Registering as a volunteer with Founders and Survivors

Dear Friend of Founders & Survivors,

First thank-you for your donated information and interest in our project. And thank-you for your patience in waiting until we have more to offer you.

We have reached the stage where our online workstation is taking shape and we need to find out who is interested in joining the research team and what you might like to do.

We have a questionnaire on the website— please log in and go to the Volunteer page. There you will find a questionnaire that we need you to complete.

We are keen to include people in the project who do not have computer skills or fast internet connections and that is one of the reasons why we hope to organize capital city and regional groups where researchers can work together, use genealogical and resources in family history centres or libraries, and be assisted by others who are more expert.

Others will prefer to work from home and that is fine too.

We are designing the workstation so that you can take digital photographs of material you find about a former convict and upload that to the website, but that will be available first for researchers in Tasmania once the new broadband network is rolled out.

It seems that every day new resources become available. Our task will be made very much easier by the recent digitization of almost all the Tasmanian newspapers and Gazettes for the nineteenth century and for a hundred years of the Melbourne Argus (NLA Newspapers). The State Library of Victoria is digitizing the early Port Phillip papers and has completed the Victorian Gazette.

We hope to have the website online by the beginning of next year, but we may be able to release some material before then.
You will be able to see each convict, and as information is collected about them, that will be added – by your research as well as by ours. We can’t publish any family trees because of privacy restrictions in Victoria, but we can give marriage and death dates of the convicts themselves and list the number (not names) of children. The rest of the data found—family trees, causes of death—will be stored confidentially.
We can list the convicts’ descendants who served in the AIF, because that is part of the public record.

We can, however, provide a means of communication similar to the process followed by Ancestry.com for those who want to follow up connections.
What we will provide for public viewing is life histories of the convicts themselves, both before and after sentence. Already our donors are providing some wonderful stories of what these men and women did with the rest of their lives

Therefore please register and complete the questionnaire if you want to be a registered researcher.

Best wishes

Janet McCalman and Claudine Chionh