Richard, Sarah, Hannah, William and Atalina Ballard could all answer yes to their parents, when they left doors open when they were older, because they were born in a tent.

Their parents John Thomas and Mary Ann Ballard moved to Goolwa, South Australia in about 1853 with Mary Ann’s two children from her first marriage Priscilla and Henry.  Richard was born in December 1853 and is said to have been the first white child born in what was then called Hutchinson’s Township (Goolwa).  The family camped on what is now the corner of Hays St and Newacott Place but was then known as Ballard’s of Hutchinson’s Paddock.  All the children from Richard through to Atalina were born in that tent dwelling.

John Thomas Ballard  was officially registered as the property’s owner on 20 July 1866 and was granted permission to build later that year.  I’m sure Mary Ann was eternally grateful when the house was completed and she was able to give birth to her son John Thomas Jnr indoors in 1869.

I’ve found this great genealogy group on Facebook called Australian Genealogy.  It’s full of lovely helpful people and great information.  If you’re looking for help with your Australian ancestors or if you live in Australia and have questions about researching in other countries you can ask your questions here.  It’s also a great place to share links and tips too.

Today I’ve uploaded all my headstone photos to my Picasaweb account.  They are there to be freely used and shared (with attribution me).

Headstones in South Australia
I’ve labelled the majority of these photos and hopefully they’ll soon be indexed by Google so that people can find them.

Headstones in Victoria, Australia
I haven’t labelled these ones yet but they’re there to look at and hopefully I’ll get them all labelled soon.

I was reading Tara’s blog, A Family Mystery, where she was talking about her use of maps.  http://www.afamilymystery.com/blog/2011/06/27/mappy-monday-historic-maps-online/#axzz1SPU42vcU


I left her a comment about my use of Google Maps so I thought I’d write more about it here.


When I find an unfamiliar place name I go straight to Google Maps to find out where it is.  I like to know things like if family members lived close together or, if they were living in a particular area, what their jobs might have been.  I found the church in Scotland where my great grandparents were married and, as it’s still there today, could look at it in Google street view.


Google Maps gives you the ability to save maps.  They call it creating a map.  You can bring up a map, give it a title and a description, choose whether you want it to be public or private and label places on the map using the Add A Placemark function.

The blue pointers are the placemarks I’ve added to the map.  Down the left hand side of the picture above you can see the labels I’ve given to my placemarks.  When you’ve saved your map  you can go back to it at any time by going to maps.google.com, logging into your Google account and clicking on My Places.


I have a map for ancestors living in Victoria, Australia. A lot of them were gold miners so the map shows me where on the Victorian goldfields they were living. It gives a ‘big picture’ to their lives and helps me to determine if a record I’ve found is for that particular ancestor or not.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=201837696451913890432.00046d79fffff6d049167&msa=0&ll=-36.826875,144.239502&spn=3.548236,4.938354


The maps I make are public so that other people can use them and contact me if we have any ancestors in common.

I was pleasantly surprised at the ease of this process of applying for permission to publish photos from the library’s collection here on my blog.  I hadn’t done it previously because I thought it may be an arduous process but it wasn’t at all.  Here’s what I did.

1. I downloaded the Permission To Publish form from the library website http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=581
2. Filled in the form with the appropriate numbers of the images I wanted to publish
3. Emailed it to the library info @ slsa.sa.gov.au
4. And in less than a week I had my reply

Eliezer operated the Mundoo on the Murray and Darling rivers, transporting goods to outlying stations and towns and bringing back wool to be exported to England, until his death in 1900.  More information about Australia’s river trading paddle steamers can be found here http://travelling-australia.info/Infsheets/Rivertrade.html