For those of us with French ancestors here is a blog that focuses on research in France. It has articles, links to websites, book recommendations, and everything you need to get over your first dismay when you discover that your ancestor came from France.

Anne Morddel has been writing this blog for a year now, and to celebrate her first anniversary she is giving away a copy of her five-page checklist of research you can do on your own before you need to contact a professional in France, called Preparing to Research an Ancestor in France.

To obtain a copy you need to send her an email. You can find her email address here.

Greghamstown School

Where did your ancestors go to school? Did they go to school at all? How long did they go to school, and what was being taught at the time?

To understand your ancestor it’s important to know what sort of education was available at that time and in that area, if any.

Historical context

First we need to know something of the educational system in New South Wales. Here is a brief timeline of some milestones in the history of education in New South Wales.

1788 – no provision for education of the children of convicts or soldiers.

early 1800s – only schools were private “academies” and “public” schools subsidies or fully-funded by government but run by the Anglican Church.

1801 – Female Orphan School founded to prepare destitute girls for domestic service.

1819 – Male Orphan School founded for destitute boys.

1826-1833 – Clergy and Schools Corporation, run by Anglican Church and funded by grant of one seventh of all land in the Colony. Unpopular with other denominations and private landholders. Repealed in 1833.

1844 – Select Committee found only half of all children going to school.

1848 – Board of National Education introduced government education system. Local communities had to contribute one third of building costs, pay school fees and provide committee to run the school. New National Schools were built mostly in country areas where no schools currently existed provided a minimum of 30 pupils were enrolled, and fees paid.

1866 – Public Schools Act – restrictions on denominational schools, inspection of schools. National Schools became Public Schools, with minimum of 25 pupils. Provisional Schools, where the number was reduced even further, and Half-Time Schools, where a single teacher had to cover two schools, also introduced. The number of schools increased dramatically in the country, where they were most needed.

1870s – school available to almost all children but many attended irregularly or for brief periods. Most denominational schools except Catholic had closed or become government schools.

1880 – Public Instruction Act made attendance at school compulsory for 6-14 year olds. Secondary education introduced to prepare for university, with high fees. Funding was withdrawn from denominational schools resulting in the closure or absorption of many of them. New types of schools were introduced. Superior Public Schools combined primary and secondary education. High Schools were purely secondary schools, with high fees and low enrolments, intended to prepare students for university. Evening Public Schools were intended to cater for young people who had missed out on an education before it became compulsory, and ran at night. replaced the Council of Education with the Department of Public Instruction.

1890s – economic depression reduced spending on school buildings and many teachers retrenched, resulting in large class sizes in poor classrooms.

1904 – New Syllabus introduced – learning by doing.

1911 – High School fees abolished. Intermediate Certificate after two years of High School, and Leaving Certificate after a further two years.

1920s – more pre-vocational and academic courses introduced in High Schools

1914-1945 – World Wars and Great Depression reduce funding for schools and teachers

1961 - Wyndham Scheme introduced – Four years of High School for School Certificate, further two years for Higher School Certificate.

Local schools

Now we need to find out what schools were available for our ancestors to attend in the area in which they lived.

The NSW Department of Education and Training has an online index to Government schools of New South Wales from 1848. A search of the database will give a list of schools containing the search-term, ie a place name, and the type of school, years of operation, alternative names, and the county in which it is situated.

Here is an example:

We can see that the dates for the different schools in Blayney are consecutive, so they all likely refer to the same school, with name changes reflecting the different stages of the public education system in NSW.

Keep in mind how far the children may have had to travel to get to school, and that they may have walked, or rode, many miles to attend school each day, especially in country areas.

Clicking on the type of school takes you to the Glossary of Schools. The Glossary of Schools explains the different types of schools, and makes interesting reading in its own right.

School history

Once you have found likely schools for the area you can trace their history. If you are lucky there will be a published account of the school, often published to coincide with the centenary or other anniversary of the school’s foundation.

State Records New South Wales holds the files that relate to the establishment, maintenance, and staffing of most schools. The files may contain plans of the site and drawings of buildings, so that you can see what the school may have looked like even if it no longer exists. They are available for inspection at the Western Sydney Reading Room at Kingswood.

To find out what records are available for your school search the Schools index. Here are the search results for Blayney:

You can see that the files are all administrative files, and that there are none before 1876.

To take another example, the school in the photograph is in Greghamstown, near Blayney. The Government Schools of New South Wales from 1848 search shows me that there was a Provisional School from August 1871. It closed in December 1872. A Public School opened in May 1875 and closed in Dec 1947. There are no further entries, accounting for the emptiness of the building in the photo.

A search of State Records NSW Schools Index has hit the jackpot!

