Trove Tuesday: The Carlton Brewery in pictures

No title (1870, December 10). Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic. : 1869 - 1954), p. 10 (TOWN EDITION). Retrieved June 6, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article219366218

The Carlton Brewery was five years old in 1870, when the woodcut above was published. The accompanying extensive article describes a large and busy operation with a smoke stack 105 feet high (30 metres). On site were boilers, crushers, a steam engine, refrigeration, thousands of bags of malt and hops, liquor in various stages of fermentation, not to mention barrels of the finished product.

The large stables (at the back left of the woodcut image) could house 20 horses “with every convenience that a man who regardeth the life of his beast could desire”. It sounds like life was pretty good for the beasts.

I wonder what life was like for the neighbours?

This image was a particularly good find for me, because Francis McMahon and Ellen Keogh (my 2xgreat grandparents) lived next to Carlton Brewery in Ballarat street (a street which no longer exists) for at least 40 years. From my reading of maps and street directories, I think they lived in one of the houses I have shaded red, below.

A later newspaper article (1904) also found on Trove provides a glimpse into the interior of the Brewery buildings and gives some idea of the scale of the Brewery.

“The Boiler House”

“Engine Room
Hercules Refrigerator or Ice Machine, having a capacity of 40 tons per day”

“Bottling by Machinery”

More images are available in the article.

VICTORIAN INDUSTRIES. (1904, November 3). Punch (Melbourne, Vic. : 1900 - 1918; 1925), pp. 25-26. Retrieved June 6, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article175405919

A gift to you from Twigs of Yore (and son)

If you are the type to rip the paper off with abandon, go ahead and click here. If you always read the card first, carry on.

My 10 year old son (who was last mentioned on this blog snapping shots with the Billion Graves app) wants to be a coder when he grows up. I keep telling him that, once he has the skills, he can build my perfect genealogy software. He seems to have accepted this fate. Either that, or he thinks I’m joking*.

So one day, when Mr 10 was looking for ideas to code, I asked him to work out how to build a web form with a button that would return different search strings depending on what was entered. I wanted such a thing because late last year I analysed historical birth notices in Trove and came up with conclusions about an effective search approach to use. In short, the best results were obtained by running a series of searches with the surname and one other relevant search term in close proximity.

Mr 10 quickly worked it out and obliged with the coding. We are excited to present to you the ….

Trove Helper

Merry Christmas!

 

* I am joking. Mostly. Partly. A little bit.

Perfecting Newspaper Searches: Birth Notices–Part 2

In this post I will turn the series of charts from my post Perfecting Newspaper Searches: Birth Notices - Part 1 into a search strategy. I will tell you why I am suggesting the searches, and I will give some tips on how to create an appropriate search string in Trove.

In each case, it’s a good idea to narrow the date range to a sensible window. You can also do it with the filters on the side after you search but “Refine search” or the advanced search form allows you to choose any range you want, not just a single decade, year, month, or day. “Refine search” becomes available once you’ve run the search:

I like to hold off on narrowing down my searches any further than that for as long as I can. Notices can sometimes turn up in unexpected places, and they are the ones you most want to find!

The series of searches I have come up with based on my previous post, and taking into account Trove search capabilities, is as follows:

1. Surname only
2. Surname and place
3. Surname and father’s name
4. Surname and mother’s name (after about 1910)
5. Surname and child’s name (after about 1910)
6. Surname and parents’ first names (after about 1940)
7. Address only... or anything else you’ve got! (if all else fails)

Read on for more detail.

1. Surname only

Reason: Every birth notice included the surname at least once.

Search tips:
Depending on the surname, you may wish to expand or restrict the search.

Expand the search by searching for known variations, or by using a wildcard.

couper OR coupar OR cooper OR cowper

coup*

Trove adds some fuzziness to your search terms by default. You can restrict the search to exactly the term you want by specifying that only the exact term you entered should be returned.

fulltext:couper

Adding fulltext gets me from 603,972 results down to 34,878. I can see that it gets rid of news about coups, and advertisements for coupes – but I don’t know what else I might have lost. Still, that’s too many to read through. I have to hope the birth notice I want is on the first page or two, or start using the state and notice type filters to narrow it down!

