Week 9 (Feb. 26-Mar. 4) Family Secret

Every family has its family secrets.  Some are simply never spoken about, others are handed down in family stories that often change and evolve over time.

One such family story which always fascinated me was the tale of a scandal involving my paternal great grandparents, Walter Proctor Green and Isabella Mary (nee Argent).  The story revolved around an affair allegedly conducted by Isabella with a neighbor while her husband Walter was overseas in America.

While searching old newspapers online, I uncovered a whole saga that played out in the press.

Walter took newspaper editor Ernest Brown to court and sued him for libel after he published innuendo that suggested Walter's wife Isabella had been having an affair.  The case excited considerable local interest and was reported in several local newspapers.

From the Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday 5 October 1888

The entire court case was reported in the papers, and finally came to a close later in the year.  After hearing all the evidence the jury retired to consider their verdict, and after only 23 minutes found editor Ernest Brown guilty on all counts.  He was sentenced to prison for three calendar months without hard labour.

The final paragraph in a lengthy report on the case

A final article appeared about the case at the end of the year, when it was reported that a committee had been formed to start a subscription to recompense Walter Green for the cost of the prosecution, which clearly showed where public sympathy lay.

From the Essex Standard, Saturday 22 December 1888

Clearly this family secret was not so secret after all!

Trove Tuesday

What's new on Trove

The following newspapers are now available in Trove. The year range listed is an indication of what's currently available in Trove, and not always the full year range the newspaper was published.

NSW

• Hanho T'aimzŭ (Hanho Times) (1985-1995) [Korean Cultural Centre]
• Central Western Daily (1945-1954) [Central West Libraries]
• Windsor and Richmond Gazette (1966-1971) [Hawkesbury Library Service]

VIC

• Portland Mercury and Normanby Advertiser (1842-1843) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• The Portland Mercury and Port Fairy Register (1843-1844) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• Portland Gazette and Belfast Advertiser (1844-1849) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• The Belfast Gazette and Portland and Warnambool Advertiser (1849-1876) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• The Banner of Belfast (1855; 1857-1876) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• The Warrnambool Examiner and Western District Advertiser (1854;1856) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• Belfast Gazette (1876-1878) [Ms Pamela Marriott]
• Western Port Times and Phillip Island and Bass Valley Advertiser (1904-1910) [Phillip Island and District Genealogical Society]

SA

• Orroroo Enterprise and Great Northern Advertiser (1892-1904) [Orroroo Historical Society]
• South-East Kingston Leader (1977-1987) [National Trust of South Australia - Kingston Branch ]
• Port Lincoln Times (1987-1988) [Port Lincoln History Group]
• The Standard (1966-1967) [Prospect Local History Group]

Trove Tuesday - Death Notice of William Pummeroy 1889

It is sometimes amazing just how much information can be included in the few lines of a death notice when you pull it apart.

The notice below was for the death of my great great grandfather William Pummeroy, who died 6 October 1889.  The notice was published in the Melbourne Leader on Saturday 12 October 1889 and The Age on Monday 7 October 1889.  Both are available through Trove.

These few lines tell me so much about William and his family.  Firstly, it gives me his address, providing a head start on researching the house history.  It names all his surviving children, the sons and unmarried daughter by their first names and his married daughters by their married names - which in turn helps me confirm the marriages of his daughters.  It notes that William is the grandfather of 53 (!!)  It then gives his age, allowing me to calculate his approximate year of birth - if he is aged 71 in 1889 then he was born around 1818.  Finally, the notice states he was a colonist of 41 years.  This not only tells me William was not born in Australia, it also tells me he arrived in the colony in about 1848, at the age of 30.

So much information in just a few short lines.

Trove Tuesday - Naturalization of Aliens

Shortly after the arrival of my Beseler family in the Australian colonies from Germany in 1848, father of the family Carl Friedrich Beseler - known as Frederick - was naturalized as a British subject.

This event was reported in the Adelaide Observer on Saturday 30 December 1848, p1.

I had previously located Carl Freidrich's certificate of naturalization via the National Archives of Australia, and was pleasantly surprised to find the newspaper article listing those who had been naturalized by the Colonial Secretary's Office.

I have blogged previously regarding the newspaper report of the family's actual arrival in April 1848 under the heading of 'Shipping Intelligence - Arrived'.

I love finding these snippets in the newspapers, they really help flesh out my research.   Worth noting is the article heading 'Naturalization of Aliens', plus the point that as Australia was still a colony at this time Carl Freidrich was naturalized as a British subject.

