the past year - kept us researching, learning, chatting and helping each other.  Well done to you all.

What's new of Trove

The newspapers listed below have recently been digitised and made available in Trove. Note that the year range listed for the item is an indication of what's currently available in Trove, and not always the full year range the item was published.

NSW Newspaper titles

• NOTA - News Of The Area (Hawks Nest & Tea Gardens, NSW) 1970-1999
• Nowra Colonist (NSW) 1899-1904
• The Telegraph and Shoalhaven Advertiser (NSW) 1879-1881
• Windsor & Richmond Gazette (NSW) 1888-1961

VIC Newspaper titles

• Box Hill Reporter (Vic) 1925-1930
• The Reporter (Box Hill, Vic) 1889-1925
• The Brunswick and Coburg Leader (Vic) 1914-1921
• Mildura Telegraph and Darling and Lower Murray Advocate (Vic) 1913-1920

WA Newspaper titles

• Dampier Herald (Kununoppin, WA ) 1928 - 1937
• Cathedral Chronicle (Geraldton, WA ) 1931 - 1954
• Corrigin Chronicle and Kunjin-Bullaring Representative (WA) 1925 - 1943
• Weekly Judge (Perth, WA) 1919-1931

Beyond 2022 : Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury

June 30th, 2022, marks the centenary of the explosion and fire at the Four Courts, Dublin, which destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) and, with it, centuries of Ireland’s collective memories and records.

The losses in that historic fire include records of the payment of taxes, the enactment of laws, births, marriages and deaths, wills, maps, parish registers and town records from across the island.
Beyond 2022 is an international collaboration to launch a Virtual Record Treasury for Irish history—an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury destroyed in 1922.

Across the globe, more than seventy repositories hold substitute materials that can replace the documents destroyed in the Four Courts blaze.  Thanks to pioneering digitization techniques, the project aims to automatically transcribe large volumes of handwritten records, allowing users to connect, group and search diverse records from archives across Ireland and the World.

The Beyond 2022 team is working to assemble a complete inventory of loss and survival of the 1922 fire. In doing so, the team has identified ten main categories of surviving or substitute sources:

• Survivors: records that survived almost unscathed because they were held in the Reading Room of the Public Record Office, not the Record Treasury itself
• Salved records: records damaged by the fire, but not completely destroyed, now in varying states of conservation
• Duplicates of original records now held in partner archives
• Facsimile images made before 1922
• Antiquarian transcripts
• Printed editions
• Certified copies
• Published calendars summarizing the contents of the records
• Unpublished calendars in manuscript form
• Legal abstracts

Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury will gather into a single database all the information it can about these substitute sources from archives and libraries in Ireland and internationally. The entire archive will be fully searchable, with its contents ranging from basic descriptions to fully restored records ranging in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This is a truly stunning project which will help ease the frustration of many researchers trying to trace lost Irish ancestors, and significantly fill the gaps in Ireland's history that the fire created.