Researchers around Australia, and indeed around the world, are breathing a huge sigh of relief at the news that the Australian Federal Government is giving a much needed cash injection to Australia’s national treasure, the National Library of Australia and Trove.

In its upcoming May budget, the federal government has promised $33 million over four years to the NLA.

The NLA, which runs digital archive database Trove, will also be separately allocated funding of more than $9 million — a move the government said would secure the future of the service for years to come.

So this is fabulous news, not only does the National Library of Australia get much needed funding, much of which is needed to upgrade the NLA building itself – the building that holds so much of Australia’s history – Trove gets allocated funds too.

With newspapers, diaries, magazines, photos, gazettes, newsletters, maps, artefacts, books, diaries, letters, music, audio and video, and so much more, the Trove website is truly a portal of Australian history, to the world.

On Trove you can find more than 14 billion digital items primarily relating to Australian history, and now with ongoing funding, that number will continue to grow.

So a big, big thankyou for everyone who signed the various “Save Trove” petitions, and to those who wrote to their local Members of Parliament to voice concern over the potential closure of Trove. Our voices have been heard, and thanks to the ongoing funding, we can now continue to use our favourite website for all of our research.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/

For more about the announcement, have a read of these articles:

– National Library welcomes announcement of ongoing Trove funding
– Trove secures funding as federal government comes to rescue of National Library of Australia’s digitised archive
– Australia’s Trove Receives Lifeline with $42.2 Million Funding Boost
– Trove funding secured in 2023-24 Federal Budget

From time to time I come across all sorts of interesting history and/or genealogy related tidbits that I want to share with you, so I’ve collected them together to make up a Snippets post.

These aren’t meant to be comprehensive, but rather they are just bits that I’ve found and wanted to share. Mostly it is Australian news, but I have tacked on some overseas snippets on the end for you interest too.

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Discovering Anzacs website “Decommissioned”
News on Twitter is that the National Archives of Australia have “decommissioned” (deleted) the Discovering Anzacs website. This is a perfect demonstration of why the community are hesitant to engage with and contribute to institutional projects. How many hours of work and contributions of material has been thrown away? –  via @michwatsonoz@ausglam.space on Twitter. More info on the NAA website.

Are you interested in helping to research and preserve the history and heritage of the WEA (SA)?
Are you interested in helping to research and preserve the history and heritage of the WEA? The WEA are in their 110th year, and they are launching an exciting volunteer-led project to ensure their  history is properly recorded and preserved for future generations. The project will include a research component as well as cataloguing, digitising, and storing our vast treasure trove of documents, photographs, and objects. Initially we are seeking 3 enthusiastic Volunteers to take on the role of WEA Volunteer History Project Team Leader for our three categories: Research; Cataloguing; and Digitisation. Once our Team Leaders have been appointed we will also be calling for general volunteers to assist with the project. If you’re interested, CLICK HERE for more information or to apply.

Sydney Jewish Museum Major Expansion
News from the Sydney Jewish Museum … “We’re thrilled to announce that we’re embarking on a major expansion project to transform the Sydney Jewish Museum into a state-of-the-art, tech-enabled museum precinct by 2027. The new precinct will be home to two museums: a Centre of Contemporary Jewish Life and a Sydney Holocaust Museum. It will offer new exhibitions and programs that celebrate Jewish life and culture, whilst strengthening our position as Australia’s leading Holocaust museum, and responding to a changing world with programs that actively challenge racism and antisemitism. This expanded Museum will allow us to almost double our capacity by 2032 – so we can grow our reach, extend our impact and meet the existing high demand for our programs. [via the @sydneyjewishmuseum Facebook page]

Volunteers Wanted for the South Australian Schools Admission Project
GenealogySA are asking if you can you spare a few hours a week to help with their project? The Schools Admissions Project has just experienced a massive influx of records and needs your help with both data entry and checking to prepare these records for their online databases. Work can be done at home or in the society library at Unley.  For those working from home arrangements can be made for work to be collected and returned to the library. If you are interested can you please contact the Schools Team Leader, Meryl Stephenson on schoolslead@saghs.org.au or R&D Chair, David Ballinger on saghs.randd@saghs.org.au. [via @GenealogySA Facebook page]

Wanted … an Events Coordinator for the History Trust of South Australia
Are you looking for an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on South Australia’s major historical events? The Events Coordinator is a crucial member of the team that develops, produces and manages the major events of the History Trust of South Australia. The Events Coordinator assists with the successful delivery of South Australia’s History Festival, the Bay to Birdwood and the History Trust’s named orations program. More information on iWorkforSA:  http://ow.ly/eNPx50NkJmU
[via the History Trust of SA Facebook page]

Find and Connect’s New website being tested for usability
The Find and Connect website is a resource for “Forgotten Australians, Former Child Migrants and anyone interested in the history of child welfare in Australia”. Their website has grown exponentially over the past few years, and they have undertaken the task of redesigning their site. But rather than go ahead and launch it, they are asking you, the users for join in and give feedback on how you find their new site. For more information and to join in as a usability tester, head to their blog.