Trove Tuesday

Trove was launched in December 2009, making this month Trove’s 15th anniversary. From humble beginnings as an aggregator for a range of library services, Trove has grown "into a home for freely accessible cultural content that reflects our vibrant contemporary and historical cultures". Trove's vision is for Australians to have their culture at their fingertips – now and decades into the future. 

Today, Trove is one of Australia’s most popular websites with an enormous and diverse community of users. Significant to the development of the website are the Trove Partners, who contribute to the vast collections in Trove, and the 'Voluntroves', who help make the collections more searchable and accessible.

Trove evolved from a number of websites and databases, including the Australian Bibliographic Network, the web archive Pandora, Picture Australia and more.  The Australian Newspapers Beta service was released in July 2008, starting with 11 newspapers, including The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, The Argus and The South Australian Advertiser. There are now over 700 newspapers with no plans to stop.

Text correcting has been a part of Trove since its first days, and in Trove’s 15-year history, Voluntrove text correctors has corrected over 513 million lines of text – and this number increases every single day.

If you think the text correcting numbers are huge, wait until you learn the size of the collections in Trove. There are over 6 billion records in Trove, contributed by around 900 Trove Partners across Australia. To learn more about Trove, you can visit the news page or subscribe to the monthly Trove Treasures newsletter to find out about what’s new in Trove.

Trove Tuesday

As the Christmas season approaches, this week's Trove blog looks back at how mail has helped people connect with each other around Christmas time for decades.  Every Christmas, is seems, we are reminded by the Post Office to make sure we send our Christmas letters, cards and packages early to ensure their timely arrival.  In more modern times, we are also urged to complete our online shopping early to ensure delivery.

In the early twentieth century soldiers had limited ways to contact their family while serving their country. Christmas was a time they could sometimes send postcards or letters to their family to let them know they were safe and well, and perhaps receive letters or packages from home. During the Second World War Japan even agreed to let Prisoners of War send Christmas mail to their families.  During the First World War embroidered postcards became a popular item for soldiers to send to loved ones back home. These postcards were known as war silks and were especially popular around holidays like Christmas.  

Then there were children writing hopeful letters to Santa, assuring him they had been good and listing toys and gifts they hoped to receive, many promising to leave out a snack for Santa and his reindeer when they visited.

The National Library of Australia holds a letter to Santa from award-winning author Patrick White in their collection. He was six years old at the time of writing.  The letter reads, “Dear Father Xmas. Will you please bring me a pistol, a mouth organ, a violin, a butterfly net, Robinson Crusoe, A History of Australia, some marbles, a little mouse what runs across the room. I hope you do not think I am too greedy but I want the things badly. Your loving Paddy”  

Perhaps the most famous letter to Santa comes from New York newspaper The Sun’s 1897 editorial featuring 8-year old Virginia O’Hanlon. Some of her friends had told her Santa wasn’t real, so she wrote to the paper to ask:  ‘Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?’  

The response penned to Virginia was so moving that it has continued to be printed in global newspapers for decades.  “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there was no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”  One such version of the article was published in the 18 December 1926 edition of Sydney's The World’s News.

Trove Tuesday

This week's Trove Highlight focuses on researching the history of your home.  For many family history researchers, discovering the history of the family home can help flesh out the story of how the family came to live there, and tell stories of their lives in that house.

The article discusses the best way to locate information on the history of your house on Trove, using not just newspapers but also Australian architecture and home design magazines from yester-year which published editorials on beautiful and interesting homes and discussed changes in architecture which provide clues about when your house was built and how it may have looked originally.

Then there are Post Office Directories, Town maps and plans, and even photos and images of your home locality which may be available on Trove.  These resources all help in researching your family history via the homes your family lived in.

Once you have exhausted the resources on Trove, there are still state and territory public records offices which may hold property records - sales, changes to the property, building permits, and more.

So try researching the history of the homes your family lived in - you never know what you might find!

Trove Tuesday

Every month newly digitised items are made available in Trove thanks to hundreds of Trove Partners and the National Library of Australia.  Take a look at what has recently been digitised and made available in Trove below.

Diaries, letters and archives

Nineteenth Century handwritten diaries

A collection of diaries and papers written by migrants to Australia. These records provide insight into the voyage from the United Kingdom to Australia and life in the early years of the Australian colonies. They include:

• The journal of Emily Braine
• The journal of Claudius Beresford Cairnes
• The papers of Henry Whittingham
• The diary of Thomas Davies
• The papers of Mary Braidwood Mowle
  

Newspapers and gazettes

Note that the year range listed is an indication of what's currently available in Trove, and not always the full year range the newspaper was published.

