I found an article in a digitised newspaper [Yorkshire Post & Leeds Intelligencer 15 Jan 1936] about my grandfather Frank Mapson. He was an intriguing fellow. He apparently tested the powers of local witch doctors, who he thought were almost as good as European diviners. He claims to have found gold, buried antiquities and even traced 8 bodies!
Amazing fellow.
How do you de-clutter all those piles of papers on your desk, in your filing cabinet and even on the floor? How do you find a misplaced page in amongst the reams of notes? Organise them systematically so you can find the information in documents?
I found an interesting tutorial by Randy Whited “A Beginners guide to Going Paperless” which I found helpful.
GGG Grandfather Benjamin Eaton was from the village of Woodford, Northamptonshire, on the banks of the River Nene.
Bakehouse or Bakers Lane, Woodford
Woodford is a small village, with a general store and a few other stores, a school and a church but is essentially the same as it was in the 1800s. About 60 miles from London.
The Eaton family lived in Bakehouse Lane, which later became known as Bakers Lane. Benjamin’s father John was a labourer and shoe maker.
John had 5 children: Benjamin b1817, William b 1819, Elizabeth b1824, Rebecca b 1826 and Mary Ann b1832.
Benjamin was to be found guilty of setting a haystack on fire in 1851 and sent to Australia as a convict on the ship Dudbrook in 1853.
St Marys Church, Woodford
Quite close to the Eaton family home was the parish church. St Marys was built in the 12th century in a Norman style.
Generations of Eatons have been christened in the ancient baptismal font, and married by the local minister.
The village has a website with photographs and notes about the history of Woodford.
Today the village hosts 1400 people and while many of the old houses have been demolished, quite a few remain.
I visited Woodford in 2011 and while I couldn’t identify the exact house the Eaton’s lived in, I enjoyed seeing the old church and village green, devouring the yummy soup in the pub and a tour by the very kind Paul Bird.
My GG Grandfather Joseph Brand was a sailor on boats that moved passengers and supplies between Fremantle, Western Australia and Albany on the southern coast in the 1860s-1870s.
In 1876 I believe he was on the ill-fated coastal steamer Georgette which sank off the south west coast of W.A. According to the Fremantle Herald of 9/12/1876, the Georgette left Fremantle and was on its way to Adelaide laden with a cargo of timber and a large number of passengers. She sprang a leak miles from shore at midnight on 30 November and foundered off the coast between Cape Naturaliste and the Leeuwin. The article reported the engine room was flooded so she headed to the shore, and was beached. A life boat was lowered with passengers but sank. Some passengers made it to shore and many were assisted by a young local girl, Grace Bussell and her helper Sam Isaacs. 12 died.
12 October 1876 Georgette crew list, source “Ancestry.com.au”
The list of survivors included “A. Brand, able bodied seaman”.
A search of shipping records has found only records for a “J. Brand”, able bodied seaman or fireman, on other vessels working on the coastal vessels in this period. In particular, a record shows J. Brand, working on the Georgette on its voyage of 10 October 1876, so I believe the initial “A” to be an error and is very likely to actually be J. or Joseph Brand.
Fortunately he survived the sinking and made it to shore with other crew and passengers. Joseph continued working as a mariner until his death in 1880.
The National Archives of Australia is a repository for government records created at Commonwealth level in Australia.
They also hold records of military service which can be searched by surname at their website, The National Archives of Australia. The files for WWI soldiers have been digitised and can be viewed free online.
More recently the NAA has created an online site, The arcHIVE, for the public to be able to transcribe, or type out original documents which can then be searched online.
I did a word search for WAR and came across personal World War One diaries that have been scanned and now need to be typed by willing volunteers. There are 3 levels of difficulty – easy, medium and hard. You can transcribe one page at a time and if you can’t complete it, submit it anyway and someone else will finish it off.
The website Australian Screen collects and preserves heritage films and has some online.
One film in particular is a short film of Perth in 1907. It’s an old black and white film showing crowds on the street, shop fronts, trams, horses and bicycles. The camera moves up and down the streets of Perth recording the action on the street. At one point a man bumps into another man in the street and fisticuffs ensue as the camera moves past.
Street scenes in Perth WA, 1907
The film was made by Leonard Corrick, who would have advertised the time and place of filming to ensure crowds on the street and the ‘inadvertent’ fight in the film was possibly set up by the Corrick as an added attraction.
[Source: www.aso.gov.au]
Our photo albums, letters, home movies and paper documents are a vital link to the past. Personal information we create today has the same value. The only difference is that much of it is now digital.
The Library of Congress has a web page with links to information about how to preserve
Italian women and a laptop http://www.rogerwendell.com/computers.html
Also a video on why digital preservation is important.
