Royal Voluntary Service Records Project

The Hidden Histories of A Million Wartime Women project went live on Kickstarter throughout May with the target of £25,000 to digitise the first 28,000 pages of diaries from 1938 to 1941. Public support has been so overwhelming that the charity hasn’t just met its target, but superseded it having raised £27,724 thanks to the 705 backers who kindly donated.

These pledges have given Royal Voluntary Service the opportunity to reveal a vivid insight into life during World War II. For the past six years, our archivist and a team of volunteers at Royal Voluntary Service has been sorting and protecting the diaries but thanks to public donations, a specially trained staff member will now begin digitising them ready for publication on their website in July 2017.

Within two years of the outbreak of the Second World War, 1-in-10 women had set aside their own lives to volunteer and help others as members of the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS).   These ordinary women who volunteered for the charity played a vital role on the Home Front and worked tirelessly to contribute towards the war effort. As well as sewing, cooking and helping the community recover after raids, they learnt new skills such as extinguishing bombs, driving in the black-out and making clothes from dog hair.

One example out of the thousands of diaries describes a major Blitz in Bath between 28 and 29 April 1941. This saw volunteers fit 80 children with masks and issue 205 helmets for babies. The centre also served 3,350 meals and helped coordinate housing for more than 9,000 people made homeless following the raids. One volunteer from the centre had lost her home and all of her belongings during the blitz but turned up to volunteer the following morning. She also sent a brave telegram to her soldier sons reading “bombed out, but still smiling,” so not to worry them.   Several other examples are also available on the project's page.

Inside History Magazine

The latest issue of Inside History Magazine is hot off the press and now available digitally. Campaspe Regional Library members can download this and past issues free through our Zinio subscription.  Not a member?  Check your local library to see if they have the magazine available digitally or in print.
Included in this issue :

• How to date photographs
• A rare diary revealing Melbourne society in the 1860s
• The colonial life of Samuel Thomas Gill
• A guide to the Western Front battlefields
• How to write your convict's life story

Suffragette Memorabilia at the NLA

The National Library has launched a crowdfunding campaign, asking for people to donate so that a significant collection of documents and memorabilia chronicling the suffragette campaign can be digitised.

Suffragettes in a police wagon in London, 1913

South Australian Bessie Rischbieth was a feminist and social activist who was fascinated by the militant actions of the British suffragettes. Australian women had already won the right to vote in 1894, two decades before Britain, and Rischbieth made several trips to London to see the UK movement gain momentum.  Before she died in 1967, she donated her entire collection of memorabilia to the National Library of Australia.
Between 1900 and 1914 around 1,000 British suffragettes were imprisoned because they refused to pay fines for crimes such as vandalism. Several prisoners went on hunger strikes; the British government released these women to avoid liability for any deaths. Many of the released women were then force-fed.
It wasn't long before Bessie was swept up with the whole whirlwind of passionate speeches in packed venues and marches through the streets of London. Over the years, Rischbieth made other trips to London, (right up until the 1950s), and she religiously chronicled the fight of suffragettes, keeping an enormous amount of documents, newspaper clippings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, suffrage periodicals, postcards and suffragette items.  The collection also includes personal letters from Vida Goldstein (instrumental in getting the right for women to vote in Australia), embroidered banners and cloths. There's also Letitia Withall's medal for 'valour' after she went on a hunger strike for the right to vote, as well as suffragette Louise Cullen's Holloway Prison brooch.

Letitia Withall's medal for 'valour'

Louise Cullen's Holloway Prison Brooch 1908

Provenance - The Journal of the Public Records Office of Victoria

Provenance is a free journal published online by Public Record Office Victoria (PROV). The journal will publish peer-reviewed articles, as well as other written contributions, that contain research drawing on records in PROV’s holdings.
The purpose of the journal is to foster access to PROV’s archival holdings and broaden its relevance to the wider Victorian community.
The records held by PROV contain a wealth of information regarding Victorian people, places, communities, events, policies, institutions, infrastructure, governance, and law. Provenance provides a forum for scholarly publication drawing on the full diversity of these records.
Some recent articles include :

• Doing their bit helping make Australia free’: mothers of Aboriginal diggers and the assertion of Indigenous rights by Patricia Grimshaw and Hannah Loney

• Beyond failure and success: the soldier settlement on Ercildoune Road by James Kirby

• Lithium and lost souls: the role of Bundoora Homestead as a repatriation mental hospital 1920–1993 by Cassie May

•  ‘She had always been a difficult case …’: Jill’s short, tragic life in Victoria’s institutions, 1952–1955 by Cate O’Neill

WDYTYA First World War Army Research Guide

To mark 100 years since the start of the Battle of the Somme, the wonderful people at Who Do You Think You Are Magazine are making their First World War Army research guide available to download completely free of charge as a PDF document.
Written by Phil Tomaselli and originally published in their July 2014 issue, the 10-page printable PDF has been fully updated to include the latest records released on the web during the First World War Centenary so far.

Lives at Sea - Royal Navy Records

Thousands of Royal Navy service records from the First World War has been launched online.  Unveiled on Wednesday 15 June, the First World War: Lives at Sea website provides details of more than 3,500 naval officers and ratings who served during the conflict.  Fully searchable, the material represents just a small portion of the total service records from the First World War period which are gradually being transcribed and uploaded to the database.

A lack of Royal Navy crew lists after the late 19th century means it has previously been difficult for researchers to determine who was on which ship at the same time.  However, the presence of transcribed records within the database means users will quickly be able to see connections between records and view ‘virtual crew lists’ for different battles and campaigns.  The transcription will also enable users to find Royal Navy personnel by details that have previously not been made searchable, including occupation, next of kin and medals.
The website is the result of a joint partnership between The National Archives, the National Maritime Museum and the Crew Lists Index Project. All three partners previously collaborated to create a similar resource last year, providing free access to Merchant Navy records from 1915.
The project team aims to have uploaded the full collection of transcribed Royal Navy service records to the database by November 2018, in time for the end of the First World War Centenary.

Soda

SODA stands for Stream of Digital Archives and it was created by the National Archives of Australia to let people know about new images that are uploaded to their collection. The National Archives uploads between 50-1000 digital copies a day and upwards of 15,000 a month, so there is always a lot of new content to browse.

The website by default shows you the newly scanned records from the last 3 days. You can select to see up to 1 months worth of recent records, and you can refine by a date range or filter by a keyword. A very handy extra is the ability to subscribe. Subscribing allows you to enter your email address and keywords and if those keywords match a newly scanned record you will be sent a message alerting you there is potentially a record of interest available to view. You can then share those records with friends and family by selecting a social media site or email.  All images are open and available to the public.
Some of the things you can find on SODA include war graves records cards, cabinet minutes, enlistment photographs, reparation records and so much more.
So have a look at SODA today.