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Hannah Mitchell was born in England in 1877, where she got a midwife certification, and came to Australia with her husband and three children in 1913. After her husband was killed in the Great War, she set up her clinic in Richmond, advertising herself as a nurse, even though she had no such qualification. Mitchell became infamous in mid January 1923 when she shot and badly wounded her abusive third ex-husband, petty crook Frank Bonfiglio, claiming it was an act of self-defence. From his hospital bed, Bonfiglio told Detective Frederick Piggott that Mitchell had shot him to shut him up. If the police went to a remote gully in rural Coldstream, he said, they’d find the body of a young woman who’d died after a botched abortion performed by Mitchell.…

There is a range of reasons visiting the gravesite of an ancestor can be beneficial in the exploration of your family history. Often, people were buried close to their family members, so if you have information on one ancestor but don’t know the full name of their mother, for example, it’s likely that the cemetery they are buried in will hold such vital information. A walk around the site and a keen eye could bear great results! Other times, the tombstone itself can off er a lot of information. For example, if you know an ancestor’s date of death but not their date of birth, their tombstone is the perfect place to find out the exact date that you are looking for, which can then lead to a wealth of…

MyHeritage Brazil • Pernambuco Deaths, 1930–2017: more than 3,100,000 indexed records added to a new collection New Zealand • Electoral Rolls, 1881–1935: more than 2,800,000 indexed records added to a new collection Visit www.myheritage.com. FamilySearch England • England Births and Christenings, 1538–1975: more than 1,500,000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England Marriages, 1538–1973: more than 44,000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England, Cumbria Parish Registers, 1538–1990: more than 306,000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England, Essex Non-Conformist Church Records, 1613–1971: more than 10,000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England, Gloucestershire Non-Conformist Church Records,1642–1996: more than 2000 indexed records added to an existing collection • England, Norfolk Non-Conformist Records, 1613–1901: more than 2000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England, Northumberland Non-Conformist…

The well-known adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is the premise of an exciting new online exhibition that places the public at the centre of the curatorial journey. ‘A Thousand Words’ marks the first collaboration between two of Australia’s leading cultural institutions – New South Wales State Archives and Sydney Living Museums – and features a selection of 100 of the most compelling photographic images from the collections. On display is a diverse range of people, places and events in New South Wales, spanning 100 years from the 1880s to 1980. Unlike a conventional curated exhibition, ‘A Thousand Words’ invites the public to interpret the images through the lens of their own knowledge, experience and imagination via social media and through the online exhibition. It’s an approach that…

The Great War was still raging when the first signs of the flu began to appear. The distance and slow transport meant that Australian authorities had time to consider their options while the epidemic spread through other countries. The Australian Government began to plan a response should influenza reach its shores. A conference with delegates from all the states agreed to start by attempting to control the movement of people. If this failed and influenza spread, the Federal Director of Quarantine should be notified. The infected state would be isolated, and the Commonwealth would take control of all interstate traffic. The delegates’ agreement, however, did not necessarily reflect the stance of the state governments. The commonwealth plan required states to patrol a 10-mile strip on both sides of their border,…

I love devouring ‘creative interpretations’ of history, watching theatre, film and television dramas set in the past, and reading historical fiction. I’ve found that unpicking why filmmakers might have made certain choices can be a useful tool in the historian’s toolkit, and this is a key part of my research. For my interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Tasmania, I investigated my own creative process of adapting history for theatre and digital media. One of the most important questions was about the role of accuracy in the creative interpretation of history. Accuracy For the historian, interpreting archival material with accuracy is crucial. But for the playwright, filmmaker or novelist, accuracy is just one key consideration alongside a whole host of other questions and tensions. To help me navigate these while…

Paul Brickhill simply, and fairly suddenly, disappeared from the publishing industry and was slowly forgotten about by readers. But why is this so? A brief history The superficial bare bones of Paul’s life from 1916 to 1991 are as follows. Paul Brickhill was born in Melbourne, but grew up at Greenwich Point, New South Wales. In January 1931, he became a cadet journalist for the Sydney Sun. In January 1941, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and was trained in country Australia before going to Canada to be trained under the Empire Training Scheme. He became a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force (RAF), but in March 1943, he was shot down in his Spitfire over Tunisia, where he became a prisoner of war (POW) and…

As president of the board that manages the daily concerns of the synagogue and its congregation, Jeff Schneider is in the place of worship frequently enough, with his mind set to do a task. Yet, he says he often finds his eyes gravitating to the original benches used by the convicts. The Hobart Synagogue is the only one in the world with seats that were allotted specifically for convicts, who attended services escorted by armed guards. ‘The benches are very worn, crude and uncomfortable. They are very primitive, low to the floor with no back. The benches reflect how difficult it was for the convicts.’ His thoughts also turn to the whole community, including the early free settlers, and he reflects that despite being so far from home, they had…

THEN The iconic St Stephen’s Cathedral has a fascinating history dating all the way back to the mid 1800s. Located on Elizabeth Street in Brisbane’s CBD, construction on St Stephen’s Chapel began in November 1848, three years after the land was granted for a ‘Roman Catholic Church, school and parsonage’. The church was built from a design by AWN Pugin (1812–52), an English architect who is widely regarded as the ‘master’ of the Gothic Revival style. Two years later, on 12 May 1850, Father James Hanly held the chapel’s first mass. In 1859, Brisbane became a diocese under the pastoral care of Bishop James Quinn, and, in turn, the humble church became a cathedral. With this came a vision for a grander, more ornate structure, so on 26 December 1863,…

In 1936, Mount Garnet was a pretty roug-hand-ready place. A tin-mining town that had seen better days, it lies approximately 80 kilometres west of Innisfail in North Queensland. That October, the settlement was hemmed in by bushfires, worrying residents that the long, dry grass along Limestone Creek might bring flames dangerously close to their homes. It was there, on a sleepy Sunday morning, that the town’s small population was alarmed by a loud roar, an ominous crash – and then silence. The cacophony caught miner Frederick ‘Fred’ Moss Junior getting dressed inside his house, on the edge of town closest to Limestone Creek. It was just shy of 7.30 am, but Phyllis Moss had already risen and taken their baby outside. At the same time, Alfred Hurn and Herbert Manly…

John Patrick Dwyer could justifiably have rallied against the fate that orphaned him in a wild place at six years of age, burdened his life with type 1 diabetes and deprived him of children. Yet, he seems to have reserved any anger for collegial mediocrity in the courtroom, being otherwise exceptionally generous and charming. This, in short, is his story. It has been said that ‘a memory and a doorstep’ was all that remained of Aberfeldy, Victoria, by 1939. Yet, when Dwyer was born there in 1879, gold, land and timber attracted hundreds of people, despite the impossibly rugged terrain and harsh winters. When the government sold land in Aberfeldy in 1877, an Irishman from Tipperary, Thomas Dwyer, bought several lots. So did his future father-in-law, Scotsman David Donaldson. Thomas…

Your average 10-year-old bears little resemblance to their baby selves, but surprisingly, Trove has not changed much in the past decade. Despite growth spurts, new skills learnt, and an ever-bigger circle of friends, Trove is trying to fit into a very old jumper and finding it much too short in the… well, everywhere. This is changing. From late June 2020, Trove will have more room to grow to promote new collections, help researchers connect and bring more freely available, digitised items to an increasingly online community. Here’s the story behind some of those changes. Many family history trails begin outside Australia. Up until recently, if you were after passenger records, correspondence or information relating to Australia but held by a UK organisation, this meant you’d have to spend countless hours…