Finding Alice Pummeroy

Over the last few weeks I have finally made progress on a family history mystery that has been annoying and frustrating me for many years - the fate of my great aunt Alice May Pummeroy.

According to the Victorian Birth Index, Alice May Pummeroy was born in Carlton in 1897 to Alfred Henry Pummeroy and Eliza (Beseler).  Alice was only 3 years old when her father died of pneumonia, leaving his widow destitute with 4 young children -  Edith Margaret (who was a deaf-mute) 4, Alice May 3, Alfred Edward 2 and William Henry 4 months.  Eliza took in washing to support her family, and the local ladies benevolent society gave her 3 shillings a week in assistance.

On 8 March 1901, newspapers I located on Trove report Eliza making an appeal to the courts for help.  When asked if she wished to surrender her children to the state she refused, wanting to keep them at home.  The court described the children as clean and neatly kept, and committed the children to the Department with the recommendation they be handed over to their mother.  Eliza was granted 10 shillings from the poor box.

Eliza struggled on before surrendering her two boys to the orphanage, but kept her girls with her, and in 1911 remarried to Edward Jennion, with whom she had two more boys, Edwin and Daniel.   All the other siblings can be traced through electoral rolls and other records, but Alice disappears, and for several years I searched for her in vain.

Then came the breakthrough.  In New Zealand, I found a record for a May Alice Pummeroy marrying David James Moorhead in 1918.  Looking in New Zealand for May Moorhead, I located several electoral roll listings before she disappeared again, reappearing in Australia as May Alice Moorhead in electoral rolls from 1950 to 1980.  David James Moorhead is recorded as dying in Victoria in 1951, age 77.  His death certificate lists him as being born in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I have not located a death certificate for Alice May yet, but according to the electoral rolls she was still alive in 1980.  There is no death notice in the Ryerson Index or in the Victorian Death Index, nor can I find a will with the PROV.  I'll just have to keep looking, but at least I have her marriage, and I know she was known by her middle name.

WDYTYA 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 RB Digital eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue

• Find parish registers
  Our essential seven-page guide to the best online sources for baptism, marriage and burial records
• D-Day discovery
  On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, Gary Sterne reveals how he discovered a lost story of heroism and sacrifice
• Reader story
  Amazing finds from Adrian Stone's 10 years of research, including a classic tale of the Windrush generation
• Taking the plunge
  Caroline Roope explains why the swimming craze had such an enormous impact on our Victorian ancestors
• Trade unions
  How to find surviving union records and trace your worker ancestors
• Plus...
  The lives of ancestors who worked as vets; how to find wills; the best websites for tracing shopkeepers; and much more...

The French Revolution Digital Archive

The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the public online. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.

Archives parlementaires / Parliamentary archives

The Archives parlementaires is a chronologically-ordered edited collection of sources on the French Revolution. It was conceived in the mid 19th century as a project to produce a definitive record of parliamentary deliberations and also includes letters, reports, speeches, and other first-hand accounts from a great variety of published and archival sources. Because of copyright limitations, FRDA contains the AP volumes covering the years 1787-1794. The text of these volumes has been marked up using TEI so that speakers, places, dates, and terms in the published index can be easily found. Users can see both scanned images of the AP pages or just the texts.

Images de la Révolution française / Images of the French Revolution

The Images are composed of high-resolution digital images of approximately 14 000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects of the Revolution. These materials were selected, mainly from the collections of the Département des Estampes et de la photographie, but also from other BnF departments, and include thousands of images for the important collections entitled Hennin and De Vinck. Detailed metadata exists for the images, so that researchers can search by artist, subject, genre, and place.

New Irish Records on Ancestry

Do you have Irish ancestors?  Then the latest release of records on Ancestry may hold some treasures for you following the addition of four Irish Roman Catholic record sets to the site.

Spanning 1763 through to 1912, the new records feature baptism, marriage and burial registers from parishes across the country, as well as the records of over 8,000 confirmations.

Although the Church of Ireland was the established state church from 1536 to 1870, the Irish population remained overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. In 1861, almost 78 per cent of people were recorded as adherents of the faith, with this figure rising to 89 per cent within the space of just three decades.

As a result, genealogists may be able to take their research back further and plug important gaps in their family tree. While Protestant marriages were registered by the state from 1845, the statutory recording of births, marriages and deaths for all Irish citizens – including Catholics – did not start until 19 years later.