Assuming you have more results than you can reasonably review, the next searches to try are:

2. Surname and place

Reason: Until the 1950s, the majority of birth notices included place names that a family researcher might know to look for.

Search tips:
The birth notices I reviewed included street and/or suburb names. Look at your information and identify all the places and addresses where the family was known to be during the date range of interest as well as immediately before and after. You may have to do a few different searches if there are a lot! 

Birth notices are rarely as long as 30 words. I found that the surname would usually appear at the beginning of the notice, and often in the middle as well (as part of the father’s full name). This means that the surname and place name you are looking for are likely to be no more than 10 words apart. You can safely restrict your results by specifying that the words you are interested must be near to each other. If Trove is in a good mood, you do that by specifying the amount of “phrase slop” to allow (I didn’t make up that expression, it’s what the Trove help page calls it!)

My Couper family lived in Rugby Road, Oakleigh. I might search for: “couper oakleigh”~10

When I started writing this post, Trove handled searches like the one above with no problem. The previous few days it has struggled – but seemed happier if I snuck up on it by trying smaller numbers first. Today it’s running complicated searches quite happily.

You can use “fulltext” with phrases – put it outside the brackets:
fulltext:“couper oakleigh”~10

Depending on how many surname variations you have, and how many place name parts you need to manage, you might have to mix and match surnames and place names. You can search on each combination one at a time, but I like an all-in-one search if I can manage it. For example:

“couper oakleigh”~10 OR “couper rugby”~10 OR “cowper oakleigh”~10 OR “cowper rugby”~10

I prefer that because separate search strings often bring up duplicated results. By running them all at once I don’t have to look through pages of the same articles to find the ones I want.

If you try a search like this and Trove isn’t co-operative, or it just seems too complicated to set up, here is another approach:

(couper OR cowper) AND (oakleigh OR rugby)

This search tells Trove to find articles that have any of the surname variations AND have any of the place names. Note the use of brackets, to assist Trove’s search engine make sense of the query.

This will bring up all the same results as the search above, but will also bring up more results that are not relevant because it doesn’t limit the distance between the search terms. Theoretically, articles where the words are closer together should appear closer to the top of the search results.  

3. Surname and father’s name

Reason: Over 85% of notices included the father’s name in some form. I suggested searching for places first, even though “searchable places” don’t appear quite so often, because places tend to have fewer name variations to work around.

Search tips:
The father’s name was sometimes shown as the given name, sometimes as initials, sometimes an abbreviation of a name (Chas, for Charles) and sometimes a mixture of these. This means that if I was searching for children of James William French, I would need to try:

• “J French”      
• “J W French”
• “James French”
• “James W French”
• “Jas French”
• “Jas W French”
• “J William French”
• “J Will French”

… you get the idea.

A reasonable starting point would be:

“J French” OR “James French” OR “Jas French”

I have deliberately ignored the W in the middle in this search as the default phrase search is equivalent to a search with ~1. Depending on how common the name you are searching for is, you might need to try more variations.

“J W French”~0 OR “James W French”~0 OR  [continue adding name variations]

That ~0 means that there can be no “slop”, the name must be exactly as written. Of course, the name in the newspaper may be written just like that but you still might not find it due to character recognition difficulties.

If after about 1910:

4. Surname and mother’s name

Reason: Increasingly from about the 1910s, birth notices started to mention the mother’s name.

Search tips: Sometimes the article included the maiden name, sometimes the given name(s) and sometimes both.

We saw the maiden name, if included, was always within a few words of the surname. A search that would find “Couper (nee Mary Allsop)” is:

“Couper Allsop”~2

Given name was sometimes included with the surname, as above, and sometimes in the middle of the text.

“Mary Allsop” is worth a shot. So is “Mary Couper”~10.

The name in a birth notice is often the name the mother went by, rather than as her full name so remember to search for Kate as well as for Catherine.

If after about 1910:  

5. Surname and child’s name

Reason: Increasingly from about the 1910s, birth notices started to mention the child’s name.

Search tips:
When included, the child’s name was written out with both the first and middle name, not nicknames, and was usually at the end of the notice. A search that insists on the first names and surname being close together won’t work.

French AND “James Henry”

If after about 1940:

5. Surname and parents first names

Reason: From about the 1940s birth notices became less formal in tone and often mentioned both parents by their first name, mother first.  