The Library of Congress also recently released a free e-publication, Perspectives
on Personal Digital Archiving.
The e-book contains a compilation of selected blog posts published in The Signal, the blog of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
The history of Western Australia’s children’s hospital dates back to 1897. A young girl put threepence into a money box observed by Perth businessman Charles Moore and said she would like to donate it to the children’s hospital. Mr Moore replied “But we have no children’s hospital”. “Then why not have one?” she asked. “Yes,” said Mr Moore, “we will have one, and we’ll start it with your pennies.” He issued a number of collecting cards to sell and agreed to subsidise the amount raised by each child by an equal sum. These cards soon raised 100 pounds.
On 8 November 1897 a public meeting was held and it was agreed 3 projects would be built to commemorate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, namely a children’s hospital, the Victoria Institute for the Blind and the Home of the Good Shepherd.
James Sykes Battye was among the members of a committee appointed to choose a site for the hospital and it was agreed the present site on Thomas Street would be used. J.S. Battye was also appointed as a trustee. On 25 November 1898 the committee called for proposals for building designs and the work of J.J. and E.J. Clarke of Royal Arcade Chambers was accepted. Battye was president of the Children’s Hospital board in 1911-13.
1898 Proposed Children’s Hospital, Perth W.A. (Western Mail, 25 Nov 1898)
Dr. James Sykes Battye (1871 – 1954) was the first chief librarian of the Victoria Public Library (now the State Library of Western Australia) . He was a leading historian, librarian and public figure of the State. He also served as Chancellor of the University of Western Australia.
In 1909 fundraising and lobbying efforts made the girl’s wish come true when Perth’s Children’s Hospital opened to the public, later to be named Princess Margaret Hospital for Children (PMH).
1860 Fremantle police station (small buildings on each side of tunnel)
Thomas Stack was born about 1836-1844 in Tipperary, Ireland, and would have lived through the potato famine in the 1840s where 1 million people died from starvation. A million more emigrated initially to America and in the 1850s, to Australia to find a new life.
Thomas and his brother Timothy emigrated Ireland via Plymouth on the ‘Emma Eugenia‘ and arrived in Fremantle on 25 May 1858. He became a police constable at the Fremantle police station, at the foot of the Round House, at the western end of High Street. The port town would have been a busy place with ships arriving, customs, convict and crime issues. Convicts were sent from England between 1850 and 1868 arriving in Fremantle by the ship load.
During this time Thomas met Mary Tuft, a young woman from Armagh in Northern Ireland. Mary had left the UK travelling alone as a 16 year old girl, on the ‘Hamilla Mitchell’ and arrived in 1859. Many young Irish women were actively encouraged to Australia to work as domestics and servants, and correct the imabalance of a male dominated society. Her 2 younger sisters Elizabeth and Alice followed her to W.A. in 1864.
Thomas and Mary married at St Patrick’s church in Fremantle on 22 September 1863. Over the next 30 years they were posted to Greenough, Dongara and Nannup police stations. Thomas would patrol the regions, look for missing settlers and convicts, investigate reports of ship wrecks, and record his activities in police occurence books which can be viewed at the State Records Office of W.A.
Thomas and Mary later became inn keepers at the 19-Mile Inn on the road from Perth to York, and then the Railway hotel in York. They had 6 children, including Louisa Stack, my great-grandmother. Thomas died in York on 10 February 1896, and is buried in the York cemetery with Mary who died in 1911.
North Perth Town Hall, c1932. Source: SLWA
Perth had several Royal Academy of Dancing (RAD) schools which operated in community halls. The North Perth Town Hall in View Street, Western Australia, was a venue for Evelyn Hodgkinson’s School of Ballet.
Evelyn was born in Coolgardie in 1905. She taught dancing, acrobats, singing and ball room dancing to her students, and performed vaudeville and Highland dances at her pupils concerts. Evelyn also played the hornpipe.
In 1923 Evelyn won the Uglieland Cup for the champion Highland and national dancer of W.A. under 18 years.
Evelyn moved to Perth in the 1920’s. She became a teacher of dancing at Goldsworthy’s Winter Palace in Subiaco and the Protestant Hall, Beaufort Street in 1924. Evelyn married Robert Bresland in 1926 but retained her maiden name.
Eventually the dancing school moved to the old Theosophical Society hall on the corner of Museum and James Streets, Perth (now Northbridge). Evelyn concentrated on teaching RAD ballet to a growing number of students, from the age of 3 years to young adults. Her students usually performed well in examinations and displayed their talents in an end of year concert at His Majesty’s theatre.
The hall was demolished about 1979 to make way for the new State Library of Western Australia (SLWA), and the school moved to a studio in Cremorne Arcade in Hay Street.
Evelyn Myrtle Hodgkinson died in 2007.
Bits from the Archives 