|
|
10,000 of Walhalla's PeopleJune 17th, 2018.Ten years after we first published it, our database of names of people who are or were notable in Walhalla's history — as residents or otherwise — has grown to more than 10,000 records. The last 3,000-odd names since our most recent refresh took more than six years to add before the target — for now — of about 10,000 or so names was reached. That milestone was achieved in about September, 2017, with some sources still to be mined to exhaustion, and others that have emerged since then, like an elusive seam of gold-bearing quartz that you just have to follow till it peters out (like that? I just made it up ...). That last 3,000 names represents a growth of this list by almost 50%; so if you haven't been able to find a name before now, you should have a 50% better chance of finding it among the one in three records that comprise the newest published additions. In fact, we currently have just over 10,250 names, and I'm taking a break for a while from adding any more. One thing that has helped to keep the flame to my feet until now has actually been a very encouraging sign for Walhalla, and one of the biggest changes I've noticed in the more than 20 years that I've been involved there, namely the number of books that have been published about the town. Prior to the year 2000, apart from family memoirs such as Lou de Prada's “My Walhalla” (1978) and Percy Masters' “Walhalla and Its People” (1982), and pictorial publications like James and Lee's “Walhalla Heyday” (1970) and Harrington and King's “Switzerland of Australia” (1981), practically the only reliable sources were Raymond Paull's “Old Walhalla” (1963), John Adams' “Mountain Gold” (1980) and Marjorie and Dorothy Morgan's “Happy-Go-Lucky” (1987), all excellent in their way and still undoubtedly authoritative, but really only able to tell a part of the story. Since then, it seemed that every time I was tempted to push back from my keyboard, a new source would appear in our store, and we'd be off again. I have to admit that I still can't claim to have pulled anything like every last name from each of these more recent publications:
... and neither is that list exhaustive — for example, despite its excellent reviews, I haven't yet even opened a copy of Diana Ruzzene Grollo's “Cooper's Creek, Gippsland: the Trevisani” (2004). It has been an immensely rewarding experience for us to make this material publicly accessible, and if you follow the correspondence in our quarterly newsletter, the “Chronicle”, you would know that it has drawn out a vast amount of email traffic from people seeking information about their forebears, and usually providing just as much useful information in return, if not far more. In this way, in a very real sense, by so doing they're putting gold back into Walhalla! This time, though, it's gold that can be mined indefinitely, again and again, and even added to further, by later fossickers with a few more facts at their fingertips.
By the way, with only a couple of exceptions, most of these books are available from our Corner Store when you visit (or phone on 5165 6250).
Special “affirmative action” plea (again!)
Using the alphabetized links below, you can check our latest lists to see whether or not they (now) include the names of your ancestors. If they do, feel free to drop us an email, or stop by the Corner Store some time and ask what other information (if any) we've got on them, or possibly to supplement whatever information we do have. Sometimes, it won't be any more than what's listed, and that might be nothing much more than a name (and it's always possible that we even got that wrong!). In the best cases, though, we can recite chapter and verse about their parents (and in some cases their parents' parents) as well as the details about some -- or even all -- of their children, bearing in mind that they weren't all born in Walhalla, and even if they were, their births might not have been registered there. We are often told that our records (for example) indicate that a particular couple had n children, whereas family records indicate there were in fact more. Or sometimes even fewer ...
The number under each letter below isn't the number of names that you'll see for each letter, but rather is the number of records in our database in total beginning with each letter, which includes the names of living people, or people we simply cannot assume to be dead (but who may well be), whose names we've refrained from publishing in accordance with current privacy practices.
Once again, we'd invite you to send us an email if you feel there are names we've missed, or details about your family's lives that we may not know about. We can't promise to get back to you by immediate return email, but we'll try to reply in the fullness of time. By the same token, if our lists say (for example) that your great-grandparents had (for example) four children, but you know they had some other number, feel free to correct us -- as long as you don't mind being credited as the source of such additional information.
Our list also includes details on some more recent descendants, and other contributors to the town who may in some cases never even have lived there for any length of time (including, for example, General Sir John Monash, whose civil engineering partnership was engaged on some aerial tramway work north of Walhalla in the 1890's). As a general rule, out of consideration for people's modesty and hopefully as some degree of an impediment to identity frauds, our list shouldn't show any birth details for people born within the last 90 years (who we don't know categorically to be dead), There are many others listed, of course, for whom the same lack of detail simply means that we don't know when they were born, though it might well have been more than 150 years ago.
Once again, you'll need Adobe's PDF reader to be able to make sense of these files.
|
| News |
© 2018 Walhalla Heritage and Development League |
|
Send your questions, suggestions and comments about this web site to
info@walhalla.org.au.. |
This page was created on 17/6/18. |