National Farm Survey

The National Archives has announced a project to digitise the National Farm Survey, taken in 1941, thanks to a £2.13 million grant from the Lund Trust.
 
The survey includes details of over 300,000 farms in England and Wales including how the land was used, location, condition and management as well as details of owners and tenants.
 
As one of the most requested documents at The National Archives, the digitisation of the 1941 National Farm Survey will help to preserve the original documents as well as improve access for local and family historians researching agricultural labourers and farms.
 
The first records to be digitised will be the individual farm records (MAF 32) with the accompanying survey maps (MAF 73) coming later. 

The project is planned to be completed by March 2027, with the first digital records coming online from March 2026. The resulting databse will be freely available online, enabling researchers to discover more about family farms or their local area.  
 
Jeff James, CEO & Keeper of The National Archives said: “This is a unique opportunity to realise the potential of what was seen as a ‘Second Domesday Book’, a ‘permanent and comprehensive record of the conditions on the farms of England and Wales’. Thanks to this partnership, the National Farm Survey, an enormous database of land ownership and land usage in mid-20th century Britain, will be freely available online to researchers in the UK and globally.”

Digitization of Wills UK

The UK Ministry of Justice has just released their plan to digitize historic wills.

Their statement reads :

"Genealogists, historians and amateur family archivists will be better able to access historic wills under proposals published today (15 December 2023).

The ambitious digitization programme could see millions of wills dating back more than 150 years moved online and more easily accessible to the public in a bid to improve the current storage system.  

Currently about 110 million physical documents are stored costing taxpayers £4.5 million per year. The consultation is seeking views on keeping hard copies for about 25 years, in recognition of their sentimental value to families, while saving them digitally longer term."

This plan has immediately stirred up a storm of controversy amongst Genealogists.  While it is agreed that digitizing the wills and making them more accessible is a boon to the Genealogical and Historical communities, the idea of destroying the hard copies of wills after 25 years is considerably less popular.

There have been a number of questions regarding the proposal.  How much will it cost to maintain the digital records? Things like the servers, the regular migration to modern formats to ensure they remain accessible etc? Digital is not 'free'.

The consultation will end on 23 February 2024.  So follow the link and have your say about the future of these important historical records.

Wards of the State Records Digitised in Victoria

The Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV) and the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing have recently announced they have made records from 1864-1923 available online for the first time, putting out the following statement.

The records relate to children under care of the state in Victoria, (Wards of the State). Ward records are "a central departmental record detailing each child committed to State ‘care’, why and for how long a child was made a ward of the state and where they were placed during that term". They remain closed for 99 years from their creation, at which point they are opened to the public. These records are the only substantial record that still exists about each child, case records having been destroyed prior to 1973 and the creation of PROV.

For a child who was put in care due to concerns for their welfare or because they had committed an offence, Ward records are singularly important – providing a starting point on their journey to answer questions about their identity and their history, and containing otherwise disparate information about the places they lived and records that may have been created about them. "For many people institutionalised as children, the bureaucratic information in the Ward Register has to ‘stand in’ for the web of information contained in memories, personal and family memorabilia that most of us take for granted."

The records have recently been digitised and include the children’s:

• Ward Number
• Name
• Date of Birth
• Sex
• Native place
• Religion
• Ability to Read or Write
• Date of Commitment
• Commiting Bench
• Date of Admission
• Term
• Cause of Commitment
• Whether Parents are living
• Vaccination details
• Previous history
• Where stationed
• Licensing out details
• Discharge details
• Half yearly report information.

You can find the records at: https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/VPRS4527

GRO Digital Ordering Update

Some great news for Family History researchers with civil birth and death registration records from selected years are now available as instant-access digital images via the General Register Office (GRO) website.

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced in England and Wales in 1837.  Birth records from 1837 to 2021 and death records from 1837 to 1957 and 1984 to 2021 are indexed on the GRO website.

Family historians have previously had the option of ordering records as either a print record for £11 with a GRO index reference supplied, or a PDF for £7. It takes up to four working days for orders to be despatched.

