Rippling Effects of the Great Irish Famine - Lecture Series

 
Do you have Irish ancestry?  Would you like to know more about the effects of the Great Irish Famine on your ancestors?  Commencing Thursday 30^th January 2025 for 5 weeks, this free online lecture series may be for you.  Delivered by the Armagh City Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council, each lecture will be recorded and uploaded to Councils YouTube channel to accommodate those unable to attend live.

Each lecture is described on the website as follows :

30^th January @ 7pm (GMT)
“Children in Irish workhouses during and after the Great Famine”.
Dr Simon Gallaher
Dr Simon Gallaher is a historian of childhood and deprivation. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2020 at the University of Cambridge, is entitled ‘Children and Childhood under the Irish Poor Law, c. 1850-1914’.  He has written on various aspects of the Irish workhouse system, including the composition of families, the long-term effect of the Great Famine on children’s experiences in the institution, and on the cultural imaginings of the workhouse child. 

6^th February @ 7pm (GMT)
“Of Monsters and ogres: Evicting the poor during Ireland’s Great Famine”.
Dr Ciarán Reilly – Maynooth University.
Dr Ciarán Reilly is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Irish social history at the Department of History, Maynooth University with a special interest in The Great Irish Famine.  He is also Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses & Estates at the Department of History.  Ciarán is the author of several books including The Irish Land Agent (2014); Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (2014) and John Plunket Joly and the Great Famine in King’s County (2012) and was co-editor of Dublin and the Great Irish Famine (2022).

13^th February @ 7pm (GMT)
“Popular piety in Ireland the pre-Famine and post-Famine periods”.
Prof. Salvador Ryan – St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth.
Salvador Ryan Professor of Ecclesiastical History, St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth where he writes on religious and cultural history from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Other published titles include Death and the Irish, Marriage and the Irish, and Birth and the Irish (2016-21); Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (2020); Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of Reformations (2022) and Reforming the Church: Global Perspectives (2023).

“Rippling Effects of The Great Irish Famine: Separated from family by crime and transportation”.
Dr Perry McIntyre AM – Visiting Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, Australia.
Dr Perry McIntyre has been involved in genealogical research for over 40 years which is where her interest in emigration from Ireland began. She has served on the council of the Society of Australian Genealogists (20 years) as well as the Royal Australian Historical Society, the Catholic Historical Society, the History Council of NSW including being chair for 2 years and other local societies such her local Mosman Historical Society. Perry’s PhD was on reunion of convict with their families, published by Irish Academic Press as Free Passage: The Reunion of Irish Convicts and their Families in Australia 1788-1852 (2011). In 2021 Perry was awarded an order of Australia (AM) for services to history and genealogy. Her current research is the workhouse orphan emigration scheme during the Famine years 1848-1850.  She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales.

20^th February @ 7pm (GMT)
“The Great Famine on the Powerscourt Estate (Benburb district) and along the Blackwater, 1845-52”.
Dr Dónal McAnallen – National Museums Northern Ireland
Dr Dónal is Library and Archives Manager for National Museums NI, based at Cultra, where he has recently devised Irish-language and Ulster-Scots-themed trails of Ulster Folk Museum. He is current Editor of Dúiche Néill: the Journal of the Ó Neill Country Historical Society. This talk is based on research initiated by his late father on the subject of The Great Famine in the Benburb district, Co. Tyrone.  

27^th February @ 7pm (GMT)
“Mothering and infant feeding in the workhouse during the Great Irish Famine”.
Judy Bolger – Trinity College Dublin
Judy Bolger is a PhD candidate at Trinity College, Dublin. Her PhD examined the social discourse surrounding impoverished mothers and women’s experiences of maternity and motherhood in Irish workhouses during the late nineteenth-century. The research was funded by the Trinity College, Dublin 1252 Postgraduate Research Scholarship. She has published works on mothers and the workhouse in Salvador Ryan (ed.), Birth and the Irish: a Miscellany (2021) and in Historical Studies, vol. 19 (2019). Judy works in the Academic Resource Office of Carlow College, St Patrick and is the Book Review Editor for the Women’s History Association of Ireland. She has a keen interest in the history of poverty, motherhood, and infant care. Her M.Phil. thesis research examined the social history of Irish breastfeeding during the nineteenth century.

I'm looking forward to listening in on this lecture series and learning more about the Famine and its impact on my Irish ancestors.

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.

Week 2 (Jan. 8-14): Favorite Photo

Over the years I have blogged a few times about my favorite photos.

I have accumulated a number of old family photographs from a variety of sources.  Many are digital copies of photos held by other family members, while I also have a number of original photos that I have inherited.  All my originals have been scanned for future preservation and happily shared with fellow family members.  I have also detailed who, where and when in as much detail as I can for each one - my pet hate is the anonymous photo of nobody-knows-who included in an album of family members.

One of my favorite family photos is the one below of my father Peter with his siblings and their father, Frank Walter Green.  Dad was one of 10 children and to the best of my knowledge it is the only photo of all 10 siblings together, which makes the scanned image I have even more precious.  And yes, one of the brothers does have a beer bottle balanced on his head!  That would be Ernest, known to all as Squib, the second eldest of the Green siblings.  If there are any relatives out there who have another photo of all 10 siblings together, I would love to hear from you and am happy to share copies!

Another favorite is the wedding photo of my great great grandparents James Nicholas Clark and Pricilla Veronica Mulholland.  Dating back to 1898, it is one of the oldest photographs I have from my mother's side of the family, and I am lucky to hold the original of this photo too.

