News - July 2025
Tuesday 15 July - 7:30 pm General Meeting
VENUE: Old Sunday School, St Johns Park Precinct
GUEST SPEAKER: Rebecca Read
TOPIC: What a new kid on the historian's block discovered about the VDL Convict archive
Academics have had access to the remarkable Van Diemen's Land convict archive since the 1960s and knowledge and understanding have grown steadily since that time, yet there is still much to learn and misconceptions to overturn about the management of convicts and the records administrators created about them.
Focusing on the assignment era, the aim of this talk is to counter misconceptions and inspire family historians to look anew at the records created about their convict ancestors.
Rebecca Read was born and raised in Sydney and has lived in Tasmania since 1989. Her post- secondary studies include a Diploma of Teaching (Goulburn CAE), a Certificate in Pattern and Clothing Construction (TAFE), an Advanced Diploma in Local, Family and Applied History (UNE), and a BA Hons and a PhD (UTAS).
Her PhD thesis has the straightforward title "Convict Assignment and Prosecution Risk in Van Diemen's Land, 1830-1835".
She has been a member of the teaching team for various units of the Diploma in Family History since 2014 and has managed the FamilySearch family history centre at Derwent Park since 2010.
More for Your Diary
Thu 17 Jul - 10am Hobart Committee
VENUE: Branch Library, Bellerive
Thu 17 Jul - 1:30pm DNA Group
VENUE: St Marks Church Hall, Scott Street, Bellerive
Thu 24 Jul - 2pm Library Committee
VENUE: Branch Library, Bellerive
Tue 19 Aug - General Meeting
VENUE: Old Sunday School, St Johns Park Precinct
SPEAKER: Brad Williams
Topic: exhumations at queenborough cemetery
From Your Branch President
Do you have any family history documents, journals or handwritten memoirs that are not easy to share with your extended family? Have you thought of reading them onto your computer using speech recognition software. It makes the task so much quicker, easier and 'do-able.'
In 1897, when my maternal grandmother was 18, one of her five sisters (no brothers) challenged her that she could not write a journal every day for 6 months. I don't know what was at stake, but for six months she faithfully recorded in pencil the weather, what she did, visitors and the rest of the family's comings and goings. The journal was found only when an unmarried aunt died. I only knew my grandmother as an elderly woman who we children had to line up to kiss, but the journal and letters gave me a precious glimpse into her life as a young woman on a rural property. When she wasn't sewing dresses for her sisters for a local ball (which lasted till dawn - not safe to drive the buggy at night), she was helping her father muster cattle or digging a trench from the dam at 5.00am so the sheep could have a drink on a blistering hot day. The journal and letters helped me understand the woman that she became and the unusual upbringing of my mother and her nine siblings, which in turn was an influence on me.
I have a large number of maternal cousins and none of them were aware of this journal, but keen to read it. Transcribing seemed a formidable task as I am not a touch-typist. So, I put on a headset and read the journal and letters into text on my computer. After trying the free Windows speech recognition program and finding it unsatisfactory (it may have improved since then), I was advised to purchase software called Dragon Dictate. It was easy to use, it learnt my voice quickly and added words like places and surnames to its dictionary. I could make obvious corrections as I went. A family member and I then proof-read it thoroughly.
Since then, I have felt able to tackle other formidable tasks, such as reading onto the computer the many pages of a handwritten account of an Irish Chancery law case from the 1830s. To help with this in places I used a website www.transkribus.org which uses AI-powered handwriting and text recognition technology to decipher handwritten historical documents. No cost for occasional use. This law case involved my great-great-grandfather, and it has baffled our family for years. We would never have found the outcome without being able to read it onto the computer.
Ros Escott president@hobart.tasfhs.org
What's New on FamilySearch July 2025
The historical records search on FamilySearch.org has had the capability to do an exact search for a while, allowing users to refine their search by specifying that they want results only with an exact first name, last name, or place. Users who like this functionality and how it helps them refine their search results requested that FamilySearch engineers add the ability to specify an exact year. That functionality has now arrived!