However, the GRO has now launched a scheme for births from 1837 to 1922 and deaths from 1837 to 1887 to be available as digital images.  The digital images currently cost £2.50 each and are available to view immediately after purchase.

The scheme to order digital images is in the beta testing phase, but is publicly available to all registered users of the GRO website.

This makes accessing these records not only quicker but also less expensive, so take advantage of this great service.

 

 

Trove News

The people at Trove have been busy adding newly digitised records to their database over the past few months.  Below are a selection of their new records.

Newspapers and Gazettes

SA

• Hills and Valley Messenger (1990-2012) [State Library of South Australia]
• Hills Gazette (1973-1984) [State Library of South Australia]
• Hills Messenger, Belair-Blackwood edition (1984-1990) [State Library of South Australia]
• Port Lincoln Times (1966-1969, 1970-1981) [State Library of South Australia]

VIC

• Benalla Standard (1932-1940) [State Library Victoria]
• Essendon and Flemington Chronicle (1882-1894) [Moonee Valley City Council]
• Essendon Gazette (1888-1913) [Moonee Valley City Council]
• Hampden Guardian (1871-1872, 1874-1877) [Camperdown and District Historical Society Inc]
• Healesville Guardian and Yarra Glen Guardian (1900) [State Library Victoria]
• Lawloit Times (1910-1929) [State Library Victoria]
• Skipton Standard (1910-1929) [State Library Victoria]
• Sunbury News (1911-1927) [State Library Victoria]
• Sunraysia Daily (1937) [Mildura Rural City Council Library Service]
• Tatura Guardian (1895-1903) [State Library Victoria]
• The Ouyen Mail and Central Mallee Advertiser (1911-1913) [Ouyen District History and Genealogy Centre]
• The Ouyen Mail (1919-1930) [Ouyen District History and Genealogy Centre]
• Western Press (1866-1867, 1870) [Camperdown and District Historical Society Inc]

Magazines and Newsletters

National

• Architecture journals project [National Library of Australia]
• Soil Conservation Service Urban Capability Study (1975-1984) [Soil Conservation Service]

Books and Libraries

ACT

• Books and pamphlets relating to Canberra Grammar School [National Library of Australia]

Diaries, Letters and Archives

National

• Migrant diaries project [National Library of Australia]
• 19th century handwritten manuscripts project [National Library of Australia]

 

Photo Restoration

Now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines is a new magazine on Photo Restoration.  Members are able to read any of our online magazines through the Libby app easily on their computer, laptop or Android or Apple device.

This new magazine provides easy to follow expert advice on how to bring your old photos back to life: – best options for scan settings, image resolution and re-sizing; – how to easily use photo editing software for Colour correction, Contrast adjustment, Sharpening, Dust and scratch removal, Clone stamp and Healing brush; – identify when it’s better to use professional restoration services; – best ways to store, organise, share and display your restored images. High quality book design and insightful case studies with sample images to provide step by step fixes for the most common blemishes in old photographs.

Inside this issue :  

• Photo Restoration
• Why digitise your photos?
• Scanning
• Software for photo restoration
• Preparing images for retouching
• Precautions when cropping
• Global adjustments
• Localised adjustments
• Editing tips
• Step-by-step restoration
• When to call the professionals
• What to do with your restored images

 Take a look at the range of e-magazines, e-books and e-audiobooks available now.

National Archives of Australia Digitisation

The National Archives of Australia has over 1 million records documenting the service of Australian men and women during World War II. These include service records for the Army, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Australian Navy.

Over the past 15 years the NAA has digitised more than 200,000 WWII records and made them available to view online through RecordSearch, and in 2019 the Australian Government announced funding of $10 million to help digitise the remaining 850,000 records.

This project was planned to take place over 4 years, with work starting in July 2019.  Since is commenced the NAA has digitised 200,000 additional records, with over 3 million pages made available online.

Large-scale digitisation of the remaining WWII service records began in October 2020.

Army records

Records are being digitised by place of enlistment.

• Citizen Military Forces personnel service records (Series B884) – digitisation began in October 2020
• Second Australian Imperial Force personnel dossiers (Series B883) – digitisation due to begin mid-2022

Air Force records

Records are being digitised alphabetically by surname (Series A9300) and by service number (Series A9301).