Ancestry Australia looking for a Digitation Operator
If you’re in Sydney, and are looking for a short term contract (4 months), Ancestry Australia are after a digitation operator for a new project. For full details head to: https://www.seek.com.au/job/66333868

SLSA wants 2023 Adelaide Fringe and Festival ephemera
The State Library of South Australia has been collecting ephemera from Adelaide’s iconic festivals since the 1960s. And they are after your help to keep collecting. They’re looking for flyers, programmes, leaflets and posters produced or collected during the Adelaide Fringe and Adelaide Festival 2023.  CLICK HERE for more information.

Don’t throw out your NSW election ephemera
The New South Wales State Election is on tomorrow (25 March 2023), and the State Library of NSW are asking you to send them the election material that you’ve received. They are collecting brochures, postcards and leaflets to document the New South Wales election. You can drop off your material in person or via the post: Election Ephemera, State Library of New South Wales, 1 Shakespeare Place, Sydney, NSW 2000. [via @statelibrarynsw on Twitter]

Temporary change to NLA collection access
News from the NLA is that “as part of major improvements to our heritage building, the National Library is replacing elements of the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system. The building roof is also being replaced due to the severe hail damage in 2020. Access to parts of our collection will be temporarily impacted from June 2022 to November 2023. This means that some requests for deliveries of Library material to the Reading Rooms will not be fulfilled during this period. Orders for copies through Copies Direct will also be affected.” CLICK HERE to read the full details out the temporary changes.

The Lutheran Archives needs donations to digitise their collections
Accessibility is key for archives. If researchers cannot access material, then what is the purpose of preserving the material?  The Lutheran Archives is actively trying to make its collection more accessible through digitisation, but it’s a long, slow and expensive process. As well as our ongoing digitisation of Registers of Pastoral Acts (baptisms, confirmations, marriages etc) they have begun digitising our collection of church periodicals. This date from the late 19th century up to today and contain not only general church news, theological discussion, and spiritual direction, but also personal details, photos and local community news. Digitising each year of a periodical costs $100 of digitising time, and there are over 500 annual volumes of material across all synods and districts. Donations to complete this work can be made at: https://donation.lca.org.au/project?id=P21021  and identifying that it is for digitisation of periodicals. Donations of $2 or more are tax deductible.
[via @LutheranArchivesANZ Facebook page]

Overseas

British Newspaper Archive Gets a Makeover
Have you noticed the brand new look on the BNA website? To celebrate the ongoing partnership between Findmypast and the British Library, which brings you The Archive, the BNA has splashed out and given themselves a bit of a makeover. Enjoy as you search through over 60 million newspaper pages. And remember behind every news story, is a family story. Check out their new-look website.

Updated and Redesigned FamilySearch Help
Based on user feedback, FamilySearch engineers have reorganised the help material in order to make some great help resources more visible. The biggest difference that users will notice is the refresh of the graphics and new navigation for the pages. Clicking on “Find help by topic” will display major topics that will help narrow a search. What are your thoughts on the new update? [via FamilySearch Facebook page]

Canadian 1931 Census to be released on 1 June 2023
FamilySearch is working with the Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC) and Ancestry to make the 1931 Census of Canada freely searchable online. In this collaborative effort to increase access to the 1931 Census of Canada, LAC has digitised all 234,687 pages of the census and Ancestry will apply its state-of-the-art handwriting recognition technology to the digital images to create a full index of the entire census. More information on this major release on the Press Release. [via FamilySearch press release]

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If you have any Australian genealogy and/or history related news that you’d like me to share, please feel free to send me an email with the info, and I’ll put it in my next Snippets update.  

It’s been too long since I did a “Discovering Links” post. These posts consist of a collection of links that I have discovered, or found useful, and want to share with others. But rather than simply giving you a whole batch of random links each time, I am grouping them by Australian state, country or topic. You can see my previous Discovering Links posts here.

