Apr 18, 2011 2
A House on Highgate Hill
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been having a ridiculous amount of fun with The National Library of Australia’s Trove database. In addition to the archive of photographs, letters, audio and other historical records, it also contains a vast library of newspapers going back well into the 1800′s. The most exciting thing about this is that the library has used text recognition software to make all of the articles searchable, and crowd-sources corrections where the text recognition hasn’t property transcribed an article.
Among other things, it occurred to me to run a search for my address. The Family Notices section of The West Australian was particularly fruitful, yielding notices of births and deaths that had occurred at the property dating back many years, and the classified advertisements indicated that the front room had been repeatedly rented to various boarders. (“Well Furnished Front Bed-sitting Room, tea and toast, suit gent, 7/6.“ I resent the present lack of a tea and toast service.)
After an hour or so of reading, I came across a newspaper article reporting on an inquest into the death of an elderly lady in my cottage in 1950. Apparently Florence (76) lived alone and hadn’t been seen for several days, so neighbours alerted a local police constable living nearby. Upon looking through the windows he discovered Florence’s body in the sitting room, with a bottle of kerosene and matches nearby. The coroner determined that she had died from smoke inhalation and burns while treating the floor for white ants.
As a relatively unsqueamish amateur historian, I had a look around for evidence of the fire. And behold, in my living room, there were some scorch marks indicating an accelerant pattern (why yes, I have been watching those dodgy crime docos again), as well as a section where the floorboards had been replaced, so now I know which window the constable looked through and found Florence’s body.
As it happens, the Metropolitan Cemeteries Board in Western Australia also has an excellent online database and I was able to look up the location of Florence and her husband Albert’s grave in Karrakatta Cemetery. And so, last weekend, I headed over to Karrakatta accompanied by fellow local history enthusiast angrygoat with a bunch of flowers to see where she was buried. We found the grave easily thanks to the excellent online lookup, and were pleased to see that the plot had not yet been renewed, and that the original headstone was still in place. It looked like it had been a very long time since anyone had tended the plot, so it was rather nice to visit and leave some roses. (We also had a lovely walk through the rest of the cemetery, and were interested in the way various cultural groups had very specific types of memorial; we particularly liked the section near the entrance to the war graves lawn where all the plots had been decorated with pot-plants, homemade markers and borders from the hardware store.)
Some further investigation of newspapers and genealogy sites via Google filled in Florence’s background and family history, which I’ve footnoted due to length and detail.[1] It’s not particularly readable, but it’s a good illustration of the wealth of historical information accessible online.
While trawling through the Trove database, I’ve also discovered the most fascinating things about my local area – some sad, some creepy, but many amusing and interesting. If you’ve got a spare hour, I heartily recommend checking it out; it’s a great example of a library utilising technology and provides easy access to a wealth of information which would otherwise be unsearchable and only stored physically on microfiche.
[1] Florence was born in Menindie (now Menindee) in New South Wales in 1876 and her sister Matilda (Till) was born in Wilcannia in 1877. She also had a third sister, Mabel Maud, born in 1880. In 1892, her widowed mother (a midwife) made the journey to Perth with her daughters, where she married her second husband, a tailor named William, and had two more children – Arthur (1886) and Willis (1891).
William, had been one of 254 convicts transported to Western Australia in 1867 on the Norwood. He was convicted in Shrewsbury at the age of 25 years for a term of 10 years, for the crime of rape. In May 1881, three and a half yards of dark tweed were stolen from William’s tailoring shop, with Michael Ennis reported as a suspect. William moved his tailoring business from William Street to premises on Barrack Street in 1895. He died in Fremantle in 1903, was described as ‘husband of Mrs Weeks, Nurse’ and is buried in Fremantle Cemetery.
Sarah Jane testified in 1888 at an inquest in Perth into the death of an elderly woman who had lived with she and her husband, and was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a man riding a horse in Perth ‘at a needlessly rapid pace through the street on a dark night’. Sarah Jane died in 1912 in Northam, leaving her daughter Matilda a sum of 34 pounds and fifteen shillings in her will.
It appears that Florence fared better than her sister Matilda who married a Queenslander of German descent named Frank, and they settled in Narrogin in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Frank was a Roman Catholic – Florence and Matilda appear to have been from an Anglican family. He and Matilda had eight children, and she died in 1932 in the local hospital at the age of 56, after drinking caustic soda. Frank died in 1943.
Mabel Maud married a widower named William and moved to Galena, near Geraldton where she was a stepmother to William’s children from his first marriage and mother of her own. After William’s death, she married Joseph and they moved into my neighbours’ cottage where Mabel Maud and her husband both died in 1947. She seems to have been a well-liked lady, with bereavement notices in the newspaper from friends as well as family. Florence’s half-brother Arthur appears to have lived at the same address, where he died in 1949.
Willis lived in Merreden and York, and died in 1961 in Subiaco, having married a man named James in York (the Western Australian one, not the English one) in 1911. James died five months after his wife. They had seven children and two of her sons died during the Second World War, in Papua New Guinea and Crete respectively. In 1951, James retired from his position as a fireman for the WA Government Railways, and applied to the magistrate for his tenant to vacate his house in Subiaco, as he would have to quit the railway cottage in which they were residing at the time.
