BALLARAT LINK November 2010—No 167 President: Secretary : Graeme Reynolds Stewart Masters Treasurer: Editor: Neva Dunstan Carmel Reynen The Ballarat & District Genealogical Society Inc Ballarat Link November 2010 - No.167 THE BALLARAT & DISTRICT GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY INC. P O Box 1809 www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au Published February, May, Ballarat Mail Centre August and November. Vic 3354 [email protected] ABN 40 041 783 778 Australia ISSN 0819-7199 A0022692F The Society’s Library is housed in the Australiana Membership Room, Ballarat Central Library, 178 Doveton Street North, Ballarat 3350. Single Membership:- $25.00 Australiana Room open for “members only” every Family Membership:- $35.00 Friday evening 5pm - 7pm. Overseas membership:- $25.00 Certain books from our collection can now be borrowed by members for 1 - 2 weeks, Membership year from 1st July to 30th between 6 - 7pm on Friday evenings. June (Half price after 1st Jan) Committee Members 2008 - 2009 President Graeme Reynolds Vice President Barbara Harris Secretary Stewart McMaster Assistant Secretary Mary Adriaans Treasurer Neva Dunstan Librarian Janette McGillivray Projects Trina Jones Publicity Officer Rene Rawson Link Editor Carmel Reynen [email protected] Committee Barbara Harris Visitors are most welcome. No meeting December or January. Guest speakers for 2011 to be announced, Please check the web page for further information Also if you have missed a guest speaker you really wanted to hear the Ballarat and District Genealogical Society record all talks, these are available for members to borrow and listen to on cassette at this stage although we now have a digital recorder for recording to CD. Ballarat Link November 2010 - No.167 © Copyright, Ballarat & District Genealogical Society Inc. pg 2 CONTENTS FROM THE PRESIDENT In the previous report, members were advised of the Regular Features success in this society gaining a Victoria 175th Pro- gram grant to commence digitisation and to insert optical word recognition of the Ballarat Star, a news- Did you know? paper from the mid 1850s, and have the product up- loaded on the National Library Australia newspaper Research Queries pg 6 website. The Society continued to search for other additional Help Wanted Pg 10 grant funds that may allow extension of this work. In addition, the Society has capacity to provide a tax Guest Speakers Pg 6 invoice that may defray Australian taxpayers’ taxa- tion liabilities. In effect, this means that the Com- monwealth government is prepared to forego some How do I find? of its legitimate taxation revenue to fund the charita- ble programs developed in this Society for the bene- fit of the broader community. The internet is proba- International Research pg 12 bly as broad as we can conceive at this time. New Members pg 14 Newspapers have been given some local promi- nence. Recently the Central Highlands Regional Li- brary Corporation, bought some newspapers at a Special Features and Articles Melbourne auction. Included were two unrecorded copies of the local paper, The Chinese Advertiser Funding for the digitisation of “The Star” pg 4 published in 1856 and one copy of The English and Chinese Advertiser dated 1857. Digitalised editions of these publications can be viewed at A Tribute to Anne Levens pg 5 www.chrlc.vic.gov.au Discovering unrecorded editions of a newspaper is Radium Anniversary pg 8 one important step but to gain the copies and be able to present them to the public in a safe medium, is only one benefit of the technology. Old Christmas Recipes pg 9 Another innovation that has appeared for the Soci- ety, is the first step in the work to introduce Paypal The Murder of Dr Saenger pg 11 into the links from the website http:// www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au/ With many people no longer operating a traditional cheque account and facing significant bank charges to replicate that system, Paypal will allow these peo- Contributions for February 2011 Link to be with ple to transact business with this Society in a more the editor by the 15 January 2009. economical way. It is case of one step at a time. Pay- Email address:- [email protected] ments for Research can be completed that way. It is proposed to extend the capacity as the organisation Phone (03) 53424732 behind the Paypal can be expanded. The benefits of such a move had been discussed in the GSV Member societies’ meeting in 2010. Visit the Ballarat Genealogy Apart from the births, marriages and death columns website:- in the press, genealogy is not usually a newsworthy topic. A number of instances have connected tradi- www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au tional family history research with modern science. Webmaster:- Daryl Povey The partial success to identify the remains of the skeletons and remains of the hastily buried soldiers EMAIL :- in a long-forgotten German