• Royal Australian Air Force Non-Commissioned Officers and other ranks personnel files (Series A9301) – digitisation began in July 2019
• Royal Australian Air Force Officers personnel files (Series A9300) – digitisation began July 2021

Batches of records in these series will be temporarily unavailable to the public while they are being digitised. As records are digitised, the digital copies will be added to RecordSearch and made available free of charge.

The table below provides specific updates on the progress of records being digitised. The NAA updates this table regularly as work progresses.

Series	Batch	Progress
B884	Northern Territory     Tasmania     Western Australia	Completed
B884	South Australia     Queensland     New South Wales     Victoria	In progress
B884	Papua New Guinea	Early 2022
A9300	AARONS to PEAD	In progress
A9300	ABBOTT to ZUCKER	In progress
A9301	Service number 1183 to 1495     Service number 14448 to 21142	Completed
A9301	Service number 21889 to 37057     Service number 21090 to 27054     Service number 60141 to 90337	In progress
B883	All states	Mid-2022

So take a look at the National Archives of Australia and see if there is new information available for you about your WW2 Australian ancestors.

National Archives of Australia Announces Digitization Partnership

National Archives of Australia has just announced they will be partnering with commercial digitisation provider Micro Image to operate from the Archives’ new industrial scale digitisation hub.  Micro Image will undertake large-scale digitisation of at-risk items from the national archival collection.

In July this year the Australian Government announced an extra $67.7 million over four years to fund the National Archives’ Defend the Past, Protect the Future Program. This Program will see the digital preservation of critical at-risk collection material, including audiovisual content, before Deadline 2025.

The digitisation hub will also enable National Archives to significantly upscale its proactive digitisation capacity, ensuring more of the collection is digitally preserved and available online, for use by government and the community.

'We are very pleased to be partnering with Micro Image to launch this new capability. Use of commercial providers, in conjunction with our inhouse digitisation team, is a cost-effective and time-efficient way of digitising large amounts of the national archival collection. This will result in more records being preserved, digitised and made available online to all Australians, regardless of where they live,’ said David Fricker, Director-General, National Archives of Australia.

The NAA states that digitisation onsite reduces the risk of damage to, or loss of, irreplaceable collection material during transportation to an offsite provider. Complete with specialised digitisation equipment, the digitisation hub also facilitates the appropriate handling of fragile historic material that may need preparation and conservation, prior to digitisation.

‘Micro Image has a strong track record of providing quality and time-critical digitisation projects. We look forward to continuing our productive relationship with the National Archives, with our operations now based in the state-of-the art digitisation hub in Canberra,’ said Bruce Shaw, Managing Director, Micro Image.

Micro Image will commence operating from the National Archives’ secure onsite hub in early 2022.

FamilySearch Completes Microfilm Digitization

Today FamilySearch International announced the completion of a massive project to digitize its collection of millions of rolls of microfilm containing billions of family history records from around the world. The archive containing information on more than 11.5 billion individuals is now freely available to the public on FamilySearch.org.

"We hope that all those who contributed to this milestone in the last 80 years feel a sense of humble accomplishment today,” said Steve Rockwood, the CEO of FamilySearch International. “And we hope the millions of individuals who will discover, gather, and connect generation upon generation of their family members for years to come because of these efforts will have a deep sense of gratitude for the many unheralded contributors who made those discoveries possible."

“It's a game-changer for everybody in the world. So, instead of having to come to the library, people can start accessing these records from home,” said Becky Adamson, a research consultant at the FamilySearch Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Over 200 countries and principalities and more than 100 languages are represented in the digitized documents. Completion of the project makes it much easier for individuals to make more personal and family discoveries.

To explore FamilySearch’s free collections of indexed records and images, go to FamilySearch.org and search both “Records” and “Images”. The Images feature enables users to peruse digitized images from the microfilm collection and more. A free FamilySearch account will be required to access the service.

So take a look at the new information available on this wonderful free database and see what it can add to your family history research.

