Finding Irene ...

 Trying to find Irene Lily May Hoggan's death record got under my skin, so I decided to do a little detective work - otherwise known as brushing up my genealogical research skills.

I backtracked my searches on Victoria's Births, Deaths and Marriages website and there was definitely no death record, nor was there a death record for her husband, Arthur Burge.

And even though we are looking at a time when divorce was rare and expensive, most people simply making their own informal arrangements, I checked for a divorce record, and there was none. 

In a moment of frustration I simply tried a google search on her full married name, and strangely that worked - I stumbled across an Ancestry list of family trees and there she was, living in New South Wales.

Ancestry of course obscures most of the information unless you sign up.

 

I don't have a subscription to any of the family history giants any more, but what was not obscured suggested that Irene Lily May may have died in New South Wales.

At this point I could, I suppose, have waited to Monday to use my local Library's Ancestry subscription - you can only use the subscription from one of the Library desktops - to check further but I had enough bits of puzzle - having a slightly unusual name helps - to track her down online using open source materials.

 

A quick search of NSW's BDM site confirmed  that she had died in Manly in 1958 almost twenty years after her husband, who appears to have died in 1939.

The fact that this was relatively straight forward is a tribute to how simple it is to carry out basic genealogical research using open source materials - despite what the glossy ads tell you you don't need a subscription to one of the behemoths for basic research given so much is publicly available online.

If you are doing a lot of work in this area, a subscription to the behemoths can be worthwhile, if only to reduce the cost of access to copies of original documents, and even then your mileage may vary...

The minutiae of everyday life

 

Something I've always found fascinating is coming  across the traces of people in the past who lived, loved and died over a century ago, somehow it makes the past more alive to me.

So when  I was documenting a pile of children's books in the nursery at Lake View I was fascinated by some of the fly leaf dedications - such as this book of stories given to a little girl called Florence Edna McKean by her proud father in 1879 or like this insert in a book given as a school prize at Carlton Kindergarten in 1899 Irene Hoggan for Music and Club Swinging - I'm guessing as a physical exercise to teach co-ordination, rather than for being a regular at the Purple Pussycat.

What life gave both these little girls I have no idea - a quick search of Victoria's Births, Marriages and Deaths site suggests Florence married quite late in life, in 1915, and died in 1947. Irene married in 1914 when she would have been 24, but I can find no record of her death, but of course she may have moved interstate,

There books came from a job lot of nineteenth century children's books bought at auction and used to 'dress' the nursery at Lake View to give an impression of how it may have looked - there's no connection with the history of the property.

Otherwise I've been working on a mapping to convert the Athenaeum Heritage book collection into a format suitable for upload to Victorian Collections, as well as reverting my Lenovo IdeaPad to an earlier version of Ubuntu, after I ran into some stability issues after an upgrade to the latest version.

It's not all been computers and archiving though, I've also been able to get a bit of gardening in, which at this time really turns into a race between me and the weeds - can I pull them out faster than they grow?

 

Shorts! I've been wearing shorts!

 The weather is getting gradually warmer, though it's two steps forward and one step back at the moment, but one afternoon this week it was warm enough to wear shorts while working in the garden trying to tame the damned couch grass that infests our flower and vegetable beds.

Because we try and be as organic as possible in our garden, dealing with the couch grass infestation means getting down on one's hands and knees with a bucket and a hand fork and trying to dig out the root nodes and runners - something which I find strangely therapeutic.

Our bower bird is chirping away trying to lay wings on a mate, and is raiding the peg basket on the washing line for blue pegs, and scattering all the other rejected ones round the garden, giving us a little task to gather them all up every morning though I leave him any of the blue ones he takes.

All this gardening and bower bird foraging hasn't turned up anything so far this year in the way of garden archaeology - no interesting bits of glass or old medicine bottles, but there's a lot of couch grass left to root out.

Down at Lake View I've been working on the room that's been dressed as the nursery, but while doing so I had an important realisation about oil lamps - that lamp makers bought in burners from specialist manufacturers - the burners being quite complicated bits of brasswork, and hence the name on the burner isn't necessarily the name of the lamp maker.

I also spent some time trying to track down what had happened to the Florence Nightingale Digitization project, principally because one of my back burner projects was to investigate the treatment of mental trauma during the Crimean war.

For the rest it was just the mechanics of life, but tomorrow's clock change day when we spring forward an hour, which at least will have the benefit of the cats trying to wake us at 0630 rather than 0530 to be let out, and I probably ought to check my bike in the hope that it will soon be warm enough to start my morning bike rides over summer ...