army field cemetery near [email protected] Fromelles in 1916 draws on the same techniques used with the discovery of a long lost aircraft from the next war. However, the reverse technique could not be applied DISCLAIMER to identify the bones of Colin Ross. In that instance The Ballarat and District prior to the government issuing his remains, the Genealogical Society Inc does not broad outline of his face was reconstructed over the hold itself responsible for the skeleton. This matched known photographic records. In all instances absolute certainty was demanded. accuracy of statements or opinions One message from the work may be that the use of expressed by authors of articles genetic materials to seek and confirm more distant published in this magazine. relationships does introduce a lower level of prob- ability. Ballarat Link November 2010— No 167 Ballarat Link November 2010 - No.167 Page 3 The Ballarat “Star” Digitising Project – by Joan Hunt For some time the Ballarat and District Genealogical Society has been investigating how best to create an in- dex to Ballarat newspapers. It seems amazing that no fully comprehensive index has ever existed for newspa- pers of this historically rich city. After two or three years of talking to various people about how best to go about the proposed project using the best technology in the least expensive way, the Society was delighted to hear that the State Government was offering the opportunity for community groups to apply for up to $12,000 to celebrate the 175th anniversary of European settlement of what is now Victoria. At the end of June I attended a presentation by Tim Hogan, Manager of the Newspaper Collection of the State Library of Victoria. It was held at the rooms of the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies in Blackburn. At that event I discussed with Tim and the other participants the possibility of getting the first decade or so of the Ballarat “Star” on to the TROVE website. (This is the National Library of Australia site where digitized images of newspapers Australia-wide can be searched using key words to find items of interest). As a result of my report, linked to the 175th grants being offered through the Public Record Office Victoria, the BDGS committee decided to make application for $12,000 to copy from the master microfilm at least the first ten years of the “Star” (which ran from 22 September 1855 to 13 September 1924) and make it available on- line through TROVE. Tim Hogan had explained that each page costs about $1.50 (later revised to about $2.20) to get from the micro- filmed image to the digitized on-line version that is searchable, and which includes optical character recogni- tion (OCR). It was using that costing that we calculated the number of years of the “Star” it might be possible to have included in the project. Graeme Reynolds and I worked on the grant application and sent it off in high hopes, which were fully real- ized. We are delighted to be able to announce that the full amount has been granted to the Society, to hand on to the State Library of Victoria. They will, in turn, send the money along with the microfilmed masters of the “Star” which they hold, to the National Library of Australia, who will complete the work. We are most grate- ful for the Government grant. In the meantime, the Ballarat Genies have agreed to add $4000 to the grant funds, and individuals have made further generous donations – maybe you would like to contribute, too. The more we are able to provide, the greater the span of years we will be able to have on the internet. If you wish to contribute to the fund, your donations are all tax deductible. The BDGS holds Deductible Gift Recipient status with the Australian Tax Office, so that all donors sending $2 or more will receive a stamped receipt (by mail) to be included with their Tax Return claim form. It is essential that any cheques be made out to the Ballarat & District Genealogical Society Inc., so that the amounts are entered into the Society’s DGR ADDRESS Such as, Victoria, we shall have a task of no common care Is presenting our first issue to the public of Ballarat, we do and responsibility— and no effort of ours shall be spared so in the fullest confidence that our acquaintance thus to promote the advancement of the general good, and to commenced will speedily ripen into friendship, and that ensure to the people their rights and privileges in the full- “The Star” will soon be as familiar with our free inde- est and freest sense. pendent ? Population, as “Household Words” The power The mining population we look upon as being paramount of the press has long and firmly been established, and it importance, and consider it our duty to carefully watch will be our careful study whilst we uphold it in all its in- over and advocate their interests by all means and appli- tegrity and plenitude, to avoid the even effects of its ances at our disposal.