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Picture Australia

27 March 2011 by
Fiji NAtives SLV b49524

State Library of Victoria ‘Fiji Natives’ 1868, SLV accession no. IMP09/11/68/168

Picture Australia is the National Library of Australia website devoted to pictures, also available through Trove, the National Library of Australia’s umbrella site for searching books, journals, newspapers, maps, pictures, diaries and letters, and much more.

Pictures are contributed from all over the country; from libraries, archives, and even from individuals.

If you search for ‘Fiji’ all sorts of pictures are listed, from holiday photographs  and travel posters  to early photographs of people and places, and engravings such as this one on the left. Many are available to view online.

Here is the link to a hand-coloured lithograph depicting the “dreadful situation of Captain Dillon and two other survivors” in the massacre in 1813 at which Charlie Savage lost his life.

Here is a link to another hand-coloured lithograph by a Frenchman, Jacques Arago (1790-1855), showing “Kandabou”, which I am guess is Kandavu, with the French ship (presumably) and a Fijian canoe in the foreground.

Here is a link to an 1846 French lithograph of an interior in Levuka.

Trove is the umbrella site for searching books, journals, newspapers, maps, pictures, diaries and letters, and much more. It incorporates results from Picture Australia and many other sources, and is a great place to start your search for pictures.

Trove

 

As with anything you find on the internet you must be aware of copyright restrictions before you publish it yourself, and you must cite the source.

Filed Under: Fiji, Pictures Tagged With: , , ,

Charles Johnson, prisoner and father

19 March 2011 by

When the grandmother of one of my clients was born there was no father listed on the birth certificate. When she married she stated her father to be a Charles Johnson, but there was no other evidence of this, or indeed of any link between Charles and and the mother Isabella Staader.

At least there was a name to go on, and the place where the child was born. A search of the digitised newspapers on Trove had given a short account of a trial in which Charles was convicted in January 1887 of assault and sentenced to 12 months hard labour at Tamworth Gaol. The woman he assaulted was Isabella Staader.

SMH 18970201 p5 Johnson and Staader

Further searches revealed more information. The NSW Police Gazettes reported his arrest (without bail), sentence and release. He is the Return of Prisoners, showing his sentence:

Charles is about half way down. He was charged with “Wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm” on Isabella Staader. He was tried at Tamworth Quarter Sessions on 29th January 1897, and sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour at  Tamworth Gaol.

Later in the same year he appears in a list of Prisoners Discharged to Freedom. The printing is even smaller than in the page above so I haven’t posted an image. It describes not only his crime, sentence and date and place of trial, but some additional information – his native place was Tamworth, NSW; year of birth was 1862; height 5 feet 5 inches; fresh complexion; brown hair and eyes; regular nose, mouth and chin; and this was his first conviction.

The Index to Gaol Photographs on the State Records NSW website does not include those taken at Tamworth Gaol, but there is a full index at the Western Sydney Records Centre. There he was: Charles Johnston in Tamworth Gaol. The presence or absence of the T in the name was a minor inconvenience – if they didn’t always spell names the same way there is no reason for us to be pedantic about it.

SRNSW Gaol Photograph 1897 Charles Johnston

The page is wrinkled where the photographs have been stuck on.  We now know quite a lot more about Charles Johnson, including some more accurate information, as I suspect the Description Book is more accurate than the Police Gazette. He had light brown hair and blue eyes, with a cut under his left eye. He weighed 130 pounds. He was Church of England and he could read and write.

We may not know exactly what was going on between Charles and Isabella, but we now have an idea of when it might have come to an end. Perhaps she took him back when he got out of gaol; certainly his child knew that he was her father.

Often the father of an illegitimate child can never be found. Sadly, if there was domestic violence, it may be possible to find out quite a bit about him.

The full citation for the page from the Description Book is :

State Records NSW: Department of Corrective Services, ‘Photograph Description Book, Tamworth Gaol, 1894-1929’, [3/5997]; item 49 for Charles Johnson.

The square brackets seem to interfere with the formatting in the picture caption.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Convicts, Courts, Police Tagged With: , , , , ,

Blog overload

19 March 2011 by

Google homepage reader bubbleThere are a lot of great blogs out there, and I try to follow as many as I can. I usually learn something new in every one of them – sometimes about genealogy sources or methods, sometimes about the person writing the blog or the family they are writing about. Blogs are a great resource.

Sometimes, though, if I haven’t been reading them for a while, it’s difficult to catch up. The bigger that number of unread posts gets, the less I feel like going in there and tackling them. It becomes overwhelming.

Your blog reader is there to help you, but for it to be useful it must be manageable. You can mark posts as being ‘read’ if you really don’t feel like reading them and know you won’t get back to them anytime soon. Remember, they’re not gone; they are still in the blog itself. They are just not in the queue demanding your attention.

If I come back to my blog reader after three or four days and there are 500 posts waiting for me, am I going to read them all? Sadly, the answer is no. There are only 24 hours in a day, and most of them are needed for other things.

I subscribe to new blogs, or newly-discovered blogs, as I find them, and the list gets longer and longer. Sometimes you have to be ruthless. Every now and then I cull my list of subscribed blogs.

Here are some tips for managing the out-of-control blog reader:

  1. Categorise the blogs you subscribe to. That way you can only read your favourites if you are pressed for time, or you can restrict yourself to the ‘genealogy’ blogs and save the ‘social media’ and ‘how to’ blogs for another time.
  2. Unsubscribe from the blogs with a much higher count of unread posts than the others. Chances are that there are a lot of posts that you would normally skip, so think about whether it’s worth wading through them to get to the occasional interesting post.
  3. Are there blogs there that you feel you should read but never get around to? It’s not school, and there won’t be a test afterwards. Unsubscribe from them.
  4. Some blogs have multiple ways of letting you know that they have just published a new post. If you tend to find new posts through Facebook,  Twitter or email then they are just cluttering up your blog reader. Unsubscribe.
  5. Some blogs only publish the first 100 words or so in the reader and if you want to read the rest you have to go to the blog itself. I tend not to. Unsubscribe.
  6. Decide on the best way to read the blogs. I use Google Reader, and I use it in different ways depending on how big the backlog is. I prefer to use the Google Reader widget on my Google homepage, as in the picture above. One click to open the post, another click to close it. Easy. If I have a big backlog I will go into the Reader itself, so I can see how many posts are outstanding for each blog. More recently I’ve been reading them on my Android phone. No clicking, which can aggravate the arthritis on bad days, just tapping and flicking the finger.
  7. Remember the blogs that you have just unsubscribed to are still there, and you can go back and browse them at any time. Keep them in a list of bookmarks, or a bookmarking site like Delicious.

Blogs are there for your enjoyment and education, and it should be enjoyable to read them. If it isn’t, do something about it!

Filed Under: Blogs, Social Media Tagged With: ,