Monday 18 May 2020

Military records on Ancestry

There are some things that are inextricably associated the commemoration of ANZAC Day. In the world of family history, that includes a new wave of advertisements from Ancestry announcing the availability of "new" Australian military records. Those of us familiar with the holdings of the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial tend to view these claims with a touch of scepticism. There is rarely anything new available to subscribers that we have not been accessing free from the official repositories for some time. But we live in hope.

On April 23 2020, Ancestry revealed their latest offerings ANZAC Memorial 1914-18 and Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947. Now that the metaphorical dust of battle has settled, it is time to try to assess their value to researchers.

Ancestry describes the first offering in these terms.
This database contains The (sic) Anzac Memorial [1], a book compiled to commemorate those who served in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and died in World War I. The contents of this book are varied. Much of the book is comprised of a Roll of Honour, listing nearly 20,000 Australians who died in the war. 
While records of nearly 20,000 lost certainly sounds impressive, remember that the AWM puts the national total killed in action or died of wounds at more than 60,000. So a search for a randomly chosen person known to have died will have a 30% chance of success. 

The original book was published in 1919 by the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia, New South Wales Branch and understandably is heavily skewed to men born in, or otherwise associated with, New South Wales. So a search in Ancestry for men of the 19th Battalion (raised in NSW) locates 805 of the 874 names recorded on the AWM Roll of Honour. By contrast, the Queensland-sourced 25th Battalion beside whom the 19th fought their last great battle on Mont St Quentin has just 85 of 1026 men known to have fallen [2] included in the Ancestry collection.

While the search facility may be of limited value, Anzac Memorial on Ancestry does offer digitised images of each page in the printed book. So what do you get? If you are familiar with the Nominal Roll on the AWM site, and imagine removing the details of all men who RTA (Returned to Australia) then you have it - complete with idiosyncratic alphabetisation. Except that less than one-third of the entries are included.

So you really might as well ignore the jingoistic blandishments of Ancestry and simply go straight to the Australian War Memorial for ready access to a full record set. Unless of course you are interested in viewing the digital image of the Official Summary of Peace Times (that is how Ancestry has transcribed the reference to the Terms of the Armistice into its Table of Contents)!

However the second of the newly-released collections (Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947) sounds more promising. 

Ancestry says 
This collection contains service documents for individuals serving for the AIF (Second Australian Imperial Forces) or CMF (Citizen Military Forces) during WWII.

I opened the dataset through the card catalogue and tossed in a name from our mother's tree, Noyes (spelling exact). It resulted in just one hit [3]
Name: Percival Reginald Noyes 
Birth Date: 20 Feb 1916
Birth Place: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Enlistment Place: Brisbane
Service Number: Q49493
Service Branch: Citizen Military Force
Relative Name: Elizabeth Noyes
Pretty impressive!

So for comparison,  I went across to NAA and ran a name search for Noyes and sure enough there was the same record [4] 


but this one took a bit of finding because of the 19 other men named Noyes in the same list.

Had I been too restrictive by demanding exact spelling at Ancestry? So run the search again without it and get 5 hits - Percival Noyes, and 4 people called Neuss.

Did Ancestry have access only to a subset of the NAA records? Click on Learn more about this database and you will see that Ancestry has based "their" collection on series B883 and B884 at NAA. Whereas of the 20 men named Noyes located in RecordSearch, 8 come from series B883 and the other 12 from B884. 

It was beginning to look as though it was sheer luck that the one Noyes that Ancestry found was someone that I recognised. Could there be a (lot of) serious transcription errors in their data? So I took a record from the NAA results (B884 NOYES THOMAS GEORGE : Service Number - Q70518 : Date of birth - 23 Jun 1916) [5] and fed it into Ancestry -- Your Search for Thomas George Noyes returned zero good matches.

It should have been obvious that this collection could not provide comprehensive coverage of WWII service from the number of records it claimed, just 14,405. So does this dataset complement the 1.44 million entries in Australia, World War II Military Service Records, 1939-1945 (an ANZAC DAY 2016 offering)? Well there are certainly many more Noyes records in that older collection. But they also include a familiar-looking entry for Percival Reginald Noyes (cited as being drawn from NAA Series B884).

What was offered as new Second AIF and CMF record could have been regarded as a minor update to the existing WWII Military Service Records; but would you want to write that advertisement?



Oh well, there will be another ANZAC Day "special offer" next April.


References
  1. The correct title of the book has no definite article. See its catalogue details on Trove https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/22661305
  2. Digger History http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-conflicts-periods/ww1/1aif/2div/07bde/25th_battalion_aif.htm
  3. Ancestry.com. Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: 2020.
  4. NAA: B884, Q49493
  5. NAA: B884, Q70518

Saturday 11 January 2020

Where did Andrew Petrie live?