Search tips: Try casual and nickname forms of the names of interest first.

If you still have no luck, leave out the surname:

6. Address – or any other information you have to use!

Reason: Sometimes, the surname simply isn’t picked up accurately by the character recognition process.

Search tips:
Leave off the surname, and use whatever you’ve got! Just the address is good option as many birth notices included an address, and it is quite specific:

“12 rugby road” OR “12 rugby rd”

In this case I left in the word road (and included both “road” and “rd”), to avoid articles about rugby scores. If the street name was not such a common word I would have left “road” and “rd” off.

You could also use anything you know about the family that is a bit unusual. Very few birth notices mention anything other than the information I’ve discussed, but there were exceptions.

If after all that you still can’t find a birth notice… perhaps there wasn’t one, or perhaps the right newspaper just isn’t online yet. It cost money to place a notice, families were large, and for many times were tough.

 

Did these strategies work for you? Is there a strategy that I’ve missed out? Do you have clever ideas about how to put together a search string using what we know about birth notices? I’ve love to hear about it!

Perfecting newspaper searches: Birth notices–Part 1

In order to search effectively, you really do have to know what you are looking for! You might know that you are looking for the birth notice for John Doe and the search seems pretty straightforward. Enter the words “John Doe” and narrow down the year range. Unfortunately, that may not be enough to find John Doe’s birth notice (assuming he has one) even one if the entry is transcribed correctly.

What you need to know as you enter your search terms is not the name “John Doe”, but the unique combination of words that are used in John Doe’s birth notice. If you are looking for a historical notice it’s entirely possible, even likely, that the notice will not contain his name at all.

Over the past few days I’ve been compiling information about the information included in birth notices in The Argus (Victoria, Australia on the Trove website), from 1850 to 1955. I selected Family Notices articles spread across the years. I aimed to choose articles with multiple notices in order to process them in batches, and did not reject any batch once I had clicked on it. I stopped searching for additional birth notices within each decade when I had reviewed at least 30.

In total, I reviewed 447 birth notice items from The Argus. I also spot-checked other newspapers and states, and looked more carefully at an extra 162 birth notices for other states in order to test if the results I found are generally applicable for Australian newspapers.

I this post I will describe what I found. In my next, I hope you will join me in a discussion of what the results means for constructing birth notice searches in Trove.

The birth notices had three common features:

• They were quite short, most were 30 words or less (newspapers would charge extra to insert a longer than standard notice).
• They all included the surname of the person.
• They all included the words “son” or “daughter”.

You will notice that I have not listed “they included the child’s name” or “they included the mother’s name” as common features. Before the 1950s, these were quite uncommon features!

Person’s surname

Every birth notice included the surname. The surname was usually given in capital letters at the start of each notice, and would also often appear in the middle of the notice when the parents’ names were mentioned. However, early birth notices did not start with the surname. The position of the surname relative to other search terms we might want to use becomes relevant when we consider how we might search Trove.

Child’s name

No birth notices prior to 1910 (in my Argus sample) included the child’s name. Inclusion of the child’s name was above 60% in the 1920s and 1950s. Still, even in those years more than 30% of birth notices did not name the person who had been born!

When the name of the child was given, it was almost always in brackets at the end of the notice.

Chart 1:  Proportion of birth notices that included the child’s name

Mother’s name

In the earlier papers, the mother was almost always referred to as “wife of …” or “Mrs husband’s name”. Almost always. Occasionally she wasn’t referred to at all.

The first instance of including the mother’s maiden name in my sample occurred in the 1900s. This practice had become more popular in the 1920s and by the ‘40s I found that more than 60% of sampled birth notices included the mother’s maiden name.

Where the maiden name was included, it was almost always placed in brackets immediately following the child’s surname at the start of the notice. There were some variations in the detail – use of the word “nee”, or inclusion of the given name.

• SURNAME (mother’s surname)
• SURNAME (nee mother’s surname)
• SURNAME (nee mother’s full name)

Inclusion of the mother’s given name, either with the surname as above or in the text of the notice, also started taking off in the 1920s. In the 1950s over 80% of birth notices would include the mother’s given name.

