Website Wednesday - The Ryerson Index

The Ryerson Index is a free index to death notices appearing in Australian newspapers. The date range covered extends from the Sydney Gazette of 1803 up to newspapers published within the last week or so. The Index also includes many funeral notices, and some probate notices and obituaries.

In 2020, Ryerson made the decision to commence indexing notices from Funeral Directors' websites in response to the mass closures of regional newspapers which occured in the second quarter of the year.

The Index was originally created by the Sydney Dead Persons Society, so its strength lies in notices from NSW papers - including in excess of two million notices from the Sydney Morning Herald alone. However, the representation from sources in other states continues to grow, with additional papers and funeral directors being regularly added, so that the Index can now truly be considered an Australian index.  Today the Ryerson Index contains 9,604,544 notices from 497 different Australian newspapers, publisher websites and funeral director websites.

Indexing is being continuously carried out by a team of volunteers who give freely of their time to ensure the site continues to grow. Site updates generally occur weekly creating a wonderful resource not purely for Family History researchers. 

While the actual notice is not digitised, information includes :

Name

Notice Type (Death, Funeral, Probate) 

Date of Event 

Event Type (Death, Funeral, Cremation, Publication) 

Age (if available)

Other Details (late of...)

Publication

Date Published

Website Wednesday - Prisoners of the First World War

Millions of First World War prisoner records held by the International Committee of the Red Cross have been uploaded to the web for the first time.

Available for free through a new web portal, the vast collection provides details of people who were held in prisoner of war camps across Europe between 1914-1918.
Created by their captors, the records were submitted to the International Prisoners-of-War Agency, which was set up by the ICRC at the start of the conflict to help restore contact between prisoners and their families at home.
Researchers will generally be able to locate an index card for each individual, providing basic details about their imprisonment and reference numbers for any related documents held elsewhere in the database.
Cards containing tracing requests made by prisoners’ next of kin can also be consulted.
Although all civilian-internee index cards from the ICRC’s archives in Switzerland are now online, roughly 20 per cent of the cards for military prisoners from Belgium, France, the UK and Germany are yet to be digitised.
According to the organisation, the missing records will be steadily uploaded over the next six months, with approximately 5 million index cards representing 2.5 million prisoners of the war available through website by the end of 2014.

In addition, the ICRC has also uploaded a large collection of historic postcards and reports on the conditions in which internees were being held at camps across Europe, Egypt, India, Russia and Japan.

Website Wednesday - Populations Past

The website Populations Past allows users to create and view maps of different demographic measures and related socio-economic indicators every 10 years between 1851 and 1911. These include fertility, childhood mortality, marriage, migration status, household compositions, age-structure, occupational status and population density. Brief explanations of each measure are included, indicating how they are calculated and explaining how they relate to other measures. Users can zoom in to a particular area on the map, and compare side by side maps of different times or measures. When large areas are viewed at once the data are displayed in Registration Districts (RDs), but the display changes to Registration Sub-Districts (RSDs) when the users are zoomed in. 

The Resources tab on the website contains a handy User Guide, as well as several podcasts of interviews with census experts created in partnership with Year 8 students from South Wales, resources for teachers, an image gallery and a number of links to online National RSD Maps.

The website is hosted by the University of Cambridge and Populations Past and its associated research project, An Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline, have been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust (Cambridge).

Website Wednesday - The Ironclad Sisterhood

The Ironclad Sisterhood was launched by the Society of Australian Genealogists in 2023, based on the original research into the lives of convict women by society member Jess Hill. 

Jess Hill was a member and volunteer of the Society of Australian Genealogists from 1964 until her death in 1995. During her time at the Society, Miss Hill worked as a Honorary Library Research Assistant, helping others find ancestors, solve long-held mysteries, and uncover lost details about individuals across the ages. In 1970, she began to collect biographies of women convicts transported to Australia from 1788 to 1818.

She began this work in 1970 – an unusually early time to begin investigating convict ancestors, particularly women convicts. Miss Hill joined a small coterie of passionate Australian historians who demanded that women’s history be taken seriously, and women be understood as historical agents in their own right.

In 2021 Miss Hill’s work was rediscovered and the Ironclad Sisterhood project was launched with hopes to further Miss Hill’s research agenda and build a searchable database of convict women filled with biographical details pulled from multiple different sources.

So if you have female convicts in your family history, or simply want to know more about the lives of the women convicts who helped build the colony of Australia, check out the website and see what it has to offer.