Instructions are in the link below:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/you-can-now-use-an-exact-year-in-your-historical-records-search
Recently, FamilySearch expanded its free online archives with over 30 million new records from 8 countries. Some exciting additions include 16 million civil registrations from Italy, 5 million cemetery records from Brazil, and nearly 1 million deceased physician records from the American Medical Association (AMA).
Other countries with significant record additions include the following:
Belgium, Colombia, Ecuador, France and Ukraine
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/new-records-july-2025T
There is a YouTube channel called BYU Library Family History Center with a lot of videos on family history. The link is https://www.youtube.com/@BYULibraryFamilyHistory
Lever Arch Folders
If you would like some, we have placed them on our front counter in the reading room at the Library, 19 Cambridge Rd Bellerive.
Help yourself.
Maree's Mutterings
Libraries Tasmania
Have released more birth registrations from 1900 now up to 1911 for all of Tasmania. All are nicely linked up. Some Hobart birth's 1912 also linked.
AB317/1/1 Register of Burial Plots in the Queenborough Cemetery with details of Burials and Removals - indexed in Queenborough Cemetery Hobart, are now online. At this stage they are not linked by surname. If you are looking for a name, it would be best to check the index in the TFHS Hobart branch publication Queenborough Cemetery, Hobart, for a page number.
The image numbers don't equal the page numbers.
https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/AB317-1-1/de0d88bb-01f2-45e1-a341-1699f1759111
Soldier's Memorial Stones
19 Memorial stones taken from Soldiers' Memorial Avenue, Hobart and three were damaged.
This is a link to the online map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?ll=-42.866743%2C147.323688&mid=17EOnKktwaDUhuURwRgbz0S90KmjgSr5R&z=18
There have been a couple of videos of the vandalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xW8Y8SGHU
and from the ABC:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-26/bronze-memorial-plaques-for-wwi-tasmanian-soldiers-stolen/105464050 and the 19 have been found. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-30/stolen-soldiers-memorial-avenue-plaques-recovered/105478190
The names of those whose plaques were stolen was listed on the Facebook page of Friends of Soldiers Memorial Avenue on 28th June. For those with Facebook the direct link to this page is https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1148369903996934&set=pcb.1148378083996116
The four memorial plaques, naming the 200 children who died there, were stolen from outside the Old Sunday School, St. John's, New Town late May.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/hobart-drive/orphan-school-plaques-stolen/105478650
Queenborough Cemetery Exhumations
Information: Former Queenborough Cemetery Exhumations - the full archaeological report on the exhumations at the former Queenborough Cemetery was put up on the Hutchins School website recently; with the link at the end of this paragraph. The page gives links to the public service which was held at the Wellington Chapel, Cornelian Bay Cemetery, New Town on Wednesday 11 June 2025 at 10.00am.
View a recording of the livestream.
It is also possible to download the Reinterment Service Program. There is a link to the high-resolution PDF entitle Final exhumation report [302 pages] and Survey of exhumation locations.
The Final Exhumation report includes a history of the site, predictive modelling ahead of the current exhumations, methodology, results of exhumations, archaeological observations, post-field methodology, consultation, reburial and memorialisation and much more. The three attachments at the end include the exhumation plan, names of those exhumed and identified, and known names of previous exhumations (1930 - 1960s) (referenced). There are quite a few photographs within the report and including some of the attendees at the memorial services. https://www.hutchins.tas.edu.au/former-queenborough-cemetery-exhumations/
Census
The release of newly recovered census transcripts is allowing people with an interest in family history to delve even further into their past!
Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI)
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) has just released 175,000 new historical records, including 60,000 pre-and-post famine names for citizen researchers to explore online. www.virtualtreasury.ie .
Library Accessions 2025
The following items were accessioned during June 2025
Books
* R. Green Double Branch Q.929.2 DOU
* T. Dell The Dells of Launceston Q 929.2 DEL
H. Chung Ching Chong China Girl 070.92 CHU
* Denotes complimentary or donated item