Although I did not make a tally, it was my impression that in most cases the name the mother went by was included, rather than her full name. That is, “Dot”, rather than “Dorothy Jane”. Her name was often paired with her husband’s name in the text ie “Dot and Wal”.

Chart 2:  Proportion of birth notices that included the mother’s name

Father’s name

The father’s name was almost always included in some form. This would either be his full name or his initials. I did not tally whether “Mr. J. W. Doe” or “Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Doe” were more common - both were frequently used.

In the earlier time periods, the father’s name was more often spelled out in full. In later time periods, when inclusion of the father’s given name again became the norm it was more often included paired with the wife’s name eg “Dot and Wal”.

Chart 3:  Proportion of birth notices that included the father’s name

Other information

While there was very occasional reference to occupations (usually in the earlier notices) or sibling names (only in the later notices) these were quite rare.

I saw quite a lot of notices that included the word “twins” and sadly even more that included the word “stillborn”. In the later years I also saw the word “caesarean” in a few notices. These words might be useful if you already knew a bit about the birth.

The only other information frequently included was place names. Almost every birth notice included a place name, either the residence or place of birth. Not all of these would be useful when construction a search. In tallying inclusion of place names, I made a completely subjective judgement in each case as to whether the place name was one that a researcher would be likely to know was connected to the family, and sufficiently unusual that it wouldn’t bring up too many false positive results.  For example, if the place was a hospital (without mention of a suburb), I did not suppose the researcher would have information that would lead them to search on that term.

While most birth notices through most of the time period included potentially “searchable” places, this dropped of in the 1950s. Two things seemed to be happening:

• A shift to including information about the immediate family instead of place of residence.
• Possibly, more births were occurring in hospital. I generally did not include a hospital name without a suburb as a “searchable place”.

Chart 4:  Proportion of birth notices that included a searchable place

Other States

A spot-check of other newspapers and other States suggested that the patterns I saw in the Argus were generally relevant. I was not keen on replicating the whole exercise across every State… but I did want a bit more information to reassure myself on this point. The decade starting 1910 seemed to be a turning point for inclusion of mother and child names in the Argus and that is the decade I chose for comparison.

For each State, I chose items from the newspaper with the most “Family Notice” articles in that State. Apologies to Tasmania and the Northern Territory. You were not forgotten. It was just that the small number of birth notices per article made the data extraction task more onerous. I’m doing this in my spare time, remember!

Results were reasonably consistent. Victoria was perhaps a little ahead in including details of the mother and child.

Of course, I only looked at a few hundred out of potentially millions of birth notices in total (as at the time of writing there are 1,543,548 “Family Notices” articles in Trove, many of which would contain multiple birth notices). Local newspapers especially may have entirely different patterns. It would always be worthwhile to look at some birth notices for the paper and era you are searching, to make sure that the terms you are searching for were used at that time and place.

 

 

Copyright 2015 Shelley Crawford

Waiting for the Mail

The Avoca Mail (Avoca, Victoria), that is. I am particularly interested in this newspaper as I hope it will mention the death of James Bennett (1831-?) which has for many years eluded me. Ghost articles have appeared on Trove with tantalising abstracts that I can’t click and read in full because they haven’t passed QA yet. It feels like weeks since I found them and entered my email address to receive a notice when each one becomes available. In reality, it has only been a few days. I may download most of my information these days, but I still get to experience waiting for the Mail!

Edited to add:

Oh my. I think I just found him. A memorial article in the Age newspaper. More when I can confirm, but it looks good!

It’s my blogiversary, and I want presents

It’s hard to believe it’s been three years since I uploaded my first, tentative post. I didn’t know if anyone would ever read it. I thought it quite possible that I would put up half a dozen posts then realise that the whole thing wasn’t really me. That was three years ago and since then I have made 167 posts – just a little over one a week on average.

Today, in honour of my third blogiversary, I’m going to come out and say it…

I want presents!

If you think that was in bad taste, then wait a minute longer because I’m going to tell you exactly what I want.

I would consider it a fantastic gift if you could spend a few minutes today correcting text on the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper site. You don’t even need a login to do so, just search for an item of interest and correct away. If you happen to find something relevant to your own research in the process, then consider that my gift to you.

Thanks for your support and encouragement. Every comment counts! I’m looking forward to the next year of blogging.