NSW

• Maitland Mercury (1940-1955)
• Coolamon-Ganmain Farmers' Review (1919-1937)

VIC

• Sunraysia Daily (1942-1950)
• The Warrnambool Standard (1872-1879)
• The Footscray Advertiser (1884-1887)
• The Advertiser (1887-1913)

Magazines and Newsletters

• Buninyong & Mt. Helen community news (1977-1986)
• Buninyong and district community news (1986-2012)

Curious to see what's in the pipeline? You can also take a look at Trove's coming soon page. 

Trove Tuesday

As today in Australia we celebrate the running of the Melbourne Cup, it seems fitting that my Trove Tuesday post focuses, in some way, on horses, jockeys and racing.

Locating a photo of an ancestor in the newspapers makes any article even more exciting.  After I discovered that my great uncle, Alfred Edward Pummeroy, worked for a few years as a jockey, I headed to the newspapers to see if he was mentioned in racing news.

To my delight, not only did I find several articles about his short (and not terribly successful) racing career, but I also found a photograph of him with a couple of other jockeys.

Alfred is pictured in the centre of the three standing jockeys, and it is the only image I have of him as a young man, which makes this photo from the newspapers even more special.

Another Trove Treasure!

Trove Tuesday

Researching Immigration can be difficult for researchers for many reasons.  

Many arrivals into Australian ports were divided into categories.

• “assisted” (subsidised)
• “unassisted” (paying their own way), or
• “coastal” (travelling from another Australian port)

How a person arrived had great influence over the detail available about them.  Assisted immigrants generally owed the government money (or labour) in return for their passage and thus the records for them are usually fairly detailed.

For Unassisted and Coastal passengers, ship's registers frequently lacked detail.  Women, children, servants and steerage passengers were frequently left off passenger lists.  Names might be abbreviated - "J. Smith" or simply "Mr Smith", and children were often simply added as a note - "Mrs Smith and 5 children". 

Newspapers, however, often published shipping news, including lists of passengers as shown in the article below, which reports the arrival of my Beseler family in South Australia on the ship Pauline.

South Australian Register, Sat 1 April 1848

Included in the list of passengers are Frederick Beseler, shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and five children.  The article also notes that the ship had sailed from the port of Bremen, Germany.

Another Trove Treasure.

Trove Tuesday

One of the saddest stories I have found in my family history is that of Eliza Pummeroy (nee Beseler).  Eliza was born in 1871 in Learmonth, Victoria to Edward Beseler and Emma (nee Flower).  Eliza married Alfred Pummeroy in1895 in St Kilda, where Alfred worked as a plasterer.  They had four children before Alfred suddenly became ill with pneumonia and died on 6 Feb 1901, leaving Eliza with 4 young children and in a desperate situation.

The family lived in rented housing and had little by way of savings.  With four children to look after, the eldest 4 years old and deaf and mute, the youngest (my grandfather William) only 2 months old, Eliza was unable to do much by way of paid work.  She took in washing to make a little money, and was given 3 shillings a week by the local Ladies Benevolent Society.  It wasn't enough.

After struggling for a month after her husband's sudden death, Eliza took the step of applying to the local court for help, risking having her children removed from her custody and placed in an orphanage, something she was adamant she did not want.  The judges hearing the case awarded her 10 shillings from the poor box and committed the children to the department, with the recommendation they be handed back to their mother.

This appeal was reported in several newspapers.  Two reported the case with a fair amount of detail, including the fact that the children all appeared clean and well cared for, while a third much briefer article gave a somewhat different impression, especially with the heading 'Neglected Children'.

Prahran Telegraph, Sat 9 March 1901, p3.

The Argus, Sat 9 March 1901, p15.

The Herald, Fri 8 March 1901, p5.

A great series of articles found on Trove. Having these to add to my records adds so much to my knowledge of my family history - without these reports I would never have know how much of a struggle my great grandmother Eliza faced after the death of her husband.

Trove Tuesday

I have recently been researching articles about my family in the newspapers, using the wonderful free Trove website to search historic Australian newspapers.  Over the years I have unearthed a number of fascinating articles and notices that have greatly enriched my research.

A recent find is the photograph below of the marriage of my great uncle Henry Montgomery Clark, published on page 18 of The Australasian on Saturday 19 January 1944.

 

The article is especially precious as I have few photographs of Henry, or of his brother Leonard who is also featured.  A wonderful find!