Week 44 (Oct. 29-Nov. 4) Rural

Earlier #52Weeks (Week 32) the focus was 'Wide Open Spaces' and I wrote about being born on a sheep station called Para and growing up in the country.

Para Homestead

Many of my ancestors lived in rural areas.  My father's family had strong ties to Fordham Hall (also called Manor Farm) in Essex, being tennants at the Hall for several generations.  Although they were not the owners, they were major local landholders and were the gentry of their small community.

Fordham Hall, Essex

 

The Green family of Fordham Hall farmed the land, kept a pack of foxhounds,and took part in many community events.  The article below, from the 'Essex Standard' on Friday 13 October 1837, mentions Isaac Green of Fordham as one of the judges at the annual meeting of the local Agricultural Society.

Week 43 (Oct. 22-28) Urban

While many of my ancestors were farmers and farm labourers, others resided in a much more urban setting.  Tracing their addresses through censuses, directories, newspaper articles and other resources.  As cities grew and industrialisation drew many into urban living, urban ancestors became more and more common.

One ancestor, Christopher Prentice, worked as a Water Bailiff in Ipswich, Suffolk in the late 1700s.  Too early for the census records, much of my knowledge of Christopher's life comes from newspaper articles.

I hadn't known the job of Water Bailiff  was an elected position until I found the article above, which was placed in the Ipswich Journal on Saturday 12 September 1778 thanking those who had elected him to the position for their trust.

Website Wednesday - Old & Interesting

Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people ran their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, making us curious about past ways of life.

Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were used, how people managed their home life - and more.

The site includes a history of laundry - a unique set of pages about laundry methods and tools, including histories of  ironing, washboards,  starch and bluing.

There is a Kitchen Antiques Directory for the best online resources on culinary equipment, cooking and eating tools as well as baking, butter, and other traditional and historic food preparation pages
 

Information on beds and bedding includes featherbeds and bed warmers for comfort, or simple straw mattresses and rustic box beds.
 

There are also one-off pages on topics from brooms to meat screens or hasteners to cleaning with stone and sand.
 

Week 42 (Oct. 15-21) Fire

Fire has the potential to have a devastating impact on family history records.  This has long been evident in the impact the loss of the Dublin Public Records Office on researching Irish ancestors. 

The Battle of the Four Courts, the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War, began on 28 June 1922. National Army forces of the Irish Free State were attempting to drive Anti-Treaty Republicans from the Four Courts, and other locations in Dublin. 

The Anti-Treaty garrison had occupied the Four Courts and the Public Record Office 10 weeks earlier, on the night of Holy Thursday 13 April. The Easter date was significant as it linked their campaign with the Easter Rising of 1916. From April to mid-June 1922 political tensions grew, but there were still some friendly contacts between the two sides. In late June the Free State’s National Army surrounded the entire Four Courts complex. In the early hours of Wednesday 28 June they gave the Anti-Treaty forces an ultimatum – evacuate the building or they would open fire. 

At around 4.45 am, just before sunrise, an artillery gun firing 18 pound shells opened fire on the building, accompanied by machine gun and rifle fire. The battle had begun.

Early in the afternoon of 30 June, after two days of fighting, the Four Courts was shaken by a tremendous explosion. 

This shattered the eastern wall of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office and threw burning material in among the paper and parchment records. The explosion produced a dramatic pillar of smoke and flung files, books and scrolls high into the air. Scraps and fragments fell on the streets of the city, some even landed in Howth, 10 km away.

The remains of the Record Treasury

 
The old, dry records on the shelves quickly caught fire. The flames destroyed practically all the records in the Treasury. Within a few hours seven centuries of Ireland’s historical records were gone.

Immediately the opposing sides blamed each other for the disaster. More usefully, though, within days the staff of the Public Record Office began rescuing any surviving records from the ruins. These rare, charred documents, called the ‘Salved Records’, were carefully stored for future investigation.

Amazingly, the fire break designed to save the Record Treasury, worked — but in reverse, protecting the administration office at the front from the terrible fire in the Treasury. This saved many catalogues, and books that described and summarised the records, from the flames. 

Along with the Salved Records, these catalogues and summaries were the starting point in rebuilding the lost Irish records.

Website Wednesday - Welsh Newspapers Online

Welsh Newspapers Online is a free online resource from the National Library of Wales where you can discover millions of articles from the Library’s rich collection of historical newspapers.

Welsh Newspapers Online currently lets you search and access over 1,100,000 pages from nearly 120 newspaper publications generally up to 1910. This resource also includes newspaper content that has been digitised by The Welsh Experience of World War One project.

Welsh Newspapers Online is part-funded by the Strategic Capital Investment Fund and the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government.

There is also the companion site Welsh Journals, which gives access to over 1,200,000 pages from over 475 journals published between 1735 and 2006.

While many of the titles included in these databases were printed in English, there are also a number printed in Welsh.

Family Tree UK Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• A World first: 200th anniversary of Brunel’s underwater tunnel 
• Digitisation of adoption records discussion
• Ancestry appeal to access Scottish records
• DNA Club news
• RootsTech registration 2026 now open
• Branches and Leaves - the importance of researching the whole family
• Suffering and shell shock : the psychological toll of WWI and WWII
• Getting started with AI for genealogy confidently
• The new MitoTree and Million Mito Project
• How to put your story together for publishing
• Further records of the Crown
• And more... 

