genealogy

Headstone Photos To Share

kira0030

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.

Theodor Gustav Hermann Buring and Family
West Tce Cemetery, Adelaide, South Australia

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.

Charles and Eleanor Wigley
Bendigo Cemetery, Victoria, Australia
As I take more photos I’ll keep uploading them to Picasa so that people who can’t get to these cemeteries can have a photo of their ancestor.

Google Maps for Genealogy

kira0030

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.

Applying For Permission To Publish Photographs From the State Library of South Australia

kira0030

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

P.S. Mundoo Built By Eliezer Hainsworth Dodd Snr

kira0030
Following on from my previous post about Eliezer Hainsworth Dodd here are some photos of the P.S. Mundoo which he built in 1875.


Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia PRG 1258/1/2727.
Bow view of ‘P.S. Mundoo’ and barge, near a semi-submerged barge, at edge of river, possibly Darling River, New South Wales with crew unloading iron sheet and other materials circa 1887.


Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia B 9982. circa 1900



Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia B 12291. circa 1900



Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia PRG 1258/1/2729.
Part side view of ‘P.S. Mundoo’ with ‘Duck’ barge, loading wool using a flying fox with pulley, loaded from the high river bank at Bourke, New South Wales circa 1887.


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

Eliezer Hainsworth Dodd Snr

kira0030
Tracing back through a distant family line I came to this gentleman Eliezer Hainsworth Dodd Snr.  I haven’t found out a lot about his life but what I have found out fascinates me!
He married Emily Pretty on 13 Nov 1854 in Adelaide.  They moved around within South Australia from Adelaide to Encounter Bay to Yankalilla and back to Port Elliot.  Eliezer was declared insolvent in 1856 and his occupation on these documents was listed as Miller.
South Australian Register, Friday 16 May 1856, page 4
He went into the Blacksmith business but didn’t fare much better and in 1862 he is declared insolvent once again.
South Australian Register, Friday 7 November 1862, page 2
By this time Eliezer and Emily have had five children although two little ones, William and Samuel have passed away.
Come 1875, during the booming river trade, Eliezer builds the PS Mundoo (Paddle steamer Mundoo) on Mundoo Island near Goolwa, South Australia.
I found this information on Trove the State Library of South Australia has a number of photos of the PS Mundoo also.
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
Barrier Miner, Wednesday 14 February 1900, page 2

This newspaper clipping tells how Eliezer had left Goolwa two or three months earlier with his steamer the Mundoo for Wilcannia but because the river was low they didn’t reach there.  He was about to come home over land when “he had an attack of an old trouble which necessitated his removal to the Wilcannia Hospital, where he died on Feb 8.”

Those who have read Nancy Cato’s book All The Rivers Run will be familiar with this awful scene of a paddle steamer stuck in a billabong when a health crisis strikes.