PapersPast just keeps the heritage newspapers coming!

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The extraordinary marriage case


The latest additions to PapersPast sent people flurrying to their computers the other day.

At long last, the New Zealand Herald (1863-1884), has been added . . . its a major New Zealand paper, and its digitisation will be welcomed by all - not least of all, by family historians!

The last batch (for now) of the Auckland Star (1927-1945) was also added at the same time.

PapersPast is a National Library of New Zealand website created to house digitised versions of our heritage newspapers.


Auckland Star and the New Zealand Herald have been digitised in partnership with the National Library and Auckland Libraries; and the goal is to eventually have all editions up to 31 December 1945 of the New Zealand Herald on PapersPast.

It didn't take long for the family history community to start finding treasures once the news was out.

Researcher Lyn Dear found a scandalous marriage case that must have raised more than a few eyebrows at the time - and indeed would probably still raise eyebrows today!

What stories have you managed to unearth so far?

Seonaid

Tombstone Tuesday - Czech Cemeteries & Headstones

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Image from StonePics website


The Central Auckland Research Centre has a brand new collection of 60 CD-Roms from StonePics who have been photographing cemeteries and headstones of The Czech Republic since 2003. This collection, Cemeteries of the Czech Republic contains over 81,000 names on a searchable database, many also important to German genealogy research.

Three CD-Roms contain records from Prague’s Vysehrad National Cemetery which was established in the 15th century next to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul. Many famous Czechs have been laid to rest there including Antonin Dvorak, Bedrich Smetana, Jan Neruda and Karel and Jozef Čapek.

A further 57 CD-Roms record headstones from Prague’s Olsanske Cemetery. This large complex of cemeteries includes Jewish and Orthodox cemeteries and graves of soldiers killed in both WWI and WWII. Olsanske Cemetery covers fifty hectares and according to some estimates, two million people have been buried there.

This is an amazing welcome addition to our family history collection.


LR

A Family History from the Research Centre's shelves

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The Worn Stockwhip: Tracking Down a Past

By Beverley Gilbert

In 2001, Melbourne writer Beverley Gilbert sat in on a workshop on biographical writing and was asked to write about the most interesting person in her family. The person she chose was her father, Harold, a man who had died just six months earlier; a man who had deliberately kept the details of his past hidden away.

Over the next few years, Beverley went on a mission to reconstruct Harold’s early life, and to uncover just why he had been so intentionally evasive about his background. He’d grown up in a rural working class area, and had transformed himself into a respectable and prominent middle class man. He kept little of his early life other than his birth certificate, a watch inscribed to him from his mother on his 21st birthday, and a well worn stockwhip, the only tangible reminder of his childhood.

This is an engaging story that appeals on several levels. Not only the details of how the author sets about putting the pieces of Harold’s life together, but in the description of Melbourne in the early 20th century with it’s entrenched class structure, division between catholic and protestant, excitement over Phar Lap’s racing career and the effect of the war on Harold and his family.

Well worth a read next time you’re up in the Research Centre.

We have numerous such donated and purchased published family histories on our shelves in the Research Centre.

Joanne

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