Who Do You Think You Are 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 : 

• A Banner for a hero
• Ancestry adds millions of Birmingham electoral registers
• Free UK Genealogy reveals plans for probate website
• TNA discovers will from Shakespeare family legal dispute
• Records of Irish schools released
• PhD student's family history collection digitised
• A Right Royal to-do - Charles II's visit to Norfolk
• Think outside the box - brick wall research
• The inheritance of trauma
• Stolen by the Nazis
• Asylum Records
• Crime and punishment 
• Protestation Returns 
• And more... 

Week 41 (Oct. 8-14) Water

Water has a profound impact on many lives.  Whether we live by the sea, by a river or far from water influences many aspects of our lives.  Too much water or not enough can be devastating.

Hard on the heels of 2 years of Covid lockdowns, 2022 saw my home area suffer the worst floods in living memory.  While my home itself was not impacted, many friends saw their homes flood, roads and highways were cut, access to services cut, shops closed and like many I came under an evacuation order.  

We watched the Murray River flood parkland, the water creeping closer and closer, flooding homes and breeching levies like the one behind the library where I work - see the photo below.  As the water rose the community came together to frantically sandbag homes and businesses, another wonderful show of community spirit in the face of a crisis.

After the water receded there was the clean-up to follow.  Cleaning and repairing homes, businesses, roads and farmland again involved the entire community.  For many the impact was ongoing.

Recording our memories of such major events should be a part of our family history records, for the generations that come after us.  My memories of the flood are now a part of my own family records, with photographs of the rising water and the devastation it left behind, as well as images of the community coming together to sandbag and support on another.

Website Wednesday - Full Text Searching Arrives at FamilySearch

FamilySearch has announced that Full-Text Search is now part of its standard search tools. Since its initial release in FamilySearch Labs during RootsTech 2024, the feature has undergone numerous enhancements to improve its power and usability. 

FamilySearch hosts billions of digitized historical records, but only a fraction are indexed and searchable. Advancements in artificial intelligence and handwriting recognition are making records searchable much faster than ever before.

Full-Text Search uses AI-generated transcripts to search unindexed record collections in seconds. By entering keywords, names, places, and dates, users can now search almost 2 billion genealogically significant records, most of which were previously accessible only as images.

Unlike traditional indexed searches, Full-Text Search scans the entire transcript of a record, allowing users to find matches in any part of the document. This capability is helping thousands of users uncover relatives and evidence about them in records they may never have considered before.

Full-Text Search is now available on FamilySearch.org in the main Search menu under Full Text. Users can also access the tool through the all-collections search on the signed-in FamilySearch home page and in the FamilySearch Catalog.

Several new features have been added since RootsTech 2024:

• AI-generated summaries of records, including names and relationships.
• Search fields for year, place, and image group number (DGS).
• Almost 2 billion records from various countries and languages.
• Ability to search by specific collections, which are grouped using digitization metadata.
• Automatic translation of record summaries into your preferred language.

Week 40 (Oct. 1-7) Cemetery

The theme for Week 40 is 'Cemetery', and the information to be found on tombstones and in cemeteries cannot be discounted.  From visiting cemeteries in person to finding online cemetery records to uncovering photos of headstones, I have had some wonderful finds.  The information found on headstones can be remarkably varied in content, with anything from a simple name to the details of parents, spouse, children and dates and places of birth and death.  Sometimes finding one relative in a cemetery leads to the discovery of several more, with whole generations of family all buried in the same location. 

The photograph above is the Mulholland family plot in Eurobin, Victoria.  The plot includes two main headstones and several plaques.

The main headstone is for my great great grandfather David Mulholland who died 10 April 1902, age 71 and his wife Eliza Jane who died 30 October 1925, age 95.  Also included on the headstone are three infant children - Samuel Thomas, died 28 April 1879, age 3 months ; Margaret died 5 September 1885 age 10 years, and an unnamed infant son who died 26 January 1887 age 10 days.

The second, smaller headstone is 'erected to the memory of the beloved children of David and Jane Mulholland who died at Boggy Creek.'

Sadly, the three children named on the headstone all died as infants within a few weeks of each other - Henry Mulholland, died 29 January 1872 aged 4 years 8 months, Margaret Jane Mulholland who died 2 February 1872 aged 6 years 4 months and Thomas Mulholland who died 14 February 1872 aged 1 year 2 months.  A stark reminder of the perils of childhood and how disease could carry off several family members in rapid succession - all three died of diphtheria.

Website Wednesday - Victoria Government Gazettes

The first issue of the Victoria Government Gazette was published on 9 July 1851. Before then, material about Victoria was published in the New South Wales Government Gazette, the Port Phillip Government Notices and the Port Phillip Government Gazette.

The gazettes are the government's method of notifying the general public of its decisions and activities. They contain information on everything from land transactions, bankruptcies, reward notices and new acts of parliament, to tenders, patent applications, unclaimed letters and monies, shipping and emigration notices, and more.

Gazette entries may be as brief as a road closure notice or as comprehensive as a 200-page list of everyone who is registered to practice medicine in Victoria.

Early issues of the Victoria Government Gazette were published once a week. In the 1850s the frequency increased, and by the turn of the century the gazette was pressed almost daily.

From 1987 onwards, the gazette has been published in three series:

• General – produced weekly
• Periodical – lengthy, non-urgent notices, published irregularly
• Special – published irregularly

The Online Archive runs from 1836 up to 1997.  You can browse the online gazettes by decade, year, month, day and page.