For this one I’ve decided to share my English links, afterall it’s been aaaaaages since I did one that covered England. You can find my earlier post with 25 links here. These aren’t intended to be an exhaustive collection of links (not by a long shot), but they are simply ones that many will find useful, and it may include some that you may not have known about.

And while many people think that genealogy costs a lot of money, let me tell you that all of the links below are free. Personally I find that it’s often a matter of knowing where to look beyond the big-name websites, and hopefully this will help with that.

=== ENGLAND GENERAL ===

UK WILL TRANSCRIPTIONS
At present this site contains over 7100 transcripts, but anyone who has transcribed a pre-1900 UK will is invited to contribute to this site which is searchable by Testator, Executor or Administrator, or Witness. It is hoped that ultimately there will be a large number of transcripts which may assist family historians in their research and also those who are interested in local history and the families who lived in a particular locality.

THE WORKHOUSE
Created by Peter Higginbotham, an expert in the field of UK Workhouses, he says ‘this site is dedicated to the workhouse – its buildings, inmates, staff and administrators, even its poets’. There are sections on poor laws, workhouse locations, workhouse life, the rules, the inspections, records, Workhouse museums, educationm emigration and a whole heap more.

WORKHOUSE NETWORK
Since we’re on the topic of workhouses, the Workhouse Network is another site dedicated to the topic of workhouses in the UK. This site brings together museums, heritage organisations, archives and universities interested in welfare history.

HISTORIC ENGLAND
The Historic England website is a place that details ‘the most importnat historic places in England’. It includes building, battlefields, monuments, parks, gardens, shipwrecks, and more. They hold major collections of national importance, covering archaeology, architecture, social and local history. Their collections include photographs, drawings, plans and documents. And to make the collection accesible, they have over one million images searchable on their website.

HOSPITAL RECORDS DATABASE
This database provides information on the existence and location of the records of UK hospitals. There are details of over 2800 hospital listed, these have been compiled by the Wellcome Library, and can be found by searching the database. The data includes: the administrative details of the hospitals, and their status or type; the location and covering dates of administrative and clinical records; the existence of lists, catalogues or other finding aids.

CREW LISTS OF THE BRITISH SOUTHERN WHALE FISHERY (BSWF)
The British Southern Whale Fishery voyage database includes information about all known British southern whaling voyages from 1775 to 1859. The Crew database contains nearly 14,000 entries for men who served in the British Southern Whale Fishery between 1775 and 1859.

RAILWAY ACCIDENTS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND
The Railway Work, Life and Death project is committed to revealing the working lives and accidents of British & Irish railway staff, from the 1880s through to 1939. What was it like to work on Britain and Ireland’s railways from the 1880s to 1939? How were tens of thousands of employees injured or killed? Who were these people? The ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project has been delving into these questions, creating an important new resource for anyone researching railway history, family history, labour history
and many other topics.

OUR CRIMINAL ANCESTORS
Oriminal Ancestors is a project led by the University of Hull in collaboration with Leeds Beckett University, that encourages people to collaborate with details of the criminal past of their own families, communities, towns and region. Please join in with your stories between roughly 1700 and 1939, and tell the criminal history from your family or area of research. They’re interested in both the big and small stories.

BLACK SHEEP SEARCH
This website is dedicated to the history of the 1830 Swing Riots, Convict Prison Hulks, Juvenile Convicts and the Bermuda Convict Establishment. Created by Jill CHambers, she has been researching this tpic for over 40 years, and while she does sell publiations, there’s plenty of useful information on her website for free.

HISTORICAL DIRECTORIES OF ENGLAND AND WALES
The collection contains 689 trade and local directories from England and Wales from the 1760s to the 19a0s, with at least one directory for every English and Welsh county for the 1850s, 1890s and 1910s. Searchable by name, place and occupation this is an essential tool for local, urban and family history. You can find Kelly’s and Pigot’s directories here, as well as those by regional publishers.

DIGITAL PANOPTICON: LONDON CONVICTS IN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALIA 1780-1925
This website allows you to search millions of convict records from both Britain and Australia, from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use this site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past. A MUST for anyone with convict interests, particularly those who were at the Old Bailey.

PHOTOGRAPHERS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND 1840 to 1940
Was your ancestor a photographer? If so, find out more. Want to date your old family photographs? Try the DIY unique Photo Dating Wizard. Get information from the world’s largest collection of British and Irish carte de visite photographs and related data.

