GSV News

This week is National Volunteer Week 17-23 May 2021 and we would like to recognise, applaud and celebrate the great work OUR volunteers do at GSV. 

There would be no GSV without our nearly 190 Volunteers.

This past year has been very testing, especially for members who have not been able to get out and share their interests with as many happy, smiling people as before. With the help of our volunteers, the GSV changed gear and ran events and other services online. It has been amazing to see more distant members participating from afar, when previously, travel distance would have prevented this. 

We can particularly thank our IT-savvy vols who kept the show running and devised ways to proceed with Zoom meetings and talks, often with increased numbers; our membershelpmembers online forum, which we launched before COVID; our Facebook sites and even our digital editions of Ancestor journal. 

Thanks to all our conveners, guest presenters and content-producers who had to adapt to online communication - rearranging their home offices to look 'appropriate' (blurring or adding virtual backdrops) and managing small children or partners who suddenly appeared 'in shot'.

On top of all this the GSV had to move to new premises - which is now open and welcoming visitors! Despite Zoom, the past year also showed us how important face-to-face contacts are in our lives. We would love to see more of you pop in. 

This year, a very big thanks go to our volunteer President and Councillors who had to locate new suitable premises and arrange our move. And our staff also volunteered working from home to keep our Society flourishing. Thank you.

On behalf of all our members and everyone in the wider world of genealogy we acknowledge your enormous contribution and thank you.

Last year I put on virtual cake, but this year I have found a champagne fruit punch for you! 

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If you would like join in as a Volunteer contact Linda or our vols at our reception or go to our website to read more about volunteering with us. 

Celebration fruit punch image courtesy of Nagi at RecipeTinEats  https://www.recipetineats.com/celebration-fruit-punch/

Clothing has much to teach the genealogist.

We may have a treasure trove of photos, drawings or paintings depicting ancestors in a variety of modes of dress. Deceased estate records may have listings of the items of clothing belonging to a person and their value. Some of us may even own items of our ancestors’ clothing - a wedding dress, a christening outfit, or perhaps even a fireman’s helmet. Others may have had ancestors who worked in the rag trade, as dressmakers, patternmakers and seamstresses. 

Ultimately, the outfits worn and made by our ancestors are more than mere pieces of fabric. Clothing can offer us clues to status and class, changing fortunes, time period, and even the personality of the individual, but do we know how to read and interpret these items? 

In a forthcoming talk, Laura Jocic will speak about the things that clothing can tell us about Australian colonial society and the emigrant's experience. 

'Anything for mere show would be worse than useless':

emigration, dress and Australian colonial society, 1820s – 1860s

Thursday 20 May, 5 - 6 pm by Zoom at GSV

Bookings are required (you will be sent an email with the Zoom link). $20 non-members and $5 for GSV members (log in to receive the discount). You can book on the GSV website HERE

As Laura states: 

Australia was generally reckoned as a country where, for much of the nineteenth century, there was little need for fashionable dress. As late as 1853, The Emigrant's Guide to Australia continued to urge prospective emigrants to pack only the most useful and durable items of clothing.

With the steady influx of free settlers from the 1820s onwards, diaries, letters and surviving items of dress paint a different picture of colonial society, one which was often criticised for being preoccupied with fashion. Drapers, tailors and dressmakers advertised the latest goods and styles from overseas, while newly arrived emigrants found a society where the regular round of social activities required a range of appropriate dress.

Don’t forget to register for this talk to find out what items of clothing people brought with them when emigrating to Australia and whether their packing lists tallied up with their expectations of the country!

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Our presenter

Laura Jocic is undertaking a PhD at the University of Melbourne, researching dress and its role in Australian colonial society. She is a former a curator of Australian Fashion and Textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria where she curated Australian Made: 100 Years of Fashion (2010) and Linda Jackson: Bush Couture (2012). In 2016 Laura curated the exhibition Louis Kahan: Art, Theatre, Fashion for the Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn. Most recently she has been working as a consultant curator on a project at the RMIT Design Archives interpreting the designs of Sara Thorn and Bruce Slorach.