Finally, there is the tinted studio photograph of my mother as a child.  Aged 5 years old, this photograph was taken to be sent to my mothers older brother James, or Jimmy, in 1947.  Jimmy was in the Merchant Navy at the time, and this photo chased him around the world before being delivered to his ship only days after he was killed in an accident in Argentina while they were picking up a load of horses to be taken to Poland.  Jimmy is buried in Argentina, and the photo was returned to his mother in an unopened letter included in his effects, making the photo even more precious.

Trove Tuesday - Government Gazettes

When many people search Trove, they concentrate mainly on its wonderful collection of digitised newspapers, which date back to the original foundation of the colony.  Trove is , however, much more than just newspapers.

A gazette is an official publication for the purpose of notifying the public of government business. All Australian governments (Commonwealth, State and Territory) publish official gazettes.

Information published in government gazettes covers all aspects of government, including:

• Appointments and employment (includes transfers and retirements)
• Budgetary papers (reports relating to government budgets)
• Freedom of Information (only for years covered by Acts)
• Index and Contents (cumulative indexes and content listings for individual issues)
• Government notices (including registers of medical professionals, licencing, honours, electoral notices, trade registrations and population statistics)
• Private notices (legal notices including bankruptcies, company registrations and local government matters)
• Proclamations and legislation (includes some Acts and regulations)
• Tenders and contracts (including requests for tender and notifications of approved contracts)

You can search the gazettes using key words or browse to find a specific issue. 

The very first issue of the Commonwealth of Australia Government Gazette, published on 1 January 1901, shows the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia by Queen Victoria. There were also instructions on a range of protocols, such as directions for appointing the judiciary, what should happen were the Governor-General to become incapacitated, and who would form Her Majesty’s first government.  This gazette from 1901-1957 now available online and fully text searchable.

Each Gazette documents the day-to-day business of governing and administering the Commonwealth. Usually published weekly, they were the principal source of public information on current legislation, and contained notices required by law on decisions made by the various departments and courts.
The subject matter of the Gazette ranges across all kinds of services and authorities, including defence, postal and telegraphic services, taxation and other forms of revenue, immigration, citizenship, trade and foreign affairs, national infrastructure and many others.

Each State and Territory also has their own Government Gazette, with historical gazettes dating back to colonial times.  More information, including dates of publication and digitisation, can be found in Trove's Government Gazettes Research Guide.

Week 1 (Jan. 1-7): In the Beginning

We all begin our Family History research at various times in our lives and for various reasons.  For me, family history research began quite early, when I was just 16.  History was my favourite subject at school, and when I picked up a book on genealogy in my local library, I was hooked immediately and started asking my parents loads of questions, the bulk of which they couldn't answer.

I am still surprised by how little my parents knew about their families and even their parents, especially my father.  Both his parents had passed away, his mother before I was born and his father when I was very young.  What was his mother's maiden name?  No idea.  "Never came up", he said.  His grandparents names?  Dates and places?  He knew very little other that that his parents had married in England before moving to Australia, and his father came from Essex.  So Dad's elder siblings were my best source of information, and I wrote numerous letters over the next few years.  Looking back I realise how much easier it is today, with the internet, online records and email providing fast - sometimes immediate - answers.  Beginning my research back in the 1980's was a much slower process, especially as with Dad's side of the family I was researching overseas almost immediately.

My mother's side of the family was both harder and easier.  My maternal grandmother was still alive when I started my research and she was a wonderful source of information, although again her knowledge of details was rather hit and miss.  She came from another big family, one of a dozen children with a couple of half siblings as well.  Having that extra generation to question made starting my research much easier, as well as the fact that my maternal ancestors had been in Victoria, Australia for a few generations.  It was when I went back further that life got harder - my paternal ancestors are all English, but on the maternal side I have Irish, Scottish and German as well, and I quickly discovered these could be harder to trace.  My one year of high school German was not much help at all with deciphering old handwritten German records.

Looking back, I can also see the many mistakes and research errors I made during those early years.  I was still in High School, I had done no training in Genealogical research methods, and basically made it all up as I went along, recording details as I uncovered them haphazardly in a series of notebooks.  I accepted family stories and legends as completely correct, I didn't record where I found a number of documents, and a couple of times I incorrectly assumed a family relationship based on data that fit 'well enough' and spent months chasing a family that wasn't actually related.  Much of the work I did back then had to be redone years later when I started researching with a bit more methodology.

It wasn't all wasted effort, however, and I found myself with copies of photographs the originals of which have since disappeared, and with notebooks full of stories and memories of family members who have since passed away.  In several cases VERIFYING those stories exposed inaccuracies or added new details, but had I not made such an early beginning in family history I would have missed out on those stories completely.

Who Do YouThink You Are 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 Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• Remembering Auntie Betty
• 50 websites to watch in 2025
• Regional Round-Up
• Sporting Heroes
• REME Service Records - Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers
• Digital resources for researching Welsh roots
• The history of the Coastguard
• A Valley Built On Mining
• Celebrating our ancestors caught on camera
• The Great Plague of London
• And more...

Family Tree US Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree US magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines. 

Inside this month's issue : 

• Web Highlight: Your Year in Genealogy
• AncestryDNA ‘Largest Ever Update’
• Bluesky attracts Genealogists
• Coming soon : private trees at FamilySearch?
• Trouble at 23andMe
• New Year’s Resolutions
• Vintage genealogy - how genealogy has changed and what we might see in the next 25 years.
• Photo-Preservation Q&A
• 6 Steps for Finding Enslaved Ancestors
• Island hopping - Set sail for your Caribbean roots
• Land Records
• Finding Newspapers at OldNews
• Saving Holiday Treasures
• Etiquette in Online Research
• Too Few DNA Matches
• Ancestry.com - Tips for Searching Records, Building Trees & More 
• And more...