More Trove updates

Because I can't get enough of researching the history of my place. I found, via our local Council website that the land in our area was released as part of an estate in the mid-1890s. So I tried searching Trove for the estate name. With some great results! In order to release the land, the joint venture had to go to court to have some Chinese market gardeners who had been squatting in the area evicted. The joint venture won. Shortly after the estate was released, a white man was charged with assaulting an Aboriginal woman who lived in a camp near the estate. He chose to go to jail rather than pay a £3 fine. She was fined a few shillings for public drunkeness. And according to a letter to the editor, there was quite a problem with the local pub (long since gone) letting its rubbish pile fester!

When we first got our house, it seemed like countless numbers of people could have lived in it. Being able to trawl the papers and see the actual names, and you start to realise how few families have h

Living and dying in our little house

207 Young (a fantastic new blog about renovating a pre-federation house on the east coast of Australia) recently put me on to Trove, which is the digitised archives of the National Library of Australia. It has all kinds of old newspapers, scanned and text-searchable. It's truly amazing.

I'd actually been to Trove before, because there's some great old knitting patterns and stitch patterns on Ravelry that have been pulled from various old newspapers on Trove, but I hadn't though to search for my street address before!

Such good fun! On 21 November 1903 Mrs Cooper gave birth to a daughter at our house, while her husband was in Marble Bar. Poor old Mrs Macmillan held her mother's wake at our house in 1928, and her husband died (in our house) only three years later. Mrs Macmillan must have had some kids though, because Miss Ruby Macmillan won a crossword prize in 1932, a year after her father's death!

Curiously, though, our place is listed as being for rent in the middle of all of this, in 1929. I know that originally there were eight townhouses like ours on a single block, so perhaps some of the houses were sharing numbers? That would seem to make sense, as in October 1929 the property is listed as being "four rooms, conveniences," but only a month later a property at the same address is described as "6 rooms, cons, lawns, etc."

The four room property is listed as being "near running shed." I wonder what that means?