Transcription Tuesday

Every year, the people at Who Do You Think You Are Magazine hold Transcription Tuesday, where they ask readers to join in indexing and transcribing thousands of unique records throughout the day, helping to make them more widely accessible to researchers across the globe.  This year Transcription Tuesday falls on 4 February.

Whether you can spare a few minutes or a few hours, it's the perfect opportunity to delve into some fascinating documents and give something back to the family history community.

No matter where in the world you live, all you need is a computer, an internet connection and a passion for genealogy.

This year, WDYTYA is partnering with two of the world’s biggest family history websites – FamilySearch and Ancestry, via their free World Archives Project.  They are also working with two smaller projects opening up records of the First World War – the Internment Research Centre and Royal Navy First World War Lives at Sea.

On the magazine’s homepage they have a post with details of Transcription Tuesday and links to the coordinators of all four projects about why they matter and how you can help.

So whether you can spare a few minutes, hours or the whole day, consider taking part in this year’s Transcription Tuesday and help make more records freely available online to researchers everywhere.  You never know what you might find!

Hidden treasures at the PROV

It is remarkable what you can find when you look around and don't follow your normal lines of research, as I discovered this week.

While looking for something completely different I discovered that the Public Records Office of Victoria, a website I visit regularly, contained a hidden treasure.  Normally when I go to the PROV website, I proceed straight to their Online Collections page to explore records which have been digitised.  It is only when I am planning a visit to the PROV Reading Rooms (for me a 200+ km trip each way, so I don't get there very often) that I go further afield to order records to have available to view when I visit.

It was while exploring these undigitised records that I discovered that the PROV has been quietly working on digitising their collection of Coroner's Inquests into Deaths.  While the entire collection is not yet available online, considerable progress has been made and more years are added to the online database as the work is done.  As the project is not yet complete there is nothing listed on the PROV's Online Collections page yet.

An inquest is a legal inquiry held to establish the exact medical cause of death of an individual in certain circumstances. Where the inquest found a death was the result of a crime, it could also commit an accused for trial.  The inquest records relate to deaths that occurred when a person died suddenly, was killed, died whilst in prison, drowned, died whilst a patient in an asylum, or was an infant ward of the state and died under suspicious circumstances, among other circumstances.  The PROV holds inquest records up until 2003 with records up until 1985 on open access. From 1986 onwards the records are closed to the public and to access these records you will need to make a request to the Coroners Court.

Currently the years between 1840 and 1961, and between 1972 and 1985 are available online, with work still progressing on the 1962 to 1971 records.  So I spent an exciting hour or so putting in names to see what came out.  I am now wading through the results of no less that 8 Coroner's Inquests into the deaths of various family members, from Edward Beseler who died in the Ararat Lunatic Asylum  in 1918 of senility and heart failure to Mary Gray Pummeroy who died at the Alfred Hospital in 1886 as a child from burns accidentally received.

When next I have a spare hour or so I will have a good rummage around on the PROV website to see what other treasures I have been missing because I don't explore the website thoroughly - and I'll be having a closer look at other websites where I normally proceed straight to a certain point and don't pay enough attention to new additions and developments.

Power of Petitioning

In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard.

Some were mere begging letters scrawled on scraps of paper; others were carefully crafted radical demands signed by thousands and sent to the highest powers in the land. Whatever form they took, they provide a vital source for illuminating the concerns of supposedly ‘powerless’ people and offer a unique means to map the structures of authority that framed early modern society.

The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth Century England is a small but growing site that plans to transcribe and publish the texts of more than 2,000 seventeenth-century petitions as well as a series of guides and other resources.  The site also has a blog on which they report progress, share links to online resources and share details of the lives of people in the seventeenth century.

Preserving Our History

Over the past few days the destructive fire are the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been much in the news, and the courage shown by firefighters, police and the general public in saving so many of the treasures inside has been widely reported.  The loss of such a historic landmark is tragic, especially considering it survived the French Revolution, both world wars and numerous other natural and man-made disasters.  It prompts me to consider, on the smaller and more personal scale, the preservation of my own family treasures.  While I have electronic backups of my data in place, what about the family treasures, paintings and ephemera, stories and general knowledge?  What can I do to preserve it all?