There is usually very little in these files relating to individual pupils, although there may occasionally be lists of parents requesting establishment of a school, or who haven’t paid their fees. For this school, however, there is an admissions register  for 1914 to 1926. If your ancestor lived in this area and was of school age within this period you could be lucky!

More information about the school records held by State Records NSW can be found here, and about records of pupils here.

School has a lasting influence on all of us as we develop into adults and make our way in the world. Discovering the school your ancestors attended and the type of school that it was can tell you a lot about your ancestor.

Sources:

Burnswood, J. and Fletcher, J. Sydney and the Bush, A pictorial history of education in New South Wales. [Sydney]: New South Wales Department of Education, 1980.

NSW Department of Education and Training. Government schools of New South Wales from 1848. http://www.governmentschools.det.nsw.edu.au/cli/govt_schools/index.shtm.

State Records NSW. State Records Archives Investigator: Activity Detail, School Education http://investigator.records.nsw.gov.au/Entity.aspx?Path=\Activity\25.

State Records NSW, Index to Schools and Related Records, 1876-1979. Website at http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/indexes-online/indexes-to-education-and-child-welfare-records/index-to-schools-and-related-records.

Spending time in the reading room of State Records NSW at Kingswood and the State Library NSW can be an educational experience.

I sometimes come across university history students looking for convict indent records as part of an assignment, and I help them when I can with the finding and the printing. The surprising thing to me was that they can’t read the records!

It’s not beautiful writing, but that isn’t the problem. The style of writing I was taught at school in the late 1960s was called Modified Cursive. Or running writing. Joined-up writing. The pen doesn’t leave the paper until the end of each word.

Kids don’t seem to learn to write like this at school any more. I have no idea why, but they learn to write in a way that we used to call “printing”. Where each letter is separated from the next. Block letters.

Perhaps it’s easier for kids to learn. Or for teachers to read. They learn to type and use computers and calculators, and never have to write a lot, or write quickly. I don’t know why it changed, or what most of the consequences are.

So what’s going to happen in the future?

We often hear about the Death of Microfilm and how all these records that have been preserved on microfilm will be unreadable in 50 years unless we transfer them to another media because we won’t have microfilm readers, or the spare parts for them.

Never mind the media, it seems to me that even if they are all digitised in the next 5 years we will still have a problem.

Who’s going to be able to read them?

At the recent Family History Conference at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City Barry J. Ewell held a session on using your digital camera and scanner for family history research. He shared some of his secrets with the participants, and I think they are worth repeating here for an Australian audience.

Digital camera

1. Ideally your camera should have between 5 and 8 megapixels, and a wide-angle lense. This gives the best possible detail without making the files too unwieldy to use. The wide-angle lense enables both pages of a book to be photographed at once. If you are shopping for a camera I would also add a “document” setting or similar that allows you to turn the camera on and start shooting without having to adjust the flash and macro settings every time – I wish mine did this!

2. Take images of the pages of a book, instead of using the photocopier. Barry uses a small desk tripod and takes the book over near a window. I’ve found that a window isn’t always available, but if you position yourself so that you don’t get a shadow from the light behind you you should be OK. Don’t use the flash – it’s damaging to old documents, annoying for other patrons, and creates a glare in the photograph.

3. Use photo software to brighten up the photos of the pages. Auto-contrast adjustment makes the page whiter and the printing darker, which is what you want. Barry uses Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is relatively inexpensive. I use PaintShop Pro, a similarly-priced application that is, in my opinion, easier to learn, although these days I often use Google’s Picasa or the Picture Viewer that came with Windows Vista for this brightening up task – it’s quicker and easier to scroll through each photo and fix it, although the Windows Viewer doesn’t create a backup of the photograph.

4. Use a metal cookie-sheet and magnets to hold curling pages or photographs down. He has a metal sheet to which he has stuck white shelf-liner paper to give a white background, then uses magnet strips from a craft store to hold down the document or photograph. I can see this working well for pages from a probate packet and I’m keen to try it!

5. Take overlapping photos of large documents and then stitch them together. Large documents such as maps, architectural drawings, or even old wills, can be photographed in overlapping sections. You can then stitch the sections together at home with your photo editing software. This works well as long as you keep the sections the same – make sure you have the camera the same distance from the document each time.

Scanner

1. Use OCR software to scan a document into editable text. Optical Character Recognition software turns printed text documents into an editable document in Word or similar that you can cut and paste into your own document. The quality of the recognition varies with the quality of the document – old newspapers are tricky, new books are fairly straightforward. I’ve used this to scan copies of old electoral rolls for a district into a spreadsheet, and although I had a lot of checking and fixing to do, it was much quicker and easier than typing the whole thing out!