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This post was prepared by Dr Kristy Love, a GSV volunteer. 

Image sources;

The Life of Emigration [jigsaw puzzle], London, c1840, State Library of South Australia.

‘Convicts in New Holland’ from Felipe Bauza - drawings made on the Spanish Scientific Expedition to Australia and the Pacific in the ships Descubierta and Atrevida under the command of Alessandro Malaspina, 1789-94, 

Mitchell Library, SL NSW, SAFE /DGD 2, item IE1110200.

‘A Most Undesirable Woman’ -

Writing about the Criminalisation of Poverty

Zoom talk by Kristy Love

7.00 pm 6 May 2021

Free to GSV members and non-members. 

Bookings are required and can be made online via the Register Now link. HERE. You will receive an email with the Zoom link. 

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In 2016, I found an article filled with extraordinary amounts of hyperbole about my great-great grandmother, second-generation Irish-Australian, Margaret O’Connor [ref. 2]. The article detailed her involvement as a witness for the prosecution in the 1915 murder trial of one of her Chinese clients. A journalist for the known scandal-rag theTruth, claimed that neither the Russian, British nor American literary greats had given the public ‘more vivid glimpses of what may be called “THE UNDERWORLD”’ than did this particular trial. And yes, the capitalisation was in the original.

The article featured hand-drawn courtroom portraits of Margaret; her lover, William Moon (one of the accused men); and the murder victim, her client, Ah Chee. I have to confess, that despite the tragic subject matter, I felt a thrill of excitement at the discovery of this newspaper article. Until that point, I’d known very little about Margaret, other than she was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Sydney. 

Finding the article led to the discovery of Margaret's string of 64 plus convictions, received between 1914 and 1923. It led to me finding her prison photograph, shown here. I’ve cropped the image because I don’t believe that Margaret’s prison record is all that she was. The nature of her so-called legal and moral ‘crimes’, and that of her younger sister, Annie O’Connor, included smoking opium, being drunk, swearing, being tattooed, doing sex work, and consorting with Chinese men. Both sisters were also arrested and imprisoned multiple times for ‘being of insufficient lawful means’ – a peculiar crime that effectively criminalised people for being poor. [Read more about this in ref 3. below].

My forthcoming talk offers an insight into the lives of women who, like Margaret and Annie, were criminalised by poverty over a century ago, and of new ways to write about them. In doing my research, I kept asking myself, how can I best tell the stories of women who were only written about in a disparaging fashion by others? This talk, therefore, arises out research for my historical novel in progress ‘A Most Undesirable Woman’, part of which was written during a residency at 'Frontyard' [https://www.frontyardprojects.org/], Marrickville, New South Wales. A version of the talk was first presented there on 8 March 2020.

Kristy Love

Dr Kristy Love (formerly Davidson) is a researcher with a passion for family history writing. Her current interest is the historical criminalisation of impoverished women. She recently joined the GSV Volunteers Team and is now assisting with our GSV Blog Family History Matters. Kristy has a PhD in Creative Writing, an Honours degree in Psychology and has worked in university research management for over two decades. She is a member of the Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria and assists with their social media outreach. She is also currently undertaking the Certificate of Genealogical Studies through the Society of Australian Genealogists. 

Sources:

Photo: Margaret O'Connor, Long Bay State Reformatory for Women, 12/11/1923. ‘Gaol Inmates/Prisoners Photos Index 1870-1930’. Photo No. 608. Series NRS249 [3/6007], page 110. Copyright: State of New South Wales through the State Records Authority of NSW 2016 

Ref 1.'A most undesirable woman' in 'Armidale Police Court - "No Lawful Visible Means", The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser, Friday 7 April 1916, p9. 

Ref 2. 'Horror and Infamy',Truth, Sunday 13 June 1915, p12.

Ref 3. 'Policing the Poor: The History of Vagrancy Laws and the Criminalisation of Homelessness' by Paul Gregoire and Ugur Nedim, in Lexology[website] 9 March 2021, accessed 28/4/21.

More books about women's stories

We had a good response to our list of books about women's stories.

So another list prepared by Penny Mercer for our GSV Writers is attached here as well. (See PDF below).

