We are considering placing the Rate Book and Consolidated Book indices on this website so keep checking
Thanks to the very consistent work of Glen Carleton in particular, our Consolidated Index is growing quite healthily, with some 25,000 entries to the present time, (Still a long way to go before we knock of Geelong with Suzie's 200,000 entries there) but with your help we can get there if we persist.
If you would like to do a voluntary job for the group and remain in your own comfortable surrounds, you can always collect a book from our library and index it.
This allows researchers to quickly find if a book is relevant to their current research, and it is a good way to get some more local knowledge. And Benalla and District is alive with interesting happenings throughout the years.
Over the years a few of the members have been transcribing the Benalla Rate books. In particular Cheryl Anne has taken on the mammoth task of completing the Business Listed People of the district from 1869 onwards, and I can tell you that it is a complicated task reading some of the writing and deciphering the early names.
BUT we have now completed the first fifty years and are up to the 1930's and all have been indexed, so that you can come into the rooms now and look up an index to see if your ancestor ever roamed the local area, and where they set down their roots.
Research team say it is a wonderful resource, so make use of the time and energy put into this project by group members.
Thanks to some early generous donations we now have a good collection of Victorian, NSW and Tasmanian gazettes.
These CDs have an enormous amount of early history in them, including convict movements, Government appointees and appointments. In the first one we received, we found promulgated, the names of the first streets of Benalla and the quotes for the building of the Benalla Railway Station, if I remember rightly, some £4000 for the whole shebang, restaurant and all. (and while talking about the railways, it was a huge industry for Benalla bringing in many, many workers who settled here in the early days).
Perhaps one of, yours may have been one of them. The Rate Books are now indexed so come in and find out. If you would like to donate a Government Gazette CD, it would be welcomed with open arms.
This year we intend to introduce some helpful short training sessions on all manner of things, and to kick off the program, Darryl Parker has offered to show us how to manipulate the photo's you have stored on your computer, commencing next Tuesday, 5 February at noon at the rooms.
If you are anything like me, (and I thought I was pretty well organized until it came to finding a certain photo), I can get them on the computer, but can't find them again to get them off and print.
They will be a short series of demonstrations to help you better able to use what you have, without costing the earth on new programs Most are readily accessed.
Hopefully, you the members, will get on board this project and tell us what you would like to learn about, so that we can rustle up the right person to tell you how to do it.