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

Look History in the Eye Podcasts

The new podcast series Look history in the eye is  produced by the Public Record Office of Victoria on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and on the PROV website. The first two episodes now available provide insight into the Pentridge panopticon and the 1970s Melbourne Landmark competition featuring interviews with archaeologists Adam Ford and Geoff Hewitt, and architectural historians Derham Groves and Seamus O’Hanlon.   

In the series the PROV interviews the people who delve into public archives and uncover interesting truths about Melbourne and Victoria's past. Discover the back story to some iconic Melbourne and Victorian people and places through the series.

PROV has more episodes to come every Wednesday including…

• Deadtown to musictown featuring food writer Michael Harden, restaurateur Tiberio Donnini and economist John Nieuwenhuysen
• They called her Madame B with historian Barbara Minchinton
• Prison escapes featuring crime writer Susanna Lobez 
• And more episodes are on the way…

Each episode spotlights records from the PROV collection. You can view the records featured, view transcripts and learn more about the stories told via the episode pages of the website. 

Victorian BMDs Discounted

The Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages Victoria has a special offer available for Family History Month.  For August only, you can order their downloadable uncertified historical certificates for just $20.

This includes :

• Births 1853 to 100 years before today's date
• Marriages 1853 to 60 years before today's date
• Deaths 1853 to 30 years before today's date
• Church baptisms, marriages and burials 1836-1853

Uncertified historical certificates are not valid for official purposes but are a scanned copy of the official record that can be downloaded to your computer.  So if you have Victorian ancestors whose certificates you haven't ordered, this month might be a good time to get your copies of them.

Victorian Birth, Death and Marriage indexes

For those of you who (like me) missed the news, the Index to Victorian births, deaths and marriages has been updated at the start of the year and you can now search for marriages up to 1950. That’s 8 years of additional marriages.  Births have also been extended by a year.
The Index to Victorian births, deaths and marriages now covers:

• births in Victoria from 1853 to 1917
• marriages in Victoria from 1853 to 1950
• deaths in Victoria from 1853 to 1988
• church baptisms, marriages and burials in Victoria from 1836 to 1853

Each entry includes the:

• name of the person or people the entry relates to
• type of event (such as birth, marriage or death)
• registration year
• registration number
• other information relevant to the type of event.

Ash Wednesday 35 Years On

It is 35 years ago that Victoria and South Australia were devastated by the Ash Wednesday bushfires.  At the time I was 12 years old and living in Moama, New South Wales, a small town on the Murray River almost directly north of Melbourne.  The Age has republished on its website their report from February 17th 1983.
My home was well away from the fire area, but I can vividly remember watching the news on television and my whole family worrying about relatives living in the danger zone.  I can remember the red sunrises and sunsets, and a kind of half-dark during the day as the smoke shadowed the sun, even though we were over 100km away from the fires themselves.  My family had an old chest freezer on the covered back verandah of our house, and my sister and I drew pictures in the layer of ash and soot that covered it.

Map of the Ash Wednesday Fires in Victoria

At the time it was the third worst fire toll in Australian history, after the 1939 Victorian bushfires which killed 71 people and the 1967 Tasmanian bushfires killed 62.  Highways were cut, thousands were evacuated, hundreds of homes and businesses burned.  Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser declared a state of emergency.  Over 4000 firefighters, many of them volunteers, were deployed and in South Australia over 600 army personnel were mobilized to help.  In a country so prone to devastating bushfires, Ash Wednesday stands out for the devastation it caused.

Victorian Birth, Death and Marriage Certificates

Hate waiting for BMD certificates you have ordered to make their slow way to you in the post?  Wait no more.  Did you know that the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria allows you to download certificates from their Historical Indexes on the spot?  A Historical Image is a scanned image of the original registration record which cannot be used for official purposes. Download purchased images to your computer at a cost of $24 per image.  Historical Death Certificates, which are a certified copy of the original registration record and can be used for official purposes, can still be purchased in hard copy form to be posted to you at a cost of $31 per certificate.

The Historical index has entries relating to:

• births in Victoria from 1853 to 1914
• marriages in Victoria from 1853 to 1942
• deaths in Victoria from 1853 to 1988
• church baptisms, marriages and burials in Victoria from 1836 to 1853

Each entry includes the:

• name of the person or people the entry relates to
• type of event (such as birth, marriage or death)
• registration year
• registration number
• other information relevant to the type of event.

Victorian Places

Want to find out more about the town or suburb where your ancestors lived?  The Victorian Places website invites you to "Hop on the historic W-class tram and hop off at any one of over 1600 destinations throughout Victoria. Along the way you can discover the history of every town, city, suburb, village and settlement with a population of over 200 people."

The website, sponsored by Monash University and the University of Queensland, contains the history of those places in Victoria which now have or once had a population over 200 at any time since the establishment of Victoria as a British colony.  Below is the information provided to Brighton East.