Liz Rushen's book Single and Free: female migration to Australia 1833-1837 is in the GSV library and elsewhere. See her website for her accounts of four women's stories https://www.rushen.com.au/bounty-womens-stories

Barbara Goldfinch let us know of a rare book  'Women of Williamstown' (City of Hobson's Bay, 1990), which includes a piece about her grandmother in WW2 written by her father. This is not in the SLV or NLA (but Prahran Mechanics Institute has a copy), so it reminds us how important it is to ensure publications are put in places for safe-keeping and thus turn up on databases like Trove.

Writing stories is one thing but ensuring they can be found is just as important.

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STOP PRESS - 28 APRIL

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PREVIOUSLY ADVISED BOOK SALE FROM THE GSV LIBRARY HAS FINISHED. 

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It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words.

This coming week on 15 April the GSV is very pleased to host a talk by Carl Villis of NGV about the revealing of a famous woman, Lucrezia Borgia.

Dating of paintings - Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia's portrait - a journey across five centuries

15 April 10.30-11.30 am via Zoom.

Don't miss this opportunity. Book via the GSV website quickly.

$5 GSV members. $20 non-members. GSV members please log in to register.

Carl Villis will relate the journey of discovery that led to the newsworthy reattribution of the National Gallery of Victoria’s sixteenth-century portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, the most famous woman of Renaissance Italy.  Prior to this research, the portrait was believed to represent a young man, but through one discovery at a time, a detailed examination of the portrait’s highly specific technical and visual features led to the conclusion that the painting’s subject could only be Lucrezia. The revelations came about through an interconnected examination of conservation, art historical and provenance sources which may be familiar to genealogical researchers.

About our presenter

Carl Villis is the Senior Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. He has specialised in the conservation of Old Master paintings at the NGV for the past twenty-five years. He has also spent several years working in both Italy and the United States. At the Gallery he has conducted major conservation treatments and technical research on paintings by many artists in the collection, including Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens and Giambattista Tiepolo. He frequently combines his technical analysis of paintings with art historical research and has published studies on works by Poussin, Van Dyck and Bernardo Bellotto, among others. In 2013-14 he was a Craig Hugh Smyth Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Centre for Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti in Florence for the purpose of researching and writing a book on his identification of the Gallery’s early sixteenth-century portrait of Lucrezia Borgia.

Image:

Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara (1519-1530)

Dosso DOSSI 

Battista DOSSI (attributed to) 

oil on wood panel

74.5 × 57.2 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Felton Bequest, 1966

© Public Domain 

Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Perhaps you live in the country, and can’t physically access the GSV.  If so, a new FREE online course to be run by the State Library Victoria from October 16 for four weeks might be of interest to you.

“Branching out is a new online course that introduces the basic principles of family history research, and looks at the key resources available for researching Victorian family history.

During this four-week course, the State Library’s Family history team will equip you with the tools you need to discover more about your own family tree. Recommended for beginners.” You can register for this at this link:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/branching-out-registration-37797922604?aff=octnews

Then, once you get into your 'tree', you can get ONGOING help from the knowledgable volunteers and staff at GSV. Join up for less than a coffee a week and get support in all kinds of ways as you branch out. 

The latest issue of Ancestor - the GSV's award-winning quarterly journal (vol 33 issue 7, September 2017) is now available. 

In this issue we have six substantial articles contributed by members. Jean Dart’s story is steeped in Irish history. Her feisty great grandmother managed to free herself from an abusive relationship and support herself as the matron of a protestant children’s home. Thelma Ragas investigates her great uncle who was a detective in New Zealand, fell foul of the police hierarchy and ended up opening his own private detective agency. Can you imagine sending a sixteen-year-old to a faraway country, all alone, to live in a strict environment on an Experiment Farm? That’s what happened to Prue Mercer’s ancestor, Harold Berrow.

The First World War casts a long shadow. We are still remembering those who paid the ultimate price. The difficulty for the family in establishing exactly what happened to their loved ones was compounded when inaccurate record keeping cast doubt on their fate, as happened in Margaret Cooper’s family.

