Random thoughts and observations
Today I discovered the outstanding Picture Australia website.
According to the About page: Picture Australia is an internet-based service that allows you to search many significant online pictorial collections at the same time.
When you do a search on Picture Australia, thumbnail images are retrieved from participating institutions on the fly and inserted into the search results.
I don’t get as much time as I would like to browse digitised newspapers at the National Library’s marvellous Trove.
However, a brief visit today yielded an interesting snippet regarding my great-great grandparents James and Sarah Evans.
I knew from Shire of Metcalfe rate books they owned a property at Barfold in Central Victoria between 1866 and 1876.
While checking my family history website this morning, I noticed today is the 90th anniversary of my uncle Edward Gorey’s burial.
The second of my grandparents’ 12 children, Edward (Ted) was aged just five when he died of diphtheria at Ballarat District Hospital on December 31, 1921.
Edward was born at Trafalgar on April 14, 1916.
Several years ago I wrote an article about my great-uncle Charles Edward Gorey, who was born at Pannoomilloo in 1878. I noted “the place name of his birth does not survive on maps today, but is situated near Echuca”. That was before the internet truly developed as a research tool. Today, although there is not much on the web regarding Pannoomilloo, there is enough to identify its location and some of its history. In particular, I recommend the National Library of Australia digitised newspapers and the Victoria Government Gazette.
A book about my grandmother’s family will be launched at Castlemaine on Sunday, March 6. The Wealth Beneath Their Feet has been written and compiled by Marjorie Theobald, a former Reader and Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. The book describes the history of the Sutherland, Burgdorf, Robertson, Webber, Madigan, List and Watkins families on the Central Victorian Goldfields. My grandmother was Eleanor Sutherland and her mother was a Burgdorf.