CREW LIST INDEX PROJECT (CLIP)
CLIP is a volunteer project, sall about the records of British merchant seafarers of the late 19th and early 20th century. The site provides information about the records of British seafarers and ships, and access to the CLIP maritime database. The original CLIP database reached over 260,000 entries from crew lists. The data was transcribed from records held at local Record Offices and covers only a small percentage of their holdings, but it’s the largest database of records from local record offices. This information is now of Findmypast, but there is still plenty of useful information on the CLIP website itself, which is still free.

FINDMYPAST
Findmypast if one of the big names in the genie field, and currently they have over 14 billion records online, and yes, it is a pay site. But did you know that over 800 million of them are FREE to look at? Yes, they are. You will need to create an account (name and email) to access them, but you don’t need a paid subscription at all. Highlights of their free records include:

• 1881 England, Wales & Scotland Census (transcripts are free)
• British Newspaper (over 2 million pages are free to view)
• All Irish censuses 1821-1911
• Irish Roman Catholic Parish Registers
• Britain, Campaign, Gallantry & Long Service Medals & Awards (transcripts are free)
• All BillionGraves cemetery records
• All Canadian censuses 1851-1911
• Many other smaller record sets are also free.

THE FRANCIS FRITH COLLECTION
Francis Frith (1822-1898) was an English photographer, and in 1859 he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co. in Surrey, as the world’s first specialist photographic publisher. In 1860 he embarked upon a project to photograph every town and village in the UK, this resulted in his creating F. Frith & Co., a publishing company to print his photographs as postcards, and that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. After the family old the business in 1971, it was relaunched in 1975 at The Francis Frith Collection. The site now holds over 330,000 high resolution digital images, from around 7000 cities, towns an villages of his postcard photos. You can search and browse all images for free, but they offer ability to purchase a copy of an image if you wish.

=== CHESHIRE ===

CHESHIRE IMAGE BANK
The Cheshire Image Bank is a collection of digital images created from original material: photographs, postcards, prints slides and negatives. These are held at the Cheshire Archives & Local Studies, the Chester History & Heritage and in Cheshire Libraries. There’s currently over 30,000 images which can be viewed online, but more are added regularly.

=== CORNWALL ===

CORNWALL’S WAR HISTORY
This site has been created by the Cornwall Family History Society as a “tribute to the brave people form Cornwall who served or said down their lives in borh World Wars and subsequent conflicts”. This site grew out of the Society’s Monumentual Inscriptions project, as during the photographing of headstones they noted many war casualties remembered on family graves, some without names. This led to the further research of their names and a subsequent need to record them. The Society felt that details of those who had served and died for their country and had a connection with Cornwall should be collated in one dedicated website and be accompanied by photographs of the individuals and the grave sites … hence Cornwall’s War History. They also have recorded those who lie in graves in Cornwall but who originated elsewhere. To date the site has details of over 6100 individuals.

=== DEVON ===

DEVON REMEMBERS: HONOURING THE 1914 GENERATION
The Devon Remembers website is a permanent digital memorial to those people from the Clinton Devon Estates towns and villages, who served their country in the Great War of 1914-1918. It is also intended as a resource for local historians, schools and anyone researching this era and the impact of war on the communities of East Devon and North Devon. It is hoped that over time that details from other Devon regions will be added.

=== DURHAM ===

DURHAM RECORDS ONLINE
The Durham Records Online is a collaborative effort between a group of dedicated genealogists and historians.They currently have over 4 million records online, all of which are free to search and relate to County Durham and Northumberland (England). These include parish and census record. Note, there is small fee to view record transcriptions.

=== HERTFORDSHIRE ===

HERTFORDSHIRE NAME INDEX
This is a part of the Herfordshire County Council website, and it allows you to type in a name, and it searches through all their indexed records including: Apprentices, Crime & Punishment, Fatalities, Marriage & Marriage Licences, Miscellaneous Names, Newspapers & Periodicals, Newspaper Pictures, Nonconformist Registers, The Poor, Tithe & Inland Revenue, and Wills. Searching is free, and the results do give a reasonable amount of info, but if you want copies of the originals you will need to contact the County Council.

=== ISLE OF MAN ===

MANX NOTE BOOK
If you have an interest in the history of the people and area of the Isle of Man, here’s a site you’ll want to bookmark. It’s basically a collection of records that relate to the Isle of Man. As the creator of the site says “These web pages reflect my various interests, mainly archival, in things Manx.”