Digging that little bit deeper often pays – you find information in unexpected places. For Sue Blackwood it was a Queensland ‘Old Insanity File’ that unearthed information, not about subject of the file, but about her husband, Sue’s great great grandfather. Darryl Grant reminds us that our ancestors did not always record the whole truth; a little extra digging may uncover some surprising facts about our ancestors that they may have deliberately covered up, or may even not have known themselves. Michael Woods found that references in Australian newspapers to his great uncle as a wrestler helped to trace him backward in time as well as forward.

'Digging deeper' reminds us of the great importance on not only relying on the international databases, such as Ancestry™and Find My Past™ for ancestral information. Nothing can beat a widespread search for information using the help of the GSV and diverse sources as illustrated above. There is no way the full story can be unravelled if you just stick to a computer at home or in a library. Make your family story interesting and complete!

As always Research Corner has some interesting tips – did you know that you might be able to find your ancestor’s name on a UK census prior to 1841?

Martin Playne - Editorial Team

GSV Members will already have received their copy as part of their membership. Others can get this issue, and much more, by joining now, or copies can be purchased via the GSV website http://www.gsv.org.au

Now that the GSV has moved closer to the Victoria's Immigration Museum we are looking forward to being closer!

GSV Members are invited to two days of complimentary admission to the Immigration Museum - 18 and 19 August.

Set in the beautifully restored 19th century Customs House, the Immigration Museum is the perfect place for learning about our ancestor’s journey to Australia, exploring Australia’s migration history, sharing personal stories, researching contemporary issues, and understanding our culturally diverse community.

GSV Members can celebrate Family History Month with free entry into the Museum on Friday 18 August, Saturday 19 August. Simply show your GSV membership card upon entry to the Museum.

Visit the Immigration Museum website for information about current exhibitions and activities. idc@museum.vic.gov.au

Open 10 am – 5 pm, 7 Days. Closed Good Friday and Christmas Day.      400 Flinders Street Melbourne

As a further service, the GSV is now taking bookings for DNA-specific consultations.

The focus will be on Autosomal  DNA (Ancestry DNA & Family Tree DNA,

Family Finder). 

Bookings can be made via http://gsv.org.au/consultations.html

Bring your access to your results (if you have them) and an ancestor or

pedigree chart (if you have one).

Cost GSV Members $30 Non-members $50

Friday bookings only

You might also be interested in the DNA Discussion Circle. The DNA Discussion Circle is for GSV members who would like to find out how DNA may assist them in furthering their family history. Your DNA can be used to confirm or establish links in your family tree as well as identifying your particular genetic origins. For more details, see

https://www.gsv.org.au/special-interest-groups/dna-discussion-circle

Penny Scott - member GSV Writers Circle

14 June 2017

At the June 7 meeting of the Writers Circle we discussed the drafts of two new family history stories submitted by Circle members.

Bernece Schultz has done a lot of research on her South of England and Jersey ancestors who settled in Victoria and later in Tumbarumba, NSW. She said her submitted piece, Mary Ann Simmons, was written as a chapter in the middle of a book that she is writing for her family members about her maternal ancestors.

Her submission concerned the affecting story of Mary Ann Simmons (1848-1880) who in her short life experienced the death of siblings, mother, husband and children before she herself died aged thirty-two. Bernece described the living conditions and influences on Mary Ann, such as problems caused by tuberculosis, which contributed to her sad and difficult life. Bernece appreciated members’ constructive comments on the writing and the subject of the narrative.

The second piece of writing was titled The winds of change – a woman, a watch and a Whig, and the first paragraph provided the force and focus of the writing - a reference to an image of a satirical print by James Gillray. The identity, background and salacious life of the male figure in the print is revealed in the writing, and there is an amusing twist in the final sentence when the writer unwillingly admits the figure is her ancestor. 

Before the meeting the writer had outlined the feedback she would like from the group - comments on structure, tone, the flow of the narrative, its logical sequence, characterisation and references in the text. These areas and more provided the basis of a lively discussion.

The August meeting of the Writers Circle will provide an opportunity for two further members to receive feedback on their writing from the other members of the group.