2. Use dark backing paper to scan a document that has bleed through from the other side. If you are able to scan a document that has the text on the reverse side showing through you can put black construction paper behind (on top) of it when scanning. This blocks the text on the other side. I have some prime examples of this, which unfortunately I had to photograph rather than scan, but it’s a neat trick!

You can read Michael De Groote’s full article about this presentation on the Mormon website here.

St Paul's Anglican Church Carcoar

Civil registration in NSW

Here in New South Wales we are fortunate in the detail to be found in our birth, marriage and death certificates. and in the indexes available online. Births include parents full names, with the  maiden name of the mother, the date they were married, and previous children born. Marriages usually show the names of both sets of parents. Deaths are best of all, showing parents, spouses and children.

Civil registration began in New South Wales on 1st March 1856, with District Registrars appointed to record all births, marriages and deaths in their districts. The responsibility for notifying the District Registrar fell to a parent, for a birth; the minister, for a marriage; or the owner of the house, for a death when one of these events took place.

In the early years it was often difficult for people to get in to town to register a birth or death. There was also some distrust of the government and unwillingness to provide information.

Parish registers

Before that time the only record of births, deaths and marriages in the Colony was in the parish registers of the churches. Initially only the Anglican Church was recognised, so Catholics and others had to be baptised, married and buried by the Anglicans or not at all.

The Registry has collected information from churches for the pre-registration period on a number of occasions to complete their records but this process is still incomplete, with missing information on many records, especially marriages, and missing records. Most of these early registers have been microfilmed and are available in many libraries – these are the Early Church Records, identifiable by the V in the reference when you search on the NSW BDM website. Photocopies are not allowed, but you can write down the information you find. Make sure you record where you found it!

Of course children were still baptised, couples were married in church, and burials were performed according to the rites of the religious denomination of the deceased, after civil registration began and so the parish registers continued.

Why look at the parish register?

The Registry has attempted to collect information that may be present in a parish register and not in the Registry. After the initial introduction of civil registration in 1856 two further attempts were made, in 1879 and 1912, to collect baptisms and marriage information not recorded in the Registry, but the process of reconciling the two was never finalised.

This means that there are entries in some parish registers, and in rare cases whole registers, that do not appear in the Registry. Marriages in the Registry may lack information that the parish register contains. It’s worth looking at the parish register, then, even if you have the certificate from the Registry.

Even the remote possibility that there is some new information somewhere makes it worthwhile to seek these registers out.

The parish register will also contain the original signatures of the parties concerned, whereas the copy sent to the Registry has been written out by the minister or a clerk and does not contain original signatures. This is especially valuable for marriages, where the bride and groom, and any witnesses, had to sign.

Parish Registers on microfilm

The Joint Copying Project of the Society of Australian Genealogists, the State Library of NSW and the National Library of Australia has been working for more than 25 years to microfilm parish registers. Many Anglican registers have been filmed, with the Diocese of Bathurst added earlier this year. Many Catholic and Presbyterian registers have also been filmed.

Microfilms are available in the Society of Australian Genealogists and the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Check their online catalogues for details of what is available; more are being added all the time. A search by the name of the place and the words “parish register” should give you what you need. You can usually make individual copies of single entries for research purposes.

In the Mitchell Library the card catalogue is available in the Special Collections area – ask the librarian behind the desk. The films are on open access on the shelves.

In the Society of Australian Genealogists the online catalogue includes the filmed parish registers. You may also find books of transcribed entries for specific churches.  There is a also a book that lists all the microfilms in the Society’s collection, but keep in mind that this book will not contain any parish registers that were filmed after 1990.

What if the parish register hasn’t been filmed or transcribed?

Parish registers that have not been filmed will be found either in the central archives of the church concerned, or remain in the parish.  Some parish records have undoubtedly been lost or destroyed, especially small churches where the minister had to travel long distances to administer to his flock.

Most parish priests and ministers are very helpful to family historians and will usually provide what you need for a small donation to cover their time and expenses.

Sources

Nick Vine Hall, Parish Registers in Australia, published by the author, 1989.

Nick Vine Hall, Tracing Your Family History in New South Wales, 5th edition. CD. Adelaide: Archive CD Books, 2006.

NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, History of the Registry’s Records. Website. http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/historyRecords.htm.

Richards, J. A., Garnsey, H.E., and Phippen, A., Index to the Microform Collection of the Society of Australian Genealogists. Sydney: Society of Australian Genealogists, 1990.

Society of Australian Genealogists, Bascis on church records (Australia). Website. http://www.sag.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48.

State Library of New South Wales, Getting started: Church Records. Downloadable PDF document. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/research_guides/docs/church_records.pdf.