Tag: poverty

Tasmania Reads: An Application to the Orphan School (Part One: The Challenge)

The State Library is issuing a challenge to Tasmanians to read five different examples of nineteenth century handwriting from our Heritage Collections, each featuring a different set of records held in the State Archives.

The scripts are selected to give you insights into some of the key strengths of our collection and we hope they will pique your interest to explore further.

Your Transcription Challenge

This final challenge is, for me, the most difficult to read both for its content and style. It is an application to the Colonial Secretary for the immediate admission of John Garrity to the newly opened orphanage at New Town.  The orphan school catered for the children of convicts under sentence, as well as the children of the free when the parents were unable or unwilling to care for them.

Tasmanian Archives:   General Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office CSO5/1/86 File 1885 page 154.

The Answer…

will be published in our blog this afternoon. Stay tuned!

A Peek Inside the Cascades Female Factory, 1833-1834, and a New Digital Volunteer Expedition

 

At the foot of Mount Wellington stands the remains of a forbidding institution.  Nearly two centuries ago, the walls of the Cascades Female Factory housed hundreds of women, children and babies. Some of these convict women were waiting to go to new masters, others were being punished. Now you can help to tell their stories through our newest digital volunteering project, transcribing the Register of Female Convicts at the Cascades Female Factory, 1833-1834.

 

Continue reading “A Peek Inside the Cascades Female Factory, 1833-1834, and a New Digital Volunteer Expedition”

Where the paupers went to die…

Hospital records are like the holy grail of archives. Because medical histories are so personal, they are carefully controlled. In the busy world of a hospital, not every slip of paper could be kept, particularly before computers. By the time 19th and early 20th century records reached the archives, many volumes had gone missing or been destroyed, and only intriguing clues have survived.

Some of the surviving records from the General Hospital in Hobart are the hospital’s registers of deaths (HSD145, 1864-1884) and orders for coffins ‘required for pauper interments’ (HSD146, 1864-1876). These records have now been digitised and added to the Tasmanian Names Index, under the record type ‘deaths’.

Continue reading “Where the paupers went to die…”

Daisy Picken in the weeds: Prisoner records in the Tasmanian Names Index

‘Daisy Picken’. It sounded to me like a circus stage name, and conjured up images of an energetic teenage girl with pigtails, like a long-lost cousin of Pippi Longstocking.

We have recently added volumes of prisoner files to the Tasmanian Names Index, and many of them have photographs. Some of them are quite comical – old lags suppressing smirks, stern mouths covered by generous moustaches, looks of surprise…or malice. So, when I looked up Daisy Picken, I was almost surprised to see despair and desperation, and the glistening of tears.  Continue reading “Daisy Picken in the weeds: Prisoner records in the Tasmanian Names Index”