Searching Government Gazettes

I've recently been playing with Government Gazettes on the State Library of Victoria (SLV) website, here. The gazettes included are the New South Wales Government Gazette (1836-1851), Port Phillip Government Gazette (1843-1851) and the Victoria Government Gazette (1851-1997).

The State Library website provides and search facility for an index to the gazettes, and the relevant gazette pages can be viewed and downloaded in pdf format. It's all free of charge. However, people's names are not necessarily indexed. The help pages say:

You can find many details about individuals in the Gazette. Sometimes people’s names are listed in the index, but very often they are not. So if you are looking for information about a person it is useful to know something about them first. For example, that they won a government tender, or were appointed to a government position. With this information you can search using keywords related to the tender or position.

It is possible to search these gazettes by name (or any other term you want). To do so, just add the search term site:gazette.slv.vic.gov.au to a Google search. It appears that Google have not only picked up the pdf files, they've also run OCR over them which seems to have worked very well, so they are searchable.

For example:

• A search on the name "Couper" through the site index came up with eleven results. None of these looked like my family.
• A Google search over the gazettes on the name "Couper" came up with 277 results. Some may have been my family, but I wasn't in the mood for looking through that many results. A further search on the street name my Couper ancestor lived in netted ten results. Two of these related to my great-greataunt who was listed as a registered midwife. I had believed her to be a midwife, anecdotally, but had only ever seen her described as a nurse in other records. This was a nice find.

I'll definately be playing with this some more...

If you give it a try and find something useful, please come back and comment!  

My intention when I started this blog was to write and post up little pieces of the family story. While that's still my intention, the act of trying to write some of the stories up has shown me how much more work there is to be done! As a result this blog contains bits and pieces of whatever I happen upon that I find useful or interesting. I have previously written about Google searches I didn't expect to be able to do here and here.

Still staying focused - a good result!

I would have skipped World Vital Records' recent offer of a few days of free access, had it not been for the Victorian Government and Police Gazettes. I've been meaning to have a look at them some time. They were tempting... so very tempting... I signed up.

After some playing around to get a feel for the site I decided to focus on a few individuals from my COUPER branch. This family came from Scotland and settled in Oakleigh, Victoria in the mid 1850s. I've got good basic information on them, and a bit more.

I found Robert COUPER in several directories as a cooper, which fits with what I know. Only... one year there was a Robert COUPER in Oakleigh with the word "beerhouse" instead. How odd, I thought, and wondered if it was the same person. It took me a few days before the (now obvious) thought came to me that beer would have been stored in barrels. Coopers make barrels. "Beerhouse" might not be so inconsistent after all. That little revelation was enough to make me think that my time was not totally wasted.

There was another possible lead for the family. I found a reference to a Robert COUPER in the Victorian Goverment Gazette (1858). He had been awarded a government contract for the supply of timber for the maintenance of the plank road from Geelong to Ballarat. Could this be my Robert COUPER? A cooper must have a source of timber, mustn't he? I will have to see if the Public Record Office of Victoria has the tender documents and contract in their archives. Some day. I've put it on my to-do list.

I came away feeling glad I'd taken up the offer. I was able to focus on the families I was interested in and now have some leads to follow when I am ready to do some real work on them.

As for the site itself, I probably will take a paid subscription with them some day, when I'm ready. I found the search interface so-so but the databases on offer had potential. I was going to write a post about the search interface but I think it would be more constructive to send my remarks to the website's feedback form. Unless I run short of blog topics, or there is overwhelming reader interest (=any) on the subject, that is!