Firstly, over the next few weeks I plan to give the camera a workout and photograph all the family items I have in my possession.  Things like the figurines that belonged to my grandparents and great grandparents, the painting my father was given when he retired, and the little shell turtles I gave my grandmother after my first solo holiday when I was 17.  Treasures that I cannot copy but should disaster strike I would at least have photos of the items to keep.

Secondly, I need to write down the stories of each item.  I've written before about cleaning out the family home after the deaths of my parents, and how my sister and I simply did not keep things we didn't know the story of.  So many items we looked at with no idea of whether they were family heirlooms or trinkets our mother had purchased from the local opp shop, and several times we found ourselves wishing so much that our parents were still with us so we could ask all the questions the items we found created for us.  Why had this china cup been kept?  Whose was it and how long had it been in the family?  There were so many bits and pieces put away that we had no idea of the history of, and so generally didn't keep.  If my sister and I didn't know, there was no one left to ask.

I have spent months digitising photos, letters, diaries and even a few journals, like the ones my mother kept of long ago holidays.  My sister has created a wonderful little recipe book made of all the dishes our mother and grandmother used to make, with notes of why each dish was special.  Now it is time to do the same for more physical items - to photograph them and record their stories.  Because if no one in my family knows the story behind Great Aunt Mary's tea set - or even that the tea set in the shed was Great Aunt Mary's and not something picked up on a whim at a jumble sale - then they will have no reason to keep it, value it, and ultimately pass it on to another generation.  And that would be a sad loss of my family history.

Historic Melbourne Directories now online

The Melbourne History Workshop has completed the first phase of the Melbourne Directories project, which involves the digitisation of volumes from 1857 to 1880. PDFs of the first tranche of directories can be found on the Melbourne History Resources site. Due to size constraints, each yearly directory is broken up into multiple files.

The University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library holds copies of Melbourne directories published first as Sands & Kenny’s directory (1857-59), then Sands, Kenny & Co.’s directory (1860-61) and finally as the Sands & McDougall’s directory.

The Melbourne directories are a comprehensive listing of city addresses and occupants organised alphabetically by streets across the city. It is augmented by alphabetical, trade and professional listings, as well as information on leading financial, government, official, ecclesiastical, legal and municipal institutions, and other miscellaneous advertisements, maps and information. The directory includes town as well as suburban listings, with coverage including Melbourne proper and, from year to year, the expanding suburbs of the greater metropolitan region.

Royal Voluntary Service Records Project

The Hidden Histories of A Million Wartime Women project went live on Kickstarter throughout May with the target of £25,000 to digitise the first 28,000 pages of diaries from 1938 to 1941. Public support has been so overwhelming that the charity hasn’t just met its target, but superseded it having raised £27,724 thanks to the 705 backers who kindly donated.

These pledges have given Royal Voluntary Service the opportunity to reveal a vivid insight into life during World War II. For the past six years, our archivist and a team of volunteers at Royal Voluntary Service has been sorting and protecting the diaries but thanks to public donations, a specially trained staff member will now begin digitising them ready for publication on their website in July 2017.

Within two years of the outbreak of the Second World War, 1-in-10 women had set aside their own lives to volunteer and help others as members of the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS).   These ordinary women who volunteered for the charity played a vital role on the Home Front and worked tirelessly to contribute towards the war effort. As well as sewing, cooking and helping the community recover after raids, they learnt new skills such as extinguishing bombs, driving in the black-out and making clothes from dog hair.

One example out of the thousands of diaries describes a major Blitz in Bath between 28 and 29 April 1941. This saw volunteers fit 80 children with masks and issue 205 helmets for babies. The centre also served 3,350 meals and helped coordinate housing for more than 9,000 people made homeless following the raids. One volunteer from the centre had lost her home and all of her belongings during the blitz but turned up to volunteer the following morning. She also sent a brave telegram to her soldier sons reading “bombed out, but still smiling,” so not to worry them.   Several other examples are also available on the project's page.