Carmel's Corner

Wednesday, 7 April 2021

Finding Aids - AJCP

Finding Aids are the Guides to the collections

Within the AJCP there are more than 10,000 pages of descriptive text. Many of these are the Finding Aids or Guides to the collections. Original finding aids were published as handbooks to accompany all the microfilms. These text Handbooks are found through the National Library catalogue. View this example of a digitised page of the Handbook of the Miscellaneous series Part 8.

The project team added more information to these aids as the conversion to digital was made. The text of these online Finding Aids is searchable. This means that if any personal and family names, organisational names, subjects, geographical locations or dates are mentioned in a Finding Aid, they can be found through search.

So now we can find Stephen Brennand mentioned in the above digitised example page, through a simple search because his name is mentioned in a digitised Finding Aid. If your ancestor was fortunate enough to be mentioned in a Finding aid, a simple search should reveal the records.

As with any search, one needs to try variations of the order of names as well as the spelling. Sometimes the surname is followed by first names or a title with surname.

Searching within a Finding Aid

The Finding Aid for the Records of the Colonial Office is one of the largest as it contains the links to approximately 40% of the AJCP records. You may need to wait sometime for it to load.

I am particularly interested in records about South Australia. Each Finding Aid has a dedicated Search bar in the top right hand corner allowing one to narrow a search to within that guide.

If I use South Australia in this Search within this finding aid, there are 3982 results in the Colonial Office. As with other phrases, a more accurate search with the terms enclosed in quotation marks gives a narrower result of 1102 results.

Further options to narrow that search are provided in the facets on the right.. Of particular use in this instance, is the ability to narrow by Decade. There are only 136 records for 1840 -1849, my dates of interest.

If I decide to narrow my search further to "South Australia" AND emigration, in that decade only 2 results are displayed.

On selecting the second result in this list I am now presented with a comprehensive list of films specifically related to my search within the Records of the Colonial Office.

It was in these records that I found a gt-gt grandfather's embarkation details.

There are multiple ways to find material within the AJCP. Using the Finding Aids effectively is just one of those methods. Search on!

Previous posts in this series

A - About the AJCP | B -Browsing the Board of Trade | C - County Record Offices | D - Downloading Documents | E - Emigration everywhere

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

Tuesday, 6 April 2021

Emigration everywhere - AJCP

Emigration records in the AJCP

Emigration records are found across many government departments, County Record Offices and in private collections. The records of the Emigration Departments of the Colonial Office contain a wealth of material about emigration schemes, expenses, as well as many personal letters from those seeking financial assistance to emigrate.

Use the search box on the AJCP portal page to start a search

Experiment with a variety of search terms, each yields a different set of results. Use quotation marks to keep terms together as a phrase

emigration departments
"registers of emigrants"
emigrants
emigration registers
"emigration registers"
emigration AND "South Australia"
"emigrant letters"

The resulting search terms then appear in Trove in this format

emigration registers AND nuc:"ANL:AJCP"

The AND is the Boolean operator, nuc (National Union Catalogue) "ANL:AJCP" indicates that the search is being conducted within the Australian National Library's AJCP collection.

All of this collection is housed in the Diaries, Letters and Archives section of Trove. Only three records will be displayed from the original search so one needs to scroll down and select the green link See all diaries, letters and archives results.

From a "register of emigrants" search, a variety of dates, sources and details are displayed in the blue links.

To view an item, click on the blue link then scroll down and choose Get

Then choose View at Australian Joint Copying Project which brings one to the screen shown below.

The Browse Collection then displays the images or sets of images. In this case there are only 4.

Choose an individual image to view, enlarge to full screen and/or use the scroll button on your mouse or trackpad.

Emigration records are plentiful and found across a wide variety of films within the AJCP. There are hand written letters applying for free passage along with replies which deny or grant the passage. Your ancestor may not have emigrated but may have applied to do so and included the details of their circumstances to support their application.

It is not often that one can find an individual's name in emigration records by searching for the surname, but if you have some indication of the date of emigration you may have success in locating their records.

In the next post I will address the vital role of the Finding Aids/Guides in enhancing searches.

Previous posts in this series

A - About the AJCP | B -Browsing the Board of Trade | C - County Record Offices | D - Downloading Documents

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

Monday, 5 April 2021

Downloading Documents - AJCP

Decisions concerning downloads

So far in this series of posts we have just browsed for items of interest. Once found there are choices to be made when saving to one's own collection.

Here is the Probate of a will found in the Doncaster Archive. To see the extent of the file one would choose the green Browse this collection button. There are 6 pages displayed, not just the 2p. listed.