=== LANCASHIRE ===

RED ROSE COLLECTIONS
The Red Rose Collections gives you online access to and image archive with over 30,000 historic photographs digitised from the collections in Lancashire Libraries, as well as indexes to other resources, held at Lancashire Archives and libraries, such as old local newspapers, local books, Preston Guild Rolls and the Lancashire Police index.

=== LONDON ===

LONDON PICTURE ARCHIVE
The London Picture Archive contains over 250,000 photographs, prints and drawings as well as over 1000 maps from the collections at London Metropolitain Archives are available to view online. The images provide an extraordinary record of London and its people from the 15th century to the present day. The whole of Greater London is covered, as are the adjoining counties.

=== SOMERSET ===

BATH BURIAL INDEX
The Bath Burial Index contains over 240,000 entries from 86 burial grounds, with monuments dating from 1660 through to recent times.

=== STAFFORDSHIRE ===

STAFFORDSHIRE ASYLUMS 1818-1960
The Stafforshire Asylums site, is a collaboration between the Staffordshire Archives and Heritage and the Wellcome Trust who aim to shed light on the history of Staffordshire’s three County Asylums; Stafford (opened in 1818), Burntwood (1864) and Cheddleton (1899). The project will cover the period 1818-1960. Their site has sections listing doctors, patients and staff as well as more information on each of the asylums themselves.

Happy researching 😉

A new series that I’m starting here is the “Genealogy News” posts. Putting it simply, I’m collating the news from big-name genealogy societies, archives and other genie organisations from Australia and elsewhere, and have listed it here for you. As for how often I’ll do it, I’m thinking monthly at this stage, but it will depend on what news is available, so we’ll see.

As RootsTech (the world’s biggest genie conference) was held recently, there were a lots of posts from numours people relating to the event. For this list I’ve chosen to not include them. They’re still listed on their blogs, so you can check them out if you wish. Anyway, now on with the news …

23andMe
Raising Awareness of Rare Disease
New Algorithm Cleans Up 23andMe Family Tree

Ancestry
Ancestry Launches Storymaker Studio
Celebrating 40 Years of Family History Discoveries

Australian War Memorial
Meet the women in construction at the Australian War Memorial
Australia’s first Academy Award 80 years on
Untold stories of Australian sailors and airmen revealed
Australian War Memorial’s new galleries take flight

FamilySearch
New Free Historical Records on FamilySearch 6 February 2023
The Family History Library Is Now the FamilySearch Library
New Free Historical Records on FamilySearch 30 January 2023
Updated and Redesigned FamilySearch Help

FamilyTreeDNA
FamilyTreeDNA Has Added 5,000 Ancient Connections to Our Database
Big Y-700 DNA Testing Breaks Down Brick Walls in Family with African Ancestry
Introducing the New FTDNATiP™ Report for Y-STRs
The Group Time Tree: A New Big Y Tool for FamilyTreeDNA Group Projects

Findmypast
Honour your heritage with over 100,000 new records, including female shipbuilders and engineers
Delve into the dark legacy of British slavery and the daily life of Nottingham’s churches this week
Enrich your tree with over 200,000 new records, from Lincolnshire to West Yorkshire
Celebrate the civil service and more with nearly a million new records

GEDmatch
GEDmatch sold again
GEDmatch owners Verogen bought by QIAGEN for US $150 million

MyHeritage
5 Women Inventors Whose Innovations Changed the World
MyHeritage Announces Third Installment of DNA Quest Initiative
Introducing Color Coding for Family Trees
Introducing cM Explainer to Predict Relationships Between DNA Matches With Greater Accuracy
Daniel’s Favorites: 10 MyHeritage Features Our Genealogy Expert Can’t Live Without

National Archives of Australia
The Captain’s treasures: Flinders’ letters and books join archival collection
Discovering Anzacs website decommissioned, making way for innovative new digital experiences
Frozen memories, now digital: Antarctic photographic collections preserved for future generations

RootsMagic
It’s here! RootsMagic 9!

ScotlandsPeople
Scottish Handwriting 1500-1700: a self-help pack available to buy
Our Records: One-hour-old: the youngest person enumerated in the 1921 census

The Genealogist
New Release: 1871 UK Census households now plotted on Map Explorer
More than 355 Square Miles of additional Lloyd George Domesday records released on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer
TheGenealogist adds more than 342,500 to their 1939 Register, opening previously closed records

Trove
Batter up, ladies: Australia’s first women’s cricket match played in front of spectators
New in March 2023
Major Digitisation of Defence Service Newspapers [this was news late 2022, but I’ve included it in case you missed it]