Family history resources in the GLAM Workbench
It’s Family History Month, so I thought a brief post was in order describing some of the family history related resources in the GLAM Workbench.
GLAM Name Index Search
This is the biggie (in more ways than one). I’ve brought 263 datasets from 10 Australian GLAM organisations together into a single search interface. All these datasets index collections by people’s names, so with one search you can find information about individuals across a broad range of records, locations, and periods. There’s more than 10 million rows of data to explore!
NSW Post Office and Sydney Telephone Directories
Many volumes of the NSW Post Office and Sydney Telephone Directories have been digitised and made available through Trove. However, they’re not easy to search. I’ve taken the text from these volumes and indexed it by line to make it easier to find people and places. There’s two databases to explore:
- New South Wales Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1886 to 1950)
- Sydney Telephone Directories (44 volumes from 1926 to 1954)
Tasmanian Post Office Directories
The Tasmanian Post Office Directories have been digitised by Libraries Tasmania, but each volume is available as a separate PDF, making it difficult to search across the collection. I’ve downloaded all the PDFs, extracted the text and images, and indexed the content by line. Now you can search all 48 volumes, from 1890 to 1948, at once!
Trove Places
If your family history research is focused on a particular region, it can be useful to know what newspapers from that region are digitised in Trove. Trove Places is a map interface to Trove’s digitised newspapers, just click on a place to find newspapers published or distributed nearby.
Save a Trove newspaper article as an image
You might have noticed that Trove’s download option for digitised newspaper articles can slice articles up in unfortunate ways. This simple web app saves the complete article as a single image (or multiple images if the article is split across different pages). Simple, but very useful.
Trove Newspapers Data Dashboard
Just about every week more digitised newspaper articles are added to Trove. The search you tried a couple of months ago might now produce different results. How can you keep track of these changes? The Trove Data Dashboard uses weekly snapshots of the digitised newspapers to visualise changes over time. It’s updated every Sunday!
And more!
The GLAM Workbench provides a wide range of tools and examples to help you work with data from libraries, archives, and museums.
The resources above cost money to keep online. If you find them useful, you might like to sponsor me on GitHub or buy me a coffee.
2024 update!
If you want to know more about using Trove, head to the new Trove Data Guide. The Guide explores the different types of data available from Trove – what it is, how you can access it, and what you can do with it. It aims to give users a critical understanding of Trove data, both its limits and its possibilities.