A slightly more eventful week

 Well, this week’s been a little more eventful with a day trip to Melbourne to see the Egyptian exhibition at the NGV, not to mention a little bit of 'fun' when I upgraded my Ubuntu machine to Noble Numbat.

As this week ends with a public holiday, I didn’t have a session at the Athenaeum this Friday, but I did have a productive day at Lakeview where I started on what’s been designated the nursery.

Most of the contents of Lakeview are inevitably props, which means that the rooms have been ‘dressed’ to give an impression of what they would have been like in late Victorian times, rather than the contents being directly associated with the house.

That said, the nursery contents, like the main bedroom are mostly in period with some contemporary children's dolls and a battered Winsor and Newton water colour set, which can be dated to the last thirty or so years of the nineteenth century, as not only is it by appointment to Queen Victoria - a more than reasonable watercolourist - but also to the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Personally, I struggle to  see the future Edward VII as a watercolour artist - gin, champagne and fornication seem to have been much more his thing, but Queen Alexandra did dabble, so there’s perhaps a little bit of truth in the claimed royal connection ...

Quite a productive week

 Despite a slow start, this has been quite a productive week.

I've finished documenting the master bedroom at Lake View - only another six rooms to go.

In the course of finishing off the  master bedroom I came across this quite nice late nineteenth century metal trunk

which interestingly had a number of Victorian Railways luggage labels on the end of the trunk including this one to Flinders Street

which is sort of interesting.

A couple of months ago I was puzzling over the possible date of a label on a Victorian tin hat box.

Well, while I have no idea to the actual dates I think I can say, on purely stylistic grounds, that the design of Victorian Railways must have changed sometime after World War One when the use of sans serif fonts became more common.

This is of course an exercise in extreme handwaving, as they could still have been using the old serif labels in parallel with the new design as they ran down stocks of the older ones.

Other than that I didn't find anything else particularly interesting other than a nineteenth century commode complete with a more recent dead spider

Up at the Athenaeum it's a little bit more serious.

Following on from my visit to Albury Library Museum to hear about e-hive, we're beginning to look at the possibilities of putting some of the collection online via a museum content hosting site, which would give us a content management system, and of course that also has implications as to how we manage our collections (and data) in the future.

I can foresee some interesting times as moving from our ad hoc collection of spreadsheets to something more formal has the potential to be a little disruptive to our workflows as naturally, if people have something that works for them, they understandably won't be enthusiastic about change ...

However its not all been toilets and archival solutions, I had a good day repotting various plants that we keep on the back deck to give the impression, in summer at least, that we live somewhere green and verdant.

I havn't planted out any tomatoes yet, in fact I've yet to source some decent plants - I decided to postpone things a little after a couple of surprisingly heavy frosts at the start of the week.

I did however plant out some radish seedlings - I forgot to put a wire cloche over them and unsurprisingly the possums found them - a reminder of last year's shenanigans when the possums destroyed my tomatoes and zucchinis three times over, as well as wiping out my chillies.

This year, hopefully, I'm better prepared ...

Our bower bird has returned ...

 Our bower bird, who took up residence in a corner of our garden last year, has returned.

He has rebuilt his bower and has started collecting blue things

Last year he managed to find a blue glass nineteenth century marble and a possible Victorian skirt weight - let's see if he turns up anything interesting this year ...

Old clothes and porridge

 This time last week we had just made it home from our trip to FNQ, this week has been a little more less exciting.

Less exciting but still good.

Despite the various storms while we were away our broad beans seem to survived both hail and possums and to my immense relief we don't seem to have had any substantial damage to the trees, but I did spend a couple of afternoons cutting the grass and clearing up fallen branches and twigs,

It's also been a good week in that I've been able to get back into the documentation of Lakeview House, something which led me to a left field thought that the demise of the crinoline as a fashion item was hastened by the adoption of the pedestal toilet, it being difficult to sit on a toilet wearing a crinoline, especially if it was more rigid wire reinforced one.

At the same time, I spent my morning at the Athenaeum this week fossicking around online archives, and by pure happenstance discovered that an all England cricket team toured Australia and played Beechworth in January 1862, trouncing the locals

I'd been looking for information on both the Oddfellows cricket team and the local lunatic asylum's team (the staff of Beechworth Lunatic Asylum had their own team - as yet I don't know if they let the inmates play as well).

However the idea of England playing Beechworth in 1862 is interesting enough and shows the importance of the town in the gold rush era.

It wasn't all archiving - I was lucky earlier this week to see a koala trying to cross the road outside of the local Health Service.

Unlike most koalas this one seemed to have a bit of road sense and waited until there was a gap in the traffic, and everyone behaved responsibly, slowing to a crawl and putting their hazard flashers on to ensure it managed to get safely across the road ...