The level of detail recorded in some of the documents can also be useful given the absence of 19th-century Irish census records, most of which were destroyed during the Public Record Office fire in 1922.

For example, a typical confirmation register not only features the name of the person that was confirmed (usually a child over the age of 12), but their age, parents’ names and current residence.

“These records will be vital to anyone interested in researching their Irish heritage, whether they live in Ireland or are one of the many millions living around the world with Gaelic roots.” said Ancestry.co.uk’s Senior Content Manager, Miriam Silverman.

“Civil and social discontent in Ireland for hundreds of years made record keeping, especially of Catholics, hard to maintain, which is why this collection opens the door to Irish family history wider than ever.”

English and Welsh Maps Free Online

The National Library of Scotland has announced a major new online resource for family historians - a collection of English and Welsh maps covering more than 100 years.

The highly detailed zoomable maps of England and Wales from 1842 to 1952 allow anyone to browse through a catalogue of place names, modern street names, postcodes and grid references. You can access the maps at maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/info1.html.

The website compiles 37,390 sheets, including 35,124 quarter sheets of A2 size, and 2,236 full sheets at A0 size, which makes for a wide range of search options.

The National Library of Scotland’s map digitisation work in recent years has been externally funded, leading to a recent expansion in map images beyond Scotland including a Victorian plan of London which was uploaded last year.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping system is the most detailed map scale to cover England and Wales and can record most man-made features in the landscape such as roads, railways, fields, fencing, streams and buildings. Smaller features such as letterboxes, bollards and mileposts can also be seen.

For many of the towns featured, the maps show the detailed urbanisation and rapidly changing landscape from 1914 through to the 1940s thanks to 25 inch to the mile mapping.

Although images can only be viewed individually, you have the option via the map group tool to look at an area from the 1840’s up until 1952. 

Operation War Diary

In the first eight weeks since the launch of TNA's Operation War Diary project - which is being jointly run with Imperial War Museums and web portal Zooniverse, more than 10,000 people across the world have volunteered to tag names, places and other key details in the diary. For more information on the project or to register to volunteer, visit the website at www.operationwardiary.org. 

Now The National Archives has released the second batch of its WW1 unit war diaries, comprising almost 4,000 diaries which relate to the last of the Cavalry and the 8-33 Infantry Divisions deployed to the Western Front in the First World War. It also covers the period of the units’ involvement in France and Belgium, from their arrival on the front, to their departure at the end of the Great War.

“This second batch of unit war diaries provides detailed accounts of the actions of the next troops to arrive on the Western Front,” explained William Spencer, author and military specialist at TNA.  “They show advancements in technology that made it the world’s first industrialised war with many mounted troops going into battle, at first with swords on horseback before ending the war with machine guns and tanks.”

Data gathered through Operation War Diary will be used for three main purposes:

• to enrich The National Archives' catalogue descriptions for the unit war diaries,

• to provide evidence about the experience of named individuals in IWM's Lives of the First World War project

•  to present academics with large amounts of accurate data to help them gain a better understanding of how the war was fought

Operation War Diary depends on the work done by The National Archives to digitise the unit war diaries, and they've made individual pages available free of charge on the Zooniverse platform for this project. Whole war diaries are available from Discovery, The National Archives' catalogue, where they can be searched free of charge and downloaded for a small fee.

All of the data produced by Operation War Diary will eventually be available to everyone free of charge- a lasting legacy and a rich and valuable introduction to the world of the War Diaries.

A New Feature At FamilySearch

Behind every photo is a story. You can now record that story with the photos of your family that you upload to FamilySearch on both the FamilySearch.org website and the FamilySearch apps.

To add audio, first go to your family photos by clicking the Memories tab at the top of the FamilySearch screen. Or, in the Family Tree, you can click an ancestor’s name and go to the person’s details page. Then choose Memories to see photos for that particular family member.

Next, add a new photo or click on one you want to add audio to. (You will only be able to add audio to those photos you have uploaded to FamilySearch.org.) You will notice a microphone below the photo with the words Record a Memory. After you click the words, an audio recording screen will appear. Click the blue microphone to start talking, and record up to five minutes for that photo.

This is a quick and easy way to record the stories and memories that make so many of our family photos so special, and share them with friends and relatives.