Layout of Brisbane Town
Moreton Bay, c 18391
Brisbane was a very small settlement in the 1840s.

Everyone knew all of their neigbours and which house belonged to whom. So it seems odd to suggest that there could now be any confusion over the location of the residence of Mr Andrew Petrie, the well-known and much-admired Supervisor of Works in the fledgling outpost of free settlement of the New South Wales Northern Districts.

But that is apparently the case.

In 2019, Queensland State Archives launched a new website, Q-Album2, to promote greater public awareness of, and access to, significant records in the collection. Distinguishing it from ArchiveSearch Catalogue or Image Queensland 3, Q-Album seeks to place each featured object in a context that enhances understanding and encourages futher exploration. Among other strategies it draws together related material in other repositories (such as the State Library of Queensland and The National Archives, UK).

However the most prominent contextual factor presented to a visitor to the Q-Album site is spatial, usually explemplified by a matching pair of now and then photographs with the "now" image derived from Google StreetView.

A search on Q-Album for "Andrew Petrie's residence" returns four photographs. Three relate to locations indirectly associated with Petrie, but the fourth is exactly what is required and is labelled as Andrew Petrie's Residence, 1859. On the detailed display page4, the user is shown that historical image above a contemporary view of of the south-west corner of the Casino (Treasury Building) seen from the end of Victoria Bridge.

This seems incongruous because the caption printed onto the 1859 image clearly describes the location of the dwelling at the spot where Queen and Wharf Streets now junction, that is, on the bank of that section of the river then known as Petrie's Bight. (Since modern mapping practice eschews apostrophes, the current name is rendered as Petrie Bight.) Yet, the modern image shows the junction of Queen Street and Queens Wharf Road on the bank of the Town Reach. As the crow flies, these two locations are more than 1200 metres apart at opposite ends of Queen Street.

Wharf Street or Queens Wharf Road?5

As additional context, Q-Album offers an extract from an 1872 newspaper obituary for Andrew Petrie under the heading News of the Day. Although that provides no indication of where he might have lived, perhaps earlier issues of The Moreton Bay Courier might.

The edition of Saturday 25 March 18546 described in detail the ceremonial progress into Brisbane of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, described in the article as the Governor-General of Australia although His Excellency's formal title was Governor of New South Wales. FitzRoy had disembarked from HMS Calliope at Newstead, the home of Captain Wickham the Government Resident, and proceeded through the settlement of Fortitude Valley until the river was encountered once again where crowds were assembled at the Kangaroo Point Ferry and at Mr Petries' home to cheer His Excellency. The official party is then described as following the rise of Queen Street into the heart of North Brisbane. Clearly in 1854, Andrew Petrie lived on Petrie's Bight.

In December 1904, The Brisbane Courier7 published extracts from the reminiscences of Tom Petrie (son of Andrew) in which he recalled the family living for a time on the site of what is now the GPO while their home was built on the riverbank with a garden bounded by the saltwater creek from which Creek Street takes its name. That description matches the location shown in Gerler's sketch Brisbane in 1844 which lists the Perie home as the first of 48 named buildings.

Map of Brisbane, 18448

Its location at the northern end of Queen Street is unmistakable, although the German artists representation of the town's main boulevard made it appear shorter, wider and straighter than it actually was!

Every historian, and even casual users of the resources of the Queensland State Archives, will welcome initiatives to make those important artefacts more widely known and readily accessible. But "popularisation" carries with it a very real risk that must be managed. Given the tendency of modern school pupils (and their teachers) to "grab an image off the web", it is essential that every record be presented in its correct context.

I dread the situation where dozens of school projects (their "relevance" dictated by the highly-publicised Queen's Wharf development) describe how the great pioneer builder and architect, Andrew Petrie, once lived on the site of the Treasury Building!

References:

  1. Queensland State Archives, Digital Image ID 5212 released to Public Domain https://flickr.com/photos/60455048@N02/36883175655
  2. https://qalbum.archives.qld.gov.au
  3. http://www.archivessearch.qld.gov.au/Search/BasicSearch.aspx
  4. https://qalbum.archives.qld.gov.au/qsa/andrew-petries-residence-1859
  5. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/-27.46892/153.02616
  6. The Moreton Bay Courier (Brisbane, Qld. : 1846 - 1861) 25 March 1854: 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page542487
  7. "EARLY QUEENSLAND." The Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933) 30 December 1904: 6. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19316762
  8. Map of Brisbane, 1844 State Library of Queensland: hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/108532 released to Public Domain https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/32794220838/in/photostream/
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