New treasure on Trove – Oakleigh Leader

This evening an item came up in my Google reader which made me exclaim a delighted “Oh!”.

One of the many great features of the Trove site is all the RSS feeds. As all of my immigrant ancestors settled in Victoria, I have signed up to the RSS feed for newly added titles from that State. It has been fantastic seeing more and more newspaper names relating to regional areas appearing.

This one in particular made me sit up and take notice because my COUPER branch had a long history in the Oakleigh area, being some of the earliest pioneers and also sitting on council. They also have the sad distinction of the known first burial in Oakleigh Cemetery – Christina Couper was buried there on 11 December 1860, aged just 7.

Naturally I jumped right in. A search on COUPER gave me 69 hits. Many of them were advertising for “Dr Couper-Johnson”, and not likely to be of interest to me. When I eliminated those I still had 22 results. Sadly, 21 of those results are still undergoing quality control so I can’t see them!

The one result I can see is notes from an Oakleigh Shire Council meeting, where my butcher ancestor’s request to renew his slaughtering licence was considered, but postponed. I will have to do a manual search for meeting notes for the next month to see what happened. I know that he continued as a butcher for many more years, so presumably he got the licence but there must have been a reason for consideration of the request to be postponed.

OAKLEIGH SHIRE COUNCIL. (1888, December 22). Oakleigh Leader (North Brighton, Vic. : 1888 - 1902), p. 7. Retrieved August 4, 2011, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article66176226

I must remember to search on Cowper and other variations as well.

Moving on there were tantalising glimpses of promising articles which were in the results but not yet viewable. Like this one:

What sad event?! What was his role in it?

There were also several mentions of a D.Couper in Court of Petty Sessions reports. I will just have to wait and see what they contain.

Something to look forward to!

Using newspaper images from Trove

Copyright is a concern when publishing information on the web, or anywhere for that matter.

Users of the National Library of Australia's Australian Newspapers website may be interested to know that the Library says "Yes it is OK to do[sic] use the images on Wikipedia and other websites". They suggest that the item be sourced with the persistant identifier (a special link to the article located on the left of the page).

Details here.

Newspaper clipping puzzle solved

The puzzle
Back in January I found a clue to a mystery that although minor, had been puzzling me for some time. The mystery was the connection of a young man, mentioned in a newspaper death notice among my grandfather's papers, to my family. The young man had accidentally drowned overseas in the late 1970s.

Why did I think there was a connection? Well, most obviously because the clipping was kept with family papers. It also mentioned that the young man had a grandparent known as "Couper" - which is one of my family names.

My apologies for being a little coy about naming names here. I have decided not to name the people, as some family members close to the deceased man may still be alive.

The clue
The clue I stumbled across was the burial place of the young man. It appears his body was returned home to Australia for burial, as he was buried in the same plot as one of my great-granduncles. Also in the plot was the relatively recent burial of a woman whose first name was a variation on the mother's name from the death notice and surname matched the son's surname. Always check who else is in the plot!!

It looked very much as though my great-granduncle was the "Couper" mentioned, the woman was his daughter and the young man his grandson. It all looked very promising, but I wanted a bit more certainty before I entered anything into my database.

The search
The dates were too recent for birth and marriage information (births and marriages in Victoria are currently only available up to 1908 and 1942 respectively). I had an Ancestry.com subscription at the time so I checked out the Australian electoral rolls. I was hoping to find the mother living in her parent's house before marriage, then disappearing and neatly turning up in her husband's house with a new surname.

I didn't get quite what I had hoped for. I did find the couple, but when they first appeared on the electoral roll they already shared a surname and were living in her (supposed) parent's house. This was completely consistent with my theory. The only trouble was that all it really showed was that the couple seemed to have a close relationship with my great-granduncle.

I put the puzzle to the side for the time being.

The solution
A few days ago I finally found something that gave me the confidence to enter the relationships into my database. Like so much of the information I have found lately, it was thanks to the wonders of Trove! More years of newspapers have come on line since January. Enough years, that I found a marriage notice. It gave full names and parents for both partners and even had a photo of the happy couple!

If you haven't tried Trove, I encourage you to give it a shot, even if you're not Australian! So that there can be no excuses, here's the